The marginalised woman: thinking beyond victim/offender in restorative justice

ABSTRACT

Restorative justice (RJ) promises to be a better approach to justice for victims and offenders. In doing so, however, it relies on and reinforces identities that have been constructed by the traditional justice system. This paper examines the value of complicating the distinction between, and ultimately thinking beyond, the identities of Victim and Offender. The paper begins with a review of feminist scholarship to argue that RJ should not embrace the identity of Victim or Offender without consideration. The author provides a discursive analysis of community justice programmes in Winnipeg MB, Canada. Staff frame the women they work in ways that trouble the Offender/Victim dichotomy. The dominant subject they construct is the Marginalised Woman. Though the programmes work with criminalised women staff stress the women’s experiences of victimisation and marginalisation. This paper argues that much of the potential for RJ to provide something unique is in its refusal of Offender/Victim identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist post-structuralist thought
• marginalised woman
• offender/victim dichotomy
• feminist restorative justice

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Drs Lori Thorlakson and George Pavlich for the invitation to participate in the symposium which led to this special edition, as well as for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts. My thanks as well to two anonymous reviewers who assisted me in clarifying the primary arguments here. This paper draws on my doctoral research, which was supported financially by Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship-Doctoral, as well as by the University of Manitoba and the Province of Manitoba. Thanks as well to my doctoral committee for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Victim and Offender are capitalised here and throughout, along with Neoliberal Offender and Marginalised Woman to refer to the subjectivities constructed in justice discourse. This is distinguished from the non-capitalised, and plural forms who are the actual people responded to by the criminal justice system and alternative justice programmes.

2 The sampling criteria for this project were that the agency be a non-profit, community agency which worked with women who had come in conflict with the law. Not all the agencies identified as Restorative Justice programmes. I group them all here under the label ‘alternative justice’. The agencies which were included are: Onashowewin, Mediation Services, Salvation Army, Elizabeth Fry Society, Native Women’s Transition Centre and New Directions.

3 Barbara Hudson’s work (1998, 2003, 2006) stands as an exception to this.

4 This project looked only at programmes working with women who had committed a crime. There are clear connections to victimised women and I discuss these later in the paper. The focus here on criminalised women was to address the near total lack of restorative justice research that looked at women as offenders.

5 See Nelund (2015) for the complete analysis and a more detailed methodology.

6 A third subjectivity was also present that is omitted here: the Medicalised Woman. See Nelund (2015) for further analysis of the Medicalised Woman.

7 The term ‘Aboriginal’ has been criticised for being assimilationist language (See Alfred, 2005 for example). I use the term ‘Aboriginal’ because it is the term most frequently used by participants. I want to note here though that they do so in a political context in which Aboriginal is the official government language.

8 It has been estimated that somewhere between 500 (NWAC, 2010) and over 1100 (RCMP, 2014) Aboriginal women and girls have been killed or gone missing in the last 30 years. The federal government of Canada has begun a national inquiry into the issue.

9 See Nelund (2015) for an extended discussion of this concern.