Non-encounter restorative justice interventions – now what?

ABSTRACT

The ‘encounter conception’ of restorative justice is definitively the most widespread of all, and practices that involve an encounter may well deserve to be called ‘fully restorative’. That said, an encounter between an individual, identifiable ‘victim’ and an equally individual, identifiable ‘offender’ is not always possible (or desirable). Indeed, an encounter conception of restorative justice is problematic for a variety of reasons, including for attaching people to distinct labels – those of ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ – when only a few have the ‘paradoxical privilege’ to be recognised as victims. This article is aimed at promoting an exercise of thinking beyond an encounter conception of restorative justice. We would like to argue that such an exercise facilitates the processes of us rethinking the current language of restorative justice (still too restricted compared to the current criminal justice system). It also helps us to acknowledge the movement’s wide-ranging agendas or directions (and to position ourselves within them).

KEYWORDS:

• Restorative justice
• victim-offender labels
• victim-centric restorative justice
• offender-centric restorative justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See, for example, Pali and Biffi (2017) and Varona (2020).

2. In fact, today, ‘reconciliation’ does no longer tend to feature among restorative justice’s list of central goals. Indeed, as its application expanded, including within the criminal justice system (e.g. to cover cases of domestic violence), advocates came to realise that, unlike a goal, which can end up forcing people to follow in a direction opposite to the one they would like to adhere to, reconciliation is a mere possibility or, simply, an eventual ‘by product’ of a restorative process aimed at other main goals such as that of reparation (Rosenblatt, 2015).

3. And here we are referring to the allegedly very first Victim-Offender Reconciliation programme in the contemporary history of restorative justice, the so-called ‘Kitchener experiment’, which was established in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1974, and is widely referred to in the literature.

4. For more about the artificialities affecting restorative justice practices in drug-related cases, see Rosenblatt (2015).

5. For more details about Tomkins’ Blueprint, see: http://www.tomkins.org/what-tomkins-said/introduction/nine-affects-present-at-birth-combine-to-form-emotion-mood-and-personality/.