Counselling after a crime in BC: how the Crime Victim Assistance Program works

Of the funded routes into counselling in British Columbia, this is the one people have most often never heard of. It is a provincial programme, it has existed for years, and a substantial number of people who are eligible for it never apply — usually because nothing in the aftermath of a crime points them towards it.

What the programme is

The Crime Victim Assistance Program is administered by the Government of British Columbia and provides financial benefits to people affected by violent crime. Counselling is one of the benefits it can cover. It is not an insurance product and there is nothing to have paid into in advance.

Who can apply

Victims of violent crime, immediate family members, and in some circumstances witnesses. The inclusion of family members is the part most people do not expect. Someone whose life was reorganised by something that happened to a person close to them may be eligible in their own right, rather than only as a support to somebody else.

It starts with an application, not a referral

You do not need a doctor or a counsellor to send you. An application goes to the programme and the province determines eligibility. The programme sets its own requirements, including about how and whether the incident was reported, and those conditions are on the government page linked below rather than paraphrased here. They can change, and a counselling website is not where anyone should be learning them second-hand.

VictimLinkBC is the practical place to start

VictimLinkBC is a toll-free, confidential provincial line available at any hour, with service in multiple languages. It exists precisely to answer the question of what you are entitled to and where the application goes. If you take one thing from this page, it is that this line exists and it costs nothing to ring.

What happens on my side

Where an application is approved, sessions are billed to the programme rather than to you. You will notice that no figure is quoted anywhere on this site for the funded streams, and that is deliberate — a third party sets and pays those rates, and publishing a private-pay number beside them would only mislead someone arriving here in the worst week of their life.

You do not have to have resolved anything about the justice process in order to start counselling. The two run on entirely separate timelines, and waiting for one before beginning the other is a long wait for no particular reason.

If you are not sure whether it applies to you

Ask. The free consultation is a reasonable place to work out whether this is a route worth pursuing, and it does not oblige you to book anything afterwards.