During the award period for Beyond the Law: Responding to Sexual Violence with Restorative Justice," co-PI Abigail Barefoot conducted 18 months of participant observation at a community-based restorative justice program in California designed to address sexual violence. Within this program, community members volunteer as facilitators who work separately with survivors and offenders to discuss the harm caused and possible accountability measures; additionally, they can facilitate between offenders, survivors, and members of their shared community. This program does not collaborate with the criminal legal system and builds upon prison abolition values. The goal of this project was to 1) understand how restorative justice principles were put into practice and where tensions between parties (victim-survivors, facilitators, and offenders) occurred and 2) to better understand survivors' experiences within these programs. 

Data from the participant observations were deidentified and coded for major themes. In general, this research shows that participants in restorative justice programs may not come to these programs out of support for restorative justice values but out of an assumption that the criminal legal system would not believe them or cause them more harm. This led to participants upholding both the values of the criminal legal system and restorative justice, creating unresolvable tensions and paradoxes that challenged the narrative that restorative justice was a more "survivor-friendly" form of justice. The following four themes represent the significant tensions found within these programs: 

1. What it means to be "survivor-friendly" is contested between survivors and facilitators of restorative justice. Facilitators often struggle to balance acting as a justice mechanism and developing accountability measures for offenders while offering survivor-centered advocacy that aligns with their non-punitive, non-carceral approach. Any attempt at boundaries or refusal to follow through with survivor's demands are read by participants as not being "survivor friendly." This is further complicated with community-based programs where facilitators are volunteers working within their own community.

2. In responding to sexual violence and seeking to prevent future sexual assaults from occurring, facilitators work to disrupt a binary of "innocent victim" and "irremediable rapist by allowing for multiple and contradictory truths of how individuals understand a sexual encounter. This approach validates both victim-survivor and offender's experiences by placing rape within a broader context that accounts for structural causes and individual fault. However, the program walks a fine line between victim blaming and minimizing sexual violence and a structural analysis of sexual violence. This led sexual violence to be seen as less of objective truth but "ambiguous" situations in which there are multiple truths to a sexual encounter.

3. Restorative justice facilitators struggle to define "punishment" outside of the criminal legal system. While telling survivors that incarceration or engagement in the criminal legal system was not supported because it was a form of punishment, other community forms of punishments, such as "callouts" and "canceling," were harder to define as punishment. While callouts are seen as a punitive document by facilitators and offenders, victim-survivors saw callouts as a tool of safety and empowerment, particularly in cases when other options of power were limited, such as when an offender chose not to participate in restorative justice. Thus, the line between providing safety or causing punishment and harm was blurred. 

4) Restorative justice's focus away from retributive justice and towards accountability as a form of justice for survivors leads to all parties struggling to define success. While all parties see behavioral change as an essential part of successful accountability, this largely internal process is hard to evaluate and prove as "successful." Thus, accountability processes often lack closure for both victim-survivors and offenders, leaving all parties feeling unsatisfied with the outcomes.

In sum, this research demonstrates that participants shape their understanding of the purpose of restorative justice against their assumptions of the criminal legal system. While these data points reflect the specific findings of one community-based restorative justice program, they point to larger, shared concerns for addressing sexual violence, both through the criminal legal system and beyond. As there is a greater push for using restorative justice and transformative justice as an alternative to the criminal legal system, we must be mindful and reflective of how these programs are influenced by the logic of the criminal legal system, even as it seeks to change it. 

Last Modified: 10/06/2022
Modified by: Abigail R Barefoot