Restorative Justice Deep Dive Series
Content note: This article engages with themes of interpersonal and sexual harm, without graphic detail.
These reflections stem from my years of facilitating community-based restorative processes outside the legal system, largely in response to sexual harm and intimate partner violence. Different practitioners work in different ways, and each situation requires its own approach. I offer one perspective; please take what feels supportive and set aside what doesn’t.
Is Restorative Justice Right for Me?
Exploring Accountability and Healing After Harm
When people begin to wonder whether restorative justice might be right for them, they are usually starting from a very simple place: something harmful has happened, it is still affecting their life, and they are asking whether there is any kind of support that could help with healing and accountability. For some, this is the first time they have even heard the term. For others, it is one of many ideas they are considering alongside therapy, legal options, community responses, or trying to move on quietly.
By the time someone is seriously considering a restorative process, though, they are often carrying a lot more than the incident itself. They may be carrying the responses they have already received from friends, family, and institutions. They may be carrying things they have read online about restorative justice and transformative justice, or strong feelings about the legal system more broadly. They may be carrying their politics, their doubts, and their hopes.
Some have seen restorative justice described as “soft on crime,” or too focused on reconciliation and harmony. Others have only encountered it in schools, courts, or HR departments, and associate it with systems they do not trust. Some feel loyal to spaces that use language like “transformative justice” or “abolition,” and worry that engaging with anything called “restorative” might mean compromising their principles. Others are simply unsure if any kind of structured process could possibly touch what they have been through.
These concerns make sense. They grow out of real experiences of being dismissed, controlled, or harmed in the name of safety, justice, or even healing, and the debates around RJ and TJ, and around the legal system more broadly, are not abstract, but based in lived reality.
This article is not a map of those debates nor an attempt to decide if any camp is “right.” Instead, I try to answer a more practical question for those considering a process: is restorative justice right for me in my context?
In my work, I start with what people are actually hoping for, what feels possible in their context, and what kind of process can be held with integrity. What I describe in the pages that follow grows out of that practice; other practitioners and communities will work differently. My hope is that this can offer one clear picture of restorative justice after harm, and help you orient toward what might make sense for you—even if what ends up feeling right is something else.
Defining the Practice: Restorative Justice Outside the Legal System
My work is rooted in restorative justice traditions and practices. For the past decade, much of my time has been spent facilitating and supporting processes around serious interpersonal harm, including sexual harm and intimate partner violence. I have worked in community-based contexts and in connection with institutions like the prison system, and those experiences have shaped a clear sense of what feels aligned with my values and what does not.
I do not receive cases from courts or police, and I am not operating as part of a criminal-legal program. There are no mandatory referrals, no institutional checklists to satisfy, and no external requirement to reach a particular outcome. The work is not about satisfying the needs of a system; it is about carefully exploring what might be possible and supportive for the people intimately involved.
At the same time, I do not treat incidents as isolated, private events without a context. When I sit down with people, we are talking not only about “what happened” in a narrow sense, but also about histories, identities, power, and the broader conditions that shaped the harm and the responses to it. A systems-aware lens is important: the same act can have very different meanings and impacts depending on race, gender, disability, class, immigration status, mental health, and many other factors. Those aspects belong in the room, even if the process itself focuses on a small circle of people and a single incident of harm.
I am familiar with many of the conversations and practices that circulate under the name “transformative justice,” and there are significant overlaps in spirit and approach. My own lineage and training, however, are in restorative justice. That is the language I use to describe my work, even while working outside the legal system and with an eye toward the larger conditions that make harm more or less likely.
(If you’re looking for a more detailed, step-by-step sense of what a restorative process can actually involve—from first contact through preparation, dialogue, and closing—I explore that more fully in What Happens in a Restorative Process?)
What People Are Often Hoping For After Harm
When people reach out after harm, they rarely begin by saying, “I’m looking for a values-aligned, non-carceral process.” The language is almost always much more concrete, and much closer to the bone.
Very often, there are particular moments they are imagining or longing for. Someone might say that they want a structured conversation with the person who caused harm, because unstructured contact feels overwhelming and unsafe. Another person might describe needing a chance to tell the full story of how this has affected their life—not just the incident itself, but the sleepless nights, the panic in certain situations, the impact on work, intimacy, or community, including, for many people, the pain of how family and friends responded—or didn’t respond—after the harm. (I write more about these ‘hidden ripples’ in The Hidden Ripples of Sexual Harm.) Someone else might say that what feels most important is hearing a real, meaningful apology: not a vague “I’m sorry if you were hurt,” but a clear, specific acknowledgment of what was done and how it landed.
