Organizational readiness for restorative justice to address campus sexual harm: ‘The messy world of creation’

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarly attention has focused on the possibilities of using restorative justice to address campus sexual harm. Scholars and advocates have noted gaps in current responses to campus sexual harm, highlighting restorative justice as an additional approach to better address the needs of survivors and more fully achieve accountability. Organizational change scholarship suggests engaging key stakeholders to examine the readiness of an institution to embrace change. One notable gap in the literature is the application of an organizational readiness framework in the context of restorative justice to address campus sexual harm. Through two phases of interviews with a total of five participants, this exploratory study fills that gap by identifying markers of readiness for restorative justice to address campus sexual harm and applying those markers to gauge one university’s readiness for restorative justice. This study identifies philosophical, practical, and external considerations relevant to readiness for restorative justice. This research also notes markers in need of further development at one university, discussing ways that those markers of readiness can be improved, as well as directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Restorative justice
• organizational change
• sexual harm
• university
• college

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful for all of the people who helped me throughout the course of this project and paper, including Ryan Shields, Andrew Harris, Wilson Palacios, Sabrina Rapisarda, and Anamika Twyman-Ghoshal. I would also like to thank my interview participants for participating in this study, and the reviewers for helping strengthen the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cameron Burke

Cameron Burke is a PhD student in the Criminology and Justice Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He holds a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His research interests focus on restorative justice implementation, particularly in the context of campus sexual harm.