The Right to Protection from Harm



The Right to Protection from Harm

The paper presents an analytical response to the key issues and themes raised by the required readings from the article “Restorative justice as social justice for victims of gendered violence: A standpoint feminist perspective” by Katherine van Wormer. For this purpose the paper focuses on new ideas and challenges to think about social policy for women, children, and families in the United States.

This article explores the possibility of adapting restorative justice processes to the needs of female victims of gendered crime. The principles of restorative justice are examined for compatibility with the teachings and values of standpoint feminist theory. The author examines the traditional handling of court processes and plea bargains that are often seen as failing to meet the needs of victims of domestic violence (Katherine, 2009). Four models of restorative justice - victim-offender conferencing, family group conferencing, healing circles, and community reparations are each examined separately through a standpoint feminist viewpoint. The author identifies several major advantages in using restorative justice strategies, including the ability to take wrongdoing and its resolution beyond victims and offenders and into the community, and in offering the profession of social work an enhanced role in criminal justice (Janice, 2006).

This article has sought to highlight the limitations associated with using restorative justice for child sex offences. The major concern is that restorative justice will be unable to defuse the power relationship between victim and offender and will re-traumatize victims compared with recent criminal justice reforms that are designed to ensure that vulnerable victims do not have face-to-face contact with offenders (Katherine, 2009).

I have often wondered what restorative justice practitioners would have thought of the process. While much of what happened was culturally appropriate, it may well have been unacceptable in a western setting (Jyl, 2002). The victim, as far as I could determine, did not seem to be traumatised by sharing her story and innermost feelings with the community - nor was she subsequently stigmatised by the villagers as a victim of incest. The penalty was quite severe, and yet at the end of the process, there was provision for reconciliation and full community restoration. However, this the author of this article tends to show restorative justice advocates have made a number of claims about the effectiveness of restorative justice in relation to sexual assault crimes, such as its ability to defuse power relations between the parties and heal the harm. This article examines whether or not restorative justice is one of the ways forward in the difficult area of prosecuting child sex offences by re-analysing some of the data reported in Katherine (2009) and comparing restorative justice with other reforms to the sexual assault trial (Jyl, 2002). It concludes that there is insufficient evidence to support the view that there are inherent benefits in the restorative justice process that provide victims of sexual assault with a superior form of justice (Katherine, 2009).

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