Restorative Justice
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in July 2025.
It’s hard to feel good about how the justice system works these days. Predatory sexual behaviour that is inarguably bad is found not to be criminal. The system moves slowly and provides a good income for everyone but the objects of law. Sometimes the slowness rewards badness, when cases are chucked because they ran out of time – a stick intended to incentivize the system instead whacks victims. Convictions are as trustworthy as bunny-boiler Glenn Close’s demise in a bathtub in Fatal Attraction – they seem to have innumerable second lives.
E. Jean Caroll won a heap of money from Trump but found the redeeming exchange in that lengthy court saga to be ‘I lanced him in the eyes. He jerked and looked back at me. I said what I wanted to say to him with my eyes and he got it. Oh, he got it. Then I turned back. It was the most intense moment of my life. Trump never held my gaze again for the rest of the trial.’ (Janet Somerville, Toronto Star, July 26/25).
Years of being eviscerated before the courts, two successful rulings, and E. Jean Caroll’s winning moment is looking her enemy in the eye! It, not the $88.3 million in pocket, allowed her to reclaim herself: ‘Here I am. Here I am,’ she says, describing the impact of that eye contact.
So: let’s think about an alternative way to seek justice when the crime is about what makes us who we are. The legal system shrinks people into three categories: criminals, victims, witnesses. No one is just any of those, and we are each all of those at some point and in some circumstances. What adjudication system might embrace that complexity? That liminal space where good and bad meet, where humanity lives and dies? Where good people do bad things and bad people do good things? Where proper punishment – think parenting, when we do this every day -- nurtures and restores the wholeness of all the players in the event?
This approach was named and claimed as Restorative Justice in 1977, but was practiced by Indigenous communities in Canada and New Zealand for eons previously. It has been found highly effective, both anecdotally and academically, in resolving conflict.
Restorative Justice describes the problematic behavior, the conflict, as harmful, rather than criminal. Criminal implies intent, which is slippery – it’s a wriggling mix of logical and emotional ‘thinking’ at the best of times. Harm, on the other hand, is a personal perception. We ask Are you hurt? How are you hurt? Where does it hurt? We acknowledge that the damaged person can best define the nature of the harm. To a large extent, we allow them to define what will repair the harm.
So if we apply that thinking to interpersonal interactions that cause harm -- hopefully long before they reach a level where they might be adjudicated illegal or criminal – we sit together the person who was harmed and the person who did the harm, and a mix of people who observed the interaction or its aftermath, and we have a carefully focussed and managed discussion about what constitutes the harm, its root causes and ripples of consequences for all concerned, and what can be done that will repair to the best possible extent the harm that has been done.
Everyone has work to do in this situation. The harmed must articulate the nature and extent of the harm – no hiding in generalized victimhood. The harmer must articulate the thinking (or lack thereof) that produced the harmful behaviour and willingness and capacity to repair the harm – no hiding in silence as four of five accused hockey players did in their trial. The witnesses must take responsibility for what they did, did not, or could or could not in the future do to address the issue – no hiding in institutional crevices.
That is the kind of work that requires and creates community. It not only allows but requires direct gazing into the eyes of the other/s. Unlike E. Jean Caroll’s experience, meaningful exchanges are witnessed and their consequences tagged for implementation, a tailored and personalized way to keep parties to an agreement ‘accountable’ (another slippery and increasingly mis-used word – topic for another time).
The restorative justice approach is not esoteric or weird: we do something that approximates it pretty much every day in our family, work and community life. It’s what creates and incrementally strengthens the ties that bind – or breaks them. A recalcitrant, unrepentant, serial harmer will eventually be cast out of community. This is not a hug-a-thug strategy (as it was called in early days before it had a chance to demonstrate its efficacy) but an equitable resolution designed to help everyone to find their better selves. There is no external harm that doesn’t also harm internally -- restorative justice is an equal opportunity healer.
There was an effective Restorative Justice mechanism in Haliburton County for a few years in the early 90s; maybe it’s time to give it another go.
