Jeffrey Epstein is all over the news, along with anyone who may have known about, enabled, or participated in his systematic child sexual abuse. Yet there is significantly less information and coverage on the perspectives, stories and named needs of these survivors themselves. This is almost always the case for any type of coverage on incidences of sexual violence – we first ask “how should we punish the offender?”, before ever asking “what does the survivor want?” For way too long, survivors of sexual violence, particularly of childhood sexual abuse (CSA), have been cast to the wayside, treated like witnesses to crimes committed against the state, rather than the victims of individuals that have caused them enormous harm. This de-emphasis on direct survivors of CSA is often presented as a form of “protection” or “respect for their privacy” and while keeping survivors safe is of the utmost importance, so is the centering and meeting of their needs, even when doing so means going against the grain of what the general public or criminal legal system think are conventional or acceptable responses to violence. Restorative justice (RJ) is one of those “unconventional” responses to CSA and yet there is a growing number of survivors who are naming it as a form of meeting their needs for justice and accountability. But what is restorative justice and why would a CSA survivor ever want it?
“You’re the most powerful person I’ve ever known and you did not deserve what I did to you.” These words were spoken toward the end of a “victim offender dialogue”, a restorative justice process in which an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse had elected to meet face-to-face for a facilitated conversation with the person that had harmed her. This phrase was said by the man who had violently sexually abused her in her youth, as he sat directly across from her, now an adult woman. As these two people looked at each other at that moment, the shift in power became tangible, as did a dissolvement of shame in both parties. Despite having gone through a formal court process, this survivor needed more…more space to ask questions, to name the impacts this violence had and continues to have in her life, to speak her truth directly to the person that had harmed her more than anyone else, and to reclaim her power. We often talk about the effects of restorative justice in the abstract, generally ineffable and far too personal to be classifiable; but in that instant, it was a felt sense, it was a moment of undeniable healing for all those involved and a form of justice and accountability that this survivor had sought for a long time, yet had not received until that instance.
Contrary to the common assumption that survivors simply want longer and longer prison sentences, a 2024 national “Crime Survivors Speak” survey finds that by margins of 3:1, victims of violent crime prefer investments in rehabilitation, treatment, and community-based alternatives over longer prison or jail sentences.
One of the most common arguments against making restorative justice more widely available is that because it does not contain elements of punishment, it minimized the severity of child sexual abuse. The best evidence against the presumption that RJ is simply a “slap on the wrist” can be found in the feedback provided by people that have caused CSA and go on to participate in an RJ process. In my work as an RJ practitioner, I have heard people who cause harm most often describe their RJ process as the “hardest thing they’ve ever done; the first time they ever truly took responsibility for the harm they caused; the only time they’ve felt they are actually being held accountable.” Additionally, RJ is not only immensely challenging, it is also very effective at reducing occurrence of future harm.
While there is not a lot of recidivism data on RJ programs that address sexual harm (solely because there so few programs in existence), the data we do have is encouraging, such as the efforts of the Objibway community of Hollow Water to address the high occurrence of sexual harm via community healing circles. Outcomes in Hollow Water showed a roughly 4% reoffence rate. While it goes without saying that Hollow Water’s sample size was significantly smaller, a 1996 meta-analysis of people who cause sexual harm conducted by Corrections Research in the Policy Branch of Solicitor General Canada nonetheless showed a notably higher recidivism rate of 13.4%. In another example, a Canadian study of a Circles of Support & Accountability pilot program reported a ~70% reduction in sexual recidivism as compared to the control group of the same size. While these statistics are worth noting, what is of much greater importance is that restorative justice gave survivors the opportunity to choose what their justice process would look like.
In closing, survivors of childhood sexual abuse are by far the most invisiblized victims of violence (both during their experience of that harm and throughout our criminal legal system’s limited response to it). Seeing the vast disparity between what some CSA survivors say they need and what is ultimately afforded to them paints a clear and indisputable picture of how we continue to let down the most vulnerable members of our society. Our approach to justice and healing cannot be one-size-fits-all and it cannot be based primarily on the interests and assumptions of those not directly involved in the harm. It cannot continue to decenter those who should, in reality, be the focus of any true justice and accountability process. Restorative justice as a response to childhood sexual violence may be unfathomable for some, but for those survivors who see it as a necessary and invaluable contribution to their healing, it should be available, accessible and offered widely, with no judgement, no assumption and no limitations to the rightful power and agency every survivor should have to define what justice means to them.
Sandra Rodriguez is Director of Healing Pathways at The Ahimsa Collective and a longtime restorative justice practitioner whose work centers community-based responses to harm, particularly sexual violence. Her practice is rooted in building BIPOC communities’ power to heal and develop life-affirming alternatives to punitive systems. She lives near the Russian River in Northern California.