It is also common for people to want some sense that the person who caused harm has done deep internal work to understand why they did what they did. They may be looking for signs that this is not just about saying the right words in a single conversation, but about grappling with patterns, beliefs, and behaviors over time. Alongside that, there is often a hope that tangible steps will be taken so that similar harm is less likely to be repeated—commitments, boundaries, changes in behavior, or forms of ongoing accountability.
All of these hopes are, in one way or another, attempts to answer the question: what would accountability look like in practice? They point toward specific ways a person who has caused harm might be accountable to the person they harmed and to others impacted: listening, acknowledging, changing, repairing where possible, and staying with the discomfort rather than turning away. (From the perspective of someone who has caused harm, I talk more about what this internal and external accountability work can involve in the article Beyond Shame.)
Beneath these concrete hopes, there is almost always another layer: how someone hopes to feel, at least a little differently, on the other side of any process. People often speak about wanting to feel less consumed or haunted by what happened, even if they do not expect to feel “over it.” There may be a wish to feel less afraid in certain situations, less constantly on guard, less prone to replaying conversations late at night. Sometimes there is a very simple hope: to sleep more easily.
There can also be a longing for a greater sense of lightness, even if the harm will always matter—a sense that their life is not entirely organized around this event. For some, there is a desire to regain some trust that people can act with integrity, or that their own sense of judgment can be relied on again. For many, there is a hope to feel more like an active agent in their own life: someone who has made choices about how to respond to harm, rather than only someone to whom harm has been done.
This layer of hoped-for internal shifts is, in many ways, another way of asking: what does healing look like here, at least in part? and what would it be like to feel even somewhat better? Not completely healed, not unchanged by what happened, but perhaps less alone with it, less trapped inside it. (I write more about this survivor-side inner work, and how it can shape a process, in Your Healing Lives in You.)
Most people do not arrive with all of this fully articulated. Often, early conversations are about finding words for what feels important, tolerable, or completely out of reach. In my experience, these concrete hopes and these imagined internal shifts are far more useful starting points than whether anyone fully understands or agrees with the larger narratives or critiques of restorative justice.
How a Process Is Shaped Around Those Hopes
Once there is some sense of what feels most important—both in terms of possible moments and possible internal shifts—the next question becomes: given the actual people and context, what might be realistically attempted?
Early conversations tend to focus on understanding the situation in more detail. Who is involved? What has already happened between them since the harm? What formal or informal systems are already in play—legal processes, campus procedures, organizational dynamics, community responses? What are the current conditions around safety, mental health, housing, work, identity-based risk, and other factors that would shape what is or is not possible? What timelines or constraints are present, and which of those are flexible?
Within that reality, processes are not about promising that certain outcomes will occur. They are about asking whether there is a way of moving that aligns with the hopes named and that does not create more harm for anyone. This is where certain values become not abstract ideals, but practical tools for making decisions.
One of those values is agency, closely tied to a commitment to collaboration. In this work, agency means that each person retains the ability to make real choices about how they participate: what they are willing to explore, what forms of contact feel possible, and how they would like a process to unfold. That agency extends to everyone in the room—not only the person who experienced harm, but also the person who caused harm and any others directly involved, including the facilitators. People are not there to carry out something that has been decided for them; they are there because they are actively choosing to take part.
Collaboration means that the shape of the process is not determined by any one person alone. The survivor is not expected to call all the shots, the facilitator is not an expert issuing instructions, and the person who caused harm is not simply showing up to do what they are told. Instead, each person comes as an agent in their own role, with their own history, experience, wisdom, and needs. Together, they work toward a structure that is as responsive as possible to those realities.
Closely tied to agency and collaboration is a commitment to power-with rather than power-over. Power-with means thinking about who is in the room and whose perspectives are included. Decisions are not made on someone’s behalf without their participation. Processes are designed so that those closest to the harm have a meaningful place in shaping the response. When that is not possible, the work may need to change form or scale to reflect who is actually present, rather than pretending that absent people are being represented.
A commitment to power-with further means that, within a restorative process, there is an explicit limit on using tactics that rely on power-over—for example, public shaming or efforts to restrict someone’s ability to make a living—as leverage while a process is underway. There are contexts in which people may decide that such strategies are necessary or appropriate in their larger situation. The point here is not to pass judgment on those choices, but to be clear that a voluntary, good-faith restorative process cannot operate with those forms of pressure active at the same time. The work depends on people being able to choose to participate, and to offer whatever accountability they are capable of, without coercion. Part of the facilitator’s role is to name these limits: not to declare what anyone should or should not do in their wider life, but to clarify what can and cannot sit inside a restorative process held with integrity.
