Supporting a Client Through a Victim Impact Statement

Somewhere between the lawyer's job and the counsellor's job there is a gap, and victim impact statements sit in it. Writing one is not legal advice, so the legal team steps back. It is not therapy, so it can feel outside your lane too. It lands on whoever is in the room with the client. Usually that's you. If you're here as a partner, parent or friend rather than a worker, this guide for family and friends is written for you.

If you work in victim support, court support, a community legal centre, a refuge or a counselling service, this is for you. It assumes you already know how to sit with people in pain. It's about the parts specific to this document.

Where your role stops

A useful rule of thumb: if the client's question starts with "am I allowed to", it belongs to the prosecution team or the witness assistance service. What can be included, what the court might edit out, whether the statement can be read aloud and by whom. Those are their questions to answer, and answering them yourself, even confidently, is how workers drift out of role.

What's left is still a full lane. Explaining the process in general terms. Helping words get onto the page. Watching the client's state while they write. Handling logistics. Holding the line that the choice to write, and what to write, stays with them.

One more boundary, and it's the one services get wrong most often: your job is not to get a statement written. Your job is to make sure the choice stays real. Those are different jobs, and they point in different directions more often than you'd think.

Whose words go on the page

Here is the trap built into your role. You have limited sessions, a client who says they can't write, and a court date. Drafting it for them starts to look like kindness.

Don't. Sentencing judges read hundreds of these. A statement in a worker's language is audible, and it costs the client the one thing the document exists to give them: their own account, on the record, in their own voice. For many clients this is the first time since the offence that they control the story. Taking the pen takes that too, however gently it's done.

If they genuinely can't write, scribe. Type what they say, in their order, in their words, including the words your report templates would never use. Read it back. Change nothing without asking. If they say "tidy it up," fix spelling, not voice. A client saying "I can't do the washing anymore because the laundry is where it happened" has produced a more powerful sentence than anything you will write for them.

Treat the session as clinical work, because it is

Writing an impact statement is structured re-contact with the worst thing that has happened to this person. Book it like you know that.

Two short sessions beat one long one. Don't open with the offence; open with who they were before it, and let the account approach the hard part from solid ground. Never end a session on the worst question. Land somewhere ordinary before they walk out: the parking, the kids' pickup, tea. And watch for the signs you already know how to read. Gone quiet, gone somewhere else, agreeing with everything you say. Stop writing. Come back to the room. The form keeps.

If the referral came late and the timeline is genuinely impossible, say so to the prosecution team early rather than forcing a statement out in one sitting the night before. A rushed statement costs more than it gives.

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When something new comes up

Writing loosens things. Mid-draft, clients disclose offences that were never charged, or things that are happening now.

Two separate tracks. The statement has to speak to the impact of the offences currently before the court. This means the impact of new allegations shouldn't get folded into the draft. Acknowledge the new allegations first, then redirect the conversation to the impact of the offences that are before the court. Liaise with the prosecutor or victim support service providing legal advice to your service user for next steps regarding the new allegation/s.

Current risk is the other track. Whatever reporting and response obligations you carry in your role still apply.

Read the draft the way the offender will

In most Australian courts, the offender or their lawyer sees the statement. Tell the client this before writing starts, not after. It changes what people choose to say, and they're entitled to make that choice with the facts.

In family violence and coercive control matters, go further. Read the finished draft once through the offender's eyes and ask what it teaches him. A new suburb. A workplace. The kids' school. A routine. A new relationship. Strip the intelligence, keep the impact.

There's a subtler version of the same question. Some clients don't want the offender to know what still hurts most, because they know exactly what he does with that information. Keeping a wound private is a legitimate choice, not a weaker statement. Offer that choice out loud. Most clients don't know they have it.

Then think about where the draft physically lives. For a client still in contact, paper in the house, a shared email account or the family laptop can all put the document in front of the wrong person early. It might be safer for the draft stays with your service until it's lodged.

Hold expectations without flattening hope

A victim impact statement informs the sentence. It does not set it. Some clients who believe the statement will drive the outcome are being set up twice: once by the sentence, and once by the feeling that their words failed.

Prepare them too for the possibility that parts get edited or objected to. If they hear it from you first, it's process. If they hear it first in court, it's silencing.

And be honest that the day itself can feel flat. The sentence is handed down, everyone files out, and the moment they rehearsed is over in minutes. What holds up afterwards, for many people, is that they said it. On the record, in their own words, with the court required to listen. That part you can promise. The sentence you can't.

Scaffolding that actually works

"How did it affect you" is too big a question for most people to answer. Swap it for something concrete: walk me through a Tuesday before this happened, now walk me through a Tuesday now. Impact lives in the gap between those two days, and clients can describe a Tuesday when they can't describe a self.

Use prompts as doors, not fields. A statement with empty sections is complete if the client says it is. Let silence do some of the work; count to ten before you rescue it, because the sentence that comes after the silence is usually the one that matters. And when the draft is done, read it back aloud. People hear their own account differently than they read it, and they correct it toward the truth.

A few questions earn their place in a professional session in a way they wouldn't across a kitchen table:

• "What would your best friend say has changed about you?" For clients who can't see it, or won't claim it, from the inside.
• "You've told me how the kids are going. How are you going?" For the client who narrates everyone's impact but their own. You know the one.
• "Who else has noticed the change? Your GP, your boss, the kids' teacher?" The answer maps the impact and tells you where supporting documents might exist.
• "The magistrate has never met you. What would they need to know to understand what this has taken?"
• "Is there anything you want the court to know but don't want the offender to read?" This surfaces the choice from the section above, and anything it turns up belongs in a conversation with the prosecutor before it goes near the draft.

The questions in our guide for family and friends work in session too, and some clients might like to take that list home so they can keep writing between appointments.

If the client speaks better than they write, scribe. If English isn't their first language or writing isn't workable at all, ask the prosecution team what formats the court will take before anyone concludes a statement is out of reach.

If they don't want to write one

Then they don't. Courts sentence on the whole of the evidence, and no one is penalised for staying silent. Make the offer, note it, revisit once if the timeline allows, then let it rest. A statement produced to satisfy a service's process serves the process, not the person.

Justice Draft was built for this gap. It's a free tool that asks ten plain questions and turns the answers into a working draft. Some workers open it in session and scribe while the client talks. Some send the link and let the client work at their own pace at home, where that's safe. Either way, it stays free for the client, and the words stay theirs.