Can face-to-face meetings between a victim and an abuser — a form of restorative justice — help a society overwhelmed with bad behavior? ameliaschonbek reports
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A lot of people weren’t ready to have that complicated conversation right away. It was thrilling to be able to speak out about the experience of harm and feel heard. It was possible, finally, to see men like Larry Nassar and Bill Cosby, who’d assaulted dozens of women and girls over years and years, convicted of their crimes. Sending them to prison looked like an acknowledgment of all the pain they had caused and a warning to other men that they couldn’t get away with abuse.
CHERYL: I was willing to do this because I didn’t want to carry this fear, guilt, shame, responsibility anymore. I had done my best to get rid of it by my own means, but I still had it. From the outside, it was usually hard to tell that anything was wrong in Cheryl’s life. She worked at a big corporation, and people around her would say, “You’re so good at your job, you’re so confident.” Yet, again and again, Cheryl’s boyfriends turned out to be controlling or abusive, just like her father had been. Maybe I am broken, she thought. Maybe all this is my fault. Some days were so hard that she would think, I just can’t do one more day like this. She thought about ending her life.
Troy graduated from high school and got a job in construction. It was the late ’80s, and it seemed that everyone he worked with had a drug or alcohol problem. He started making a lot of money, more than he needed. It didn’t really matter what substance someone put in front of him — if it was there, he was going to do it.
Troy took it and went to prison for 22 months. His 9-year-old daughter wrote him a letter saying she must be the reason he couldn’t quit drinking. It broke his heart. He joined AA and kept it up when he got out: Drug and alcohol treatment was a condition of his early release. He found 12-step work to be moving, and when he reached the fifth step and sat across from his sponsor, Troy admitted to him “the exact nature of my wrongs.
Yantzi proposed to the judge that they all try something new: The boys would knock on the door of each victim’s house and ask what the damage had cost them. A few weeks later, the boys would return, this time with money to repair the houses or cover insurance costs. One of the homes they visited was owned by a woman who had lived in it nearly all her life. Before, she had never locked her doors or felt unsafe. The house had a picture window, and the boys had thrown a brick through it.
The problem was this strategy mostly didn’t work. In 1995, the year after the Violence Against Women Act was signed into law, the National Institute of Justice noted that there was “little conclusive evidence” that criminalizing domestic violence actually discouraged offenders or protected victims. Even now, as more and more people admit that legal solutions alone aren’t enough, the question of whether restorative justice is appropriate in cases of rape and domestic abuse has not gone away.
Outhier Banks had read about a program in Canada that arranged conversations, called surrogate victim-offender dialogues, between unrelated rape survivors and perpetrators who had taken responsibility for their actions. The surrogate approach was experimental, intended to meet the needs of victims for whom a direct dialogue with those who had harmed them was impossible. “The survivors were able to ask the perpetrators the question that everybody asks,” Outhier Banks told me.
“Justice means different things to different people,” Outhier Banks said. “You can never fully have justice, right? Something’s been taken. For me, it’s about what we can do to make a victim as whole as possible.” The survivors she worked with generally had clear and unique ideas about what they wanted out of the process.
By the time Me Too unfolded, Sonya Shah had been thinking about these questions for a decade. Shah facilitates surrogate dialogues in the Bay Area for those who have committed and survived sexual harm. Like Outhier Banks, she has often been asked to justify her focus on the rehabilitation of bad men. “Understandably, everybody is so pissed at how little attention gender violence has gotten, at how much victim blaming and silence and shaming there has been,” she told me. “That needs to happen.
The road to getting a survivor and an offender together for a dialogue is usually long and uncertain. Over the course of a decade, DVSD facilitated only around 200 of them. Though the process has a lot in common with therapy, it’s more narrowly focused, and ideally the two work in tandem. Most people who haven’t been through it “have a very naïve view of what it takes for someone to be accountable,” Shah told me.
In a courtroom, many stories are told, and the task is to winnow them to a single true story: Someone is guilty of a crime, or they aren’t. In a restorative-justice dialogue, every story, or history, can be true at once, even those that seem to contradict one another. Inevitably, these dialogues mean different things to each person who takes part, and each person remembers them differently.
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