Source: (2003) Ottawa, Canada: National Association of Women and the Law. Downloaded 7 March 2005.
Restorative justice processes have been contemplated as a potential improvement on the failures of the existing criminal justice system to deal with violence against women, and as a potential source of empowerment for women. These analyses tend to downplay systemic discrimination’s role in these failures, to ignore family and community roles in the reinforcement of male control of women, and to take an “it can’t get worse” approach to justifying unproven interventions through restorative justice. The complex realities of abuse, sex offences and discrimination against women which may impact restorative justice processes, when they are acknowledged, are often
seen as remediable through power-balancing techniques and pre-process preparation.
However, equity-oriented analysis of restorative justice (such as Richard Delgado’s, from which the articulation of themes in this paragraph is drawn) combines both internal and external critiques of restorative justice. (excerpt)
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