It attends to the broken relationships between three players: the offender, the victim, and the community. Accordingly, restorative justice seeks to elevate the role of crime victims and community members; hold offenders directly accountable to the people they have harmed; and restore, to the extent possible, the emotional and material losses of victims by providing a range of opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and problem solving.
Moreover it views criminal acts more comprehensively than our judicial system because it recognizes how offenders harm victims, communities, and even themselves by their actions. The ultimate aim of restorative justice is one of healing. If survivors of crimes receive appropriate emotional and material reparation, the harm can be redressed; by seeking to repair the damage caused, the offender can be reconciled with the victim and reintegrated back into his or her social and familial networks; and through such reconciliation and reintegration, community harmony has a chance to be restored.
This manner of healing gives the actual victims and the community, as well as the offenders, the opportunity to take an active part in the justice process instead of a traditionally passive role. Restorative justice is a young field that emerged during the s as alternative approaches to the court process, such as alternative dispute resolution, were becoming a national trend.
From the late s to the early s, a number of experimental programs, modeled after the Kitchener program, were initiated in several jurisdictions in North America and Europe. These initiatives, however, remained small in size and number, having little impact on the larger system. In , restorative justice took a giant step toward becoming mainstream when the American Bar Association endorsed victim-offender mediation, a program usually associated with first-time offenders and minor crimes.
Additional support came from the National Organization for Victim Assistance, which published a monograph entitled Restorative Community Justice: A Call to Action, and from the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Union, all of which have committed to promote restorative practices. Today, thirty states either have restorative justice principles in their mission statements and policy plans or legislation promoting a more balanced and restorative juvenile justice system.
This institutionalization is further buttressed by the American Bar Association, which began offering grants in to develop restorative justice initiatives in criminal law settings.
The most widely used approaches in restorative justice are victim-offender mediation, family group conferencing, circles, and victim-offender dialogue. All put victims and offenders in direct dialogue, nearly always faceto-face, about a specific offense or infraction.
They also have in common the presence of at least one more person who serves as the facilitator, and they usually involve advance preparation of the parties so they will know what to expect. The focus of the encounter most frequently involves naming what happened, identifying its impact, and coming to some common understanding, often including reaching agreement as to how any resultant harm will be repaired.
These practices are also used in non—criminal justice settings such as schools or neighborhoods. Victim-offender mediation is the oldest practice and is typically used with victims and offenders of property crimes and minor assaults. Participants include the victim, offender, and facilitator.
The face-to-face meeting is centrally focused on the victim and the offender, accompanied by a small number of support persons such as parents or friends. Family group conferencing originated in New Zealand as a means of diverting young offenders from formal adjudication. It routinely involves support persons for both victims and offenders, as well as additional participants from the community. This approach emphasizes supporting offenders in taking responsibility for their actions and in changing their behaviors.
Circles are more focused on the harm done to the community than the other approaches. Continuing Education. Professional Development. Restorative Practices for Educators. Restorative Justice Conferencing. Facilitating Listening Circles. Flawless Consulting. Program Overview. School Resources. Become a Trainer. Free Webinars. Schools K Research and Evaluations. Reports and Recommendations. Guides for Implementation. School Conduct. Integrating Related Evidence-Based Strategies.
Professional Journals. Articles and Videos. Supporting Evidence. The myth is that restorative justice replaces harsher consequences. The truth is that restorative justice represents the steps that lead up to more harsh consequences, should they be necessary.
Sometimes in educational discipline we whip out the cannons of suspension first. But with the right training and support from all stakeholders, restorative justice can prove much more effective in building a stronger school community. According to Howard Zehr, a recognized founding father of restorative justice , the concept is based on three pillars:. Empathy for all and by all.
This definition has become highly popular. This development went hand-in-hand with both an upwards and a downwards expansion of the terms use, as clarified by Gerry Johnstone. With the downwards expansion, the term began to be used in relation to non-criminal forms of misconduct, including misconduct in schools, inappropriate behaviour in the workplace and neighbourhood disputes Johnstone One of the most famous example of the upwards expansion occurred in post-apartheid South Africa, where Desmond Tutu and several others argued that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempted to promote restorative justice Gade Restorative justice, which Zehr had presented as a revolutionary alternative approach to criminal justice in , became an internationally recognised approach to justice in the s.
