Restorative justice is a community-based approach to addressing crime that focuses on repairing harm and relationships, restoring balance, and reintegrating victims and offenders back into the community. This is achieved by actualizing restorative principles such as empowering victims and responding to their unique and individual needs; working towards restitution; supporting offenders, while encouraging them to understand, accept and carry out their obligations; recognizing that obligations should not be intended as harms, and must be achievable; providing opportunities for dialogue between victim and offender as appropriate; finding meaningful ways to involve the community; and encouraging collaboration and reintegration rather than coercion and isolation.
Restorative justice can be practiced in many forms. The most common for VRJS is a community justice conference (also called a family justice conference), which is a meeting of all the stakeholders of a criminal incident. This conference entails the victim and his/her supporters, the offender and his/her supporters, members of the community, a facilitator and co-facilitator, a mentor for the offender, and the investigating police officer(s) coming together in a circle to have a facilitated dialogue about what happened, who was affected and how, and how the offender can make amends and address the root cause(s) of his/her behavior.
For more information on restorative justice and restorative practices, please go to our RJ Resources page.
