Passive Choice Made Under Severe Reality

The criminal victim aid system with study on victims as its theoretical basis has been established in most western developed countries. However, in judicial practice in our country, rights and interests of criminal victims are not able to be effectively protected. Moreover, the number of criminal victims tends to be increasingly larger, which causes the occurrence of a series of social problems. In view of this, many places in our country have carried out practical exploration quickly as soon as the criminal victim aid system is introduced to judicial practice departments. Although the criminal victim aid system has played a relatively active role, many difficulty and embarrassment are encountered in practice.It is commonly believed in academic circle that establishment of criminal victim aid system in our country may play a constructive role in both protecting human rights and controlling crimes, which may lead to realize social equity and harmony finally. On the basis of the aforesaid, lots of suggestions and ideas are put forward as for how to establish criminal victim aid system in our country, how to decide the aid agencies, subjects, standards as well as the amount of compensations and so on. However, the aforesaid theoretical analysis, fundamentally speaking, derives from worries about the deficiency in protecting rights and interests of victims in the process of criminal justice and from sympathy for the miserable experience of more and more criminal victims, instead, those political, economic and social factors preventing criminal victim aid system from functioning are ignored. The establishment of criminal victim aid system is, in essence, compelled by the severe situation of criminal justice in China and a passive choice made by decision-makers under many difficulties and great pressure. Consequently, it is the passive choice which leads certain blindness to the criminal victim aid system since its establishment and ignorance to other relevant social, economic and political factors impeding the said system’s function.According to the opinion "limited rationality" in economics, when a decision-maker decides to establish the criminal victim aid system, it is impossible for him/her to have access to any and all information concerning the said system but can only act within the "limited rationality". The scope of "limited rationality" is decided by the distribution of decision-makers’attention. Moreover, media plays a decisive role in distributing attention in modern society, which finally leads the decision-makers’attention to be attracted to the criminal victims, and the decision to establish criminal victim aid system is made therefrom. Nevertheless, when the decision-makers devote most of their attention to the criminal victims, protection of common people’s human rights is inevitably ignored to some extent. Taking China’s concrete national situation into consideration, the criminal victim aid system may give priority to social protection with criminal victim aid as subsidiary. We may realize fundamental protection through social protection system and better protection for victims by using criminal victim aid system.