“Shaming Conferences: Community Policing and the Victim’s Perspective.”

Source: (1996) Paper presented at the American Society of Criminology Conference, Annual Meeting, Chicago, November 20-23, 1996.

This report on the randomized trial underway in Canberra AUS comparing the effectiveness of the restorative justice approach, represented by shaming conferences, provides an opportunity to examine the differential impact on the victims. This paper reports on interviews with around one hundred victims of juvenile offenders, half of whom have been dealt with through court and half through shaming conferences. Preliminary analysis of these interviews provide some early data on the different attitudes prevailing in these two categories of victims towards their offenders, their feelings about the way their cases were dealt with by the justice system and the extent to which the loss and harm they have experienced has been repaired through each approach.