Chief physician advises victims at night
The Victim Counseling Service has an anniversary. For 25 years, victims of crime and accidents have been able to get support and help from a victim counselor. Professor and senior physician Jens Peter Gøtze is one of the victim counselors in the Victim Counseling Service at the Red Cross Capital.
A few years ago, Jens Peter Gøtze saw an advertisement for victim counselors in a newspaper, and the now 54-year-old chief physician at Rigshospitalet had reached an age where he thought he had the energy to try something new:
"I thought it had to be something other than medicine, that I would enter some spaces that are more complex and where there is no pill that fixes everything. I wanted to try to maneuver where there is no easy solution to anything," says Jens Peter Gøtze.
The starting point came with the law establishing the Victims' Counseling Service in 1998. The actual anniversary is June 25. During the life of the organization, the offer has been expanded to also apply to witnesses and relatives of victims of crime or accidents, such as victims of the shooting in Fields last year. Today, volunteer victim counselors can be found all over the country.
The majority of the advice is provided by telephone on 2120 9170, but the Victim Advice Centre in the Capital also offers advice in person. The telephone number is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year – without exception. Jens Peter Gøtze has a busy and long day as a chief physician, so he has chosen to offer advice hours at night and on weekends:
“Some people go to the garden, I do this,” he says. And the family has accepted it. His children, aged 13 and 17, think it's cool that he does it.
As a doctor, he is used to talking to people who are feeling bad:
"But what was new for me was that it was telephone counselling. When you are physically sitting across from another person in the hospital, you can decode a lot. You get a lot of information in return. You don't get that with another person on the phone, and you have to be even more humble, because there is a lot you don't know. It could be that a victim is sitting there in total internal disarray, but is having a well-orchestrated conversation. Or the opposite," says Jens Peter Gøtze.
But even though he thinks that Victim Counseling is a good help for a huge range of victims, there are also some who are difficult to help:
"We could probably be better at understanding people with a different ethnic background. I am challenged because my classic Danish brain and education are not always enough," says Jens Peter Gøtze, who hopes that it will also be possible to get Arabic-speaking advisors.
FACTS ABOUT VICTIM COUNSELING
All counselling sessions are conducted by volunteer victim counsellors. They receive their basic training from a national secretariat located in Fredericia, but also receive ongoing further training at the Victim Counselling Service in the Capital. It is a requirement that one has completed victim counselling training in order to be allowed to guide and support victims, witnesses and relatives of victims.
The Capital Victims' Advice Service covers the Copenhagen Police District, which consists of the municipalities of Copenhagen, Frederiksberg, Taarnby and Dragør. The advice service had 1.886 conversations in 2022, of which 386 were personal meetings with users. The Capital Victims' Advice Service is the largest of the capital victim advice services, and is run by the Capital Red Cross. When the tragedy in Fields occurred on July 3 last year, the Capital Victims' Advice Service had its busiest day with over 600 calls.