The former calls for increased awareness of—and focus on—restorative justice in various contexts see ss. Thus, as described above, a lot has happened in restorative justice since Zehr wrote his foundational article Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice in Some of the most significant developments within academia include the emergence of critical research challenging common restorative justice assumptions and dogmas, as well as empirically informed research on the effects of restorative justice programmes.
These texts by Danish scholars were inspired by the emerging international literature on restorative justice, and they both referred to Howard Zehr. The question of whether restorative justice is something that is found in Denmark first began to be addressed around the year , and it only received little attention at this time.
Some scholars also posed the question of whether this association was reasonable. For example, Anne Lemonne and Annika Snare argued that the Danish model is not a clear-cut example of restorative justice as the mediation programme is combined with prosecution in the penal system Lemonne and Snare In contrast to a country such as Norway, victim offender mediation has always been a supplement, and never an alternative, to punishment in Denmark.
Prior to , no other practices in Denmark than the abovementioned pilots appear to have been connected with restorative justice.
Slowly, other Danish practices than the police trials began to be associated with restorative justice. Later, Mary Koss and Mary Achilles also referred to the mediations at the just mentioned Danish centre in their article Restorative Justice Responses to Sexual Assault, thus suggesting that restorative justice in Denmark occurs outside the police programme on victim offender mediation Koss and Achilles , see also Liebmann ; McGlynn et al.
The background was that the Danish Ministry of Justice had established a committee, which should propose the future organization of a permanent Danish victim offender mediation programme. In fact, this is not very surprising, as Madsen was one of the committee members.
His book The Little Book of Restorative Justice was also published in Danish in , which no doubt contributed to an increased Danish interest in restorative justice, not least among conflict management practitioners. At this point in time, I was working with restorative justice in South Africa and was getting increasingly interested in the Danish context. The conference was held at Aarhus University in May , and it was attended by more than 60 people, including both conflict management practitioners and academics such as Karin Sten Madsen.
Ida Helene Asmussen, who was in the process of writing the first doctorate thesis on the Danish victim offender mediation programme, also attended. Asmussen shows that some victims and offenders who have participated in the permanent Danish victim offender programme have been put under pressure to perform specific roles, which—needless to say—is problematic see also Asmussen The first attempt was made by Annette Storgaard in her report Restorative Justice in Denmark from Thus, it was linked to a broader effort to describe the European restorative justice landscape.
Until now, Storgaard has been the only person writing in English about the Danish restorative justice landscape, leaving the international community with the impression that next to nothing is happening in Denmark regarding restorative justice. Storgaard does not mention any texts on restorative justice written by Danes, nor does she take notice of restorative justice initiatives outside the police, such as the Danish restorative justice conference and the network.
There are also other restorative justice initiatives that Storgaard leaves unnoticed in her writings. This proposal, which was based on lobbyism from the SSP Committee on Restorative Justice, 7 was debated in Parliament on 18 December , but did not generate sufficient political support to be implemented.
Nevertheless, the mere proposal shows that restorative justice is something that has received political attention in Denmark. Against the background of the conference on restorative justice, the Danish Centre for Conflict Resolution received funding from Forskningsfonden af English: The Research Foundation of to collect data on how restorative justice is practiced in Denmark. To illustrate this, the report presents seven stories with concrete examples of how restorative justice has been practiced in Denmark.
One example is about a restorative circle process in Ungdomsbyen English: The youth town in Copenhagen, which was organised by a conflict management teacher in a fifth grade after a fight between two youngsters.
Another example is about a restorative conference in a small town in Egedal Municipality, which was arranged by the SSP due to serious trouble in the community caused by a group of 16—17 boys. A weakness of the report is that it does not contain any quantitative data on the spread of such processes in Denmark. Such data does not exist. It contains a section about restorative justice in Denmark, which basically summarises the findings of the report from the Danish Centre for Conflict Resolution Berger et al.
Additionally, the KORA report presents an overview of international literature on restorative justice, including an overview of findings on the effects of different restorative justice programmes.
The positive effects of restorative justice, however, have been recently questioned in the Danish context by Britta Kyvsgaard.
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