Restorative Justice Is Bringing Humanity Back to Some Survivors of Assault
Advocates claim talking therapies can help with recovery, but also minimize repeat offenses
Claire was in her first semester of college when she was raped. “I was hanging out drinking with a bunch of kids,” she says. “I’d never drunk to the point of blacking out until that evening. It was the first time that ever happened to me. And somebody who I thought was my friend thought it was okay to have sex with me while I was passed out.”
After that deeply traumatic event came an adjudication process that Claire says was almost as traumatic as the actual assault. College rules about mandated reporting meant that as soon as Claire told her resident assistant, the incident was reported to campus police. “I really had no choice whether or not I was going to go through the adjudication process. So regardless of if I participated or not, this was going to be investigated,” she says. And investigated it was — with a process and outcome that Claire found hard to recover from.
Two years on, Claire is now an advocate for restorative justice. It’s a method that focuses not on punishment, but on rehabilitation, with facilitated conversations between survivors and perpetrators of crimes or wrongdoings — either face-to-face…
