살인피해자 유가족의 경험과 한국형 심리지원 방안모색을 위한 제언

Experiences of Families of Homicide Victim and Psychological Support Measures for Them

This study aims to understand experiences of families of homicide victims and to explore appropriate psychological support measures for them. When a family has been traumatized by a family member’s homicide, the whole family is the secondary victim. The most of them experience traumatic grief. And, they often experience in-tensive rage, aggression, fear, dissociation, depersonalization, mental numbness, and/or panic attack. In the worst case, intensive and prolonged traumatic stress may lead them to death. PTSD is often diagnosed in them. They often suffer from psychophy-siological problems. Because their attachments and beliefs to their own and world are change, they never trust safety. In addition, they are faced with a variety of practical difficulties. For example, there are financial difficulties, parenting victim’s children, and/or miscellaneous chores. Difficulties in criminal justice system make to them very distressful and ag-gravate their psychological problems. They feel that criminal justice process is unfair. Unfortunately, many families of homicide victim are stigmatized by the local community. Traumatic mourning process varies, depending on the family and the fam-ily members. The prognosis predictors are relationship between the deceased and the bereaved family, quantity and quality of social support, nature of homicide, self-es-teem, premorbid psychopathology, personality problem, the amount of time that has elapsed after the incident et al. Thus, psychological support measures for them need to be differentiated from other types of trauma victims. For this reason, many other countries provide specialized psychological support for them such as murder worker of U.K. South Korea should be sought in this specialized measures for them. It is necessary to perform a variety of empirical research on their experience for this purpose. In addition, the review also indispensable what they experience in the criminal justice system and their community.