A further orientation is both/and thinking. Harm is not minimized or treated lightly. There is room to explore the broader conditions that made it possible, and to hold complex and even contradictory experiences together. It is common, for example, for someone to feel both deep hurt and ongoing care for the person who harmed them; to want both accountability and distance; to recognize that structural factors played a role and still insist that individual choices mattered. Rather than forcing all of that into a single simple story, the process makes space for those and other tensions to be spoken and considered.
The pacing of the work is guided by a commitment to moving at the speed of trust. In concrete terms, this means that the question is not, “How quickly can this get to a dialogue?” but “What level of trust, stability, and readiness is present right now?” Sometimes the early phases of a process are devoted almost entirely to building enough trust between facilitator and participants that people can say what is true for them without fear of being pushed, judged, or abandoned. Steps that require greater vulnerability—such as in-person dialogues—are only taken when there is enough of a foundation to make them feel like considered choices rather than leaps into the unknown.
Closely connected to this is the importance of presence and emergence. Most processes begin with a plan: an outline of preparation, possible forms of contact, and follow-up. But that plan is held lightly. Throughout the work, attention is paid to what is actually happening: the things people say quickly and then pull back from, the shifts in what they feel ready for, the new information that comes to light, the ways that external circumstances change. Being present in this way allows the process to change shape when needed. In many of the most meaningful processes I have been part of, the moments that mattered most were not the ones imagined at the beginning, but the ones that emerged when everyone was paying close attention to what was truly needed.
Taken together, these commitments shape not only what happens inside a process, but whether a process is advisable at all. They invite careful questions about whether the conditions for this kind of work are actually present in a given situation. Those questions—about readiness, safety, and fit—are often the real starting point.
Considering Whether This Approach Is Right for a Particular Situation
No article can tell someone definitively whether a particular process is right for them. What it can do is offer a way of thinking and feeling into the question.
For some people, the starting point is simply to notice what feels most pressing when they imagine things changing, even slightly. It may be a specific conversation they keep replaying in their mind, a particular person they wish they could speak to, or an unanswered question that will not let them go. For others, the starting point is more internal: a longing to feel less weighed down or less alone with what has happened, or to feel that they have acted in alignment with their own values, whatever the outcome.
It can be helpful to notice what kinds of moments or movements feel potentially meaningful, even if they also feel frightening, and what feels clearly unsafe or out of reach. It can also be useful to consider what kind of facilitation would feel trustworthy: someone who is structured but not rigid, steady but not detached, able to name what is happening without taking over.
These are not questions that need to be perfectly answered before reaching out to someone. Often, the first conversation is itself a place to sort through them with another person who is listening for both possibility and limit. Sometimes, after that conversation, it becomes clear that a restorative process is not the right next step. Sometimes, it becomes clear that there is something worth exploring, even if only cautiously and slowly.
In my own practice, I am most committed to supporting thoughtful, nuanced processes around harm that aim toward accountability and healing rather than punishment or silence. This means trying to move in ways that strengthen people and relationships, rather than replicating dynamics of control, coercion, or abandonment. It also means being honest about what I cannot offer or hold.
If, in reading this, you recognize elements that resonate with what you are longing for or are curious about—whether that is a particular kind of conversation, a chance to name impact, or a desire to explore accountability in a different way—it may be worth having a conversation about it. That first step does not obligate anyone to commit to a process. Its purpose can simply be to explore whether this way of working feels aligned with what is needed in the aftermath of harm.
Whatever language is used—restorative justice, transformative justice, or something else entirely—the heart of the work, for me, is the careful, human-scale project of figuring out what is possible, supportive, and as safe as it can be here, with these people, in this moment.
More in the
‘Restorative Justice Deep Dive Series’
These articles are for people navigating healing, accountability, and repair after harm. Each piece offers a deep look into the principles and practices that shape my approach.
My hope is that these resources can support you in making greater sense of where you are, clarify what you may be seeking, and offer guidance as you consider your next steps.
What Happens in a Restorative Process?
A Guide to the Many Ways It Can Go
A thorough, step-by-step guide to what actually happens in a restorative justice process—from first contact through preparation, dialogue, and closing—showing the different ways a process can unfold.
Your Healing Lives in You:
What Sexual Harm Survivors Can Expect in Restorative Work
An exploration of the often-unspoken internal work survivors may engage in ahead of restorative justice dialogues, and how this preparation shapes the depth and impact of a process.
The Hidden Ripples of Sexual Harm:
When Friends and Family Don’t Understand
For survivors of sexual harm who feel that added ache when family and friends don’t know how to respond, this article explores how restorative justice processes can meaningfully address these hidden ripples of harm.
Beyond Shame:
Finding a Way Forward After Causing Sexual Harm
For those who’ve caused sexual harm, this article explores how restorative dialogues and accountability coaching can support you in facing shame, guilt, and remorse and open a path toward meaningful accountability, healing, and personal transformation.
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