 It's a pleasure to be with you today. I've spent much of my career in the field of violence against women and want to share with you my perspective on what restorative approaches have to offer. As a feminist, I've been a strong advocate for using restorative approaches since the eighties. Violence against women is a broad concept which includes multiple forms of violence experienced by women. Into the partner violence, sexual violence, online bullying and harassment are examples that have significant implications for the dominant criminal justice system. I've spent considerable time assisting women navigating the justice system, understanding the challenges we face as victims, as offenders and as service providers in the justice system. Often I've left a courtroom with a victim asking me, did he get convicted of anything? Did I get custody of the children? I know how come after me, as soon as he's released, he's going to pay my fear. There has long been criticism directed at the criminal justice systems in effectiveness, specifically on how it deals with victimized or even criminalized women. An example for me was the testament who killed all the family cats, burned the house down and the lawyer at the court saying to me, Stephanie, this is not domestic violence. He never touched her. In Nova Scotia, there are a percent of the population. They're more likely to earn the lowest wages. They have the most precarious employment. They're at the highest risk for victimization through their life force. We are concerned as well for criminalized women in the justice system. Many times we're seeing women charged in domestic violence cases. Female inmates are, on average, younger. They're single. They haven't graduated from high school. They're unemployed consistently and they exhibit a high prevalence of trauma in their lives. In my observation of the criminal justice system, women who experience violence, whether it's intimate partner violence or sexualized violence, are left wanting by the criminal justice system. Victims who access the system tell us that the justice process has left them no voice, no choice in the process, no sense of agency. They speak of the stigmatizing nature of the process, the re-traumatization they experience in providing their testimony. In their words, the justice system consistently fails them. Despite the improvements we've made here in Nova Scotia over the last decades and around the country, with respect to how the justice system understands gendered violence, the system prioritizes safety over victim agency or choice through policies and processes. In Nova Scotia, we have the pro-arrest, pro-charge, pro-prosecution policies. And I'm not criticizing the necessity of these policies. I was certainly on the ground advocating for these policies when I ran a shelter and built a shelter for battered women. We are now with a left-left with the unintentional consequence of victims feeling they have no say in what happens to them or their families in seeking remedies for the harms they experienced. What might a restorative justice approach with the criminal justice system with women? What might be possible? A fundamental question is how we proceed with the concept of justice. Restorative justice, as has been said, is more than just a program to be administered by a set of processes or policies in the system. Using restorative justice should never be considered a cheaper alternative to the dominant culture of justice. We need to have people fall for beginning to end. Once we've opened their first domestic violence court, the judge with some of her current staff from here said to us she felt the most profound change that happened in cases before her is that the offender was consistently coming back into her court to talk about where he was in the process and the family was being followed by other professionals. So there's something to be said about surrounding people with services and support. It requires to support a fundamental shift in thinking from individualized cases to a broader understanding of context, causes and conditions in which arms manifest. If you want to do things differently, we must also think differently about what we're doing. In this way, there are symmetries in how we think about this concept between restorative approaches and violence against women. A restorative approach is a broader concept than individual notions. It is relevant for social and institutional relationships as well. Similarly, violence against women is complex and the complexity is dynamic. The dynamic is rarely an isolated act of violence, but more often patterns of abuse over time. And there are social and structural conditions where patterns of abuse continue to flourish. In this way, restorative approaches support our analysis of the issues we face. It allows us to explore and understand the intersections of relationships. The intersection between systems and structures and the experiences of women. A restorative approach would support exploring the history of abuse and violence, creating a different and deeper understanding of the nature and extent of the heart rather than the criminal justice system where only the incident that brought you before the cold is to be discussed. Even when we do a victim impact statement and a woman has had 10 years of violent interactions, we're not allowed to talk about it. We can only talk about the incident that brought us in front of the justice system. A strength of restorative approaches is recognizing the importance of context and that context matters. Understanding violence using a gender lens ensures that the nuances of context of relationships are highlighted and that the context or dynamics of relationships matter. Practically speaking, the criminal justice system tends to decontactualize the experience of women, thereby denying their gendered and racialized experience of being in the world. This generalized notion of thinking that we serve everyone the same denies the reality that everyone in every situation is different. Restorative approaches are not solely concerned with restoring relationships after a harm has occurred. There can be a preventative aim in what we learned from the past experiences in order to change for the future. An example of that is the No Special Home for Colored Children and the inquiry, the restorative process that's being used for that inquiry and we have some of those carriers who are survivors of the home with us today and it's really important that we look at the notion of restore focuses on structures and conditions of relationships needed for well-being. In relationships based on equality, respect, care, concern and dignity, which is how restorative approaches work. With restorative approaches there is a focus on healing and restoring relationships to that dignity. As used in Nova Scotia currently, restorative approaches take a broader understanding of safety and there was a principal commitment to trauma-informed practice and an understanding of the need for trauma-informed practice. If everyone that comes before us has lived with and lives with the experience of multiple traumas, then how they deal with that person is not one size that it's all about. Another strength of restorative approaches to justice is that it's forward-focusing and problem-solving it is more inclusive and collaborative it's concerned principally with including all impacted voices in what meaningful change could occur. The value of infocivity is paramount to our approach in addressing violence against women. It's critical to incorporate multiple perspectives in coming to understand the complexity of gender violence. How we support just relationships means identifying who else can affect an outcome and who else is affected by that outcome and bring them into the process. Victims often feel voiceless in the criminal justice process that's understood. Restorative processes could conceivably provide means of increasing agency, voice and choice for victims and an informed decision-making process. The benefits of more meaningful and truly collaborative processes could realize better outcomes for women, both criminalized women and victims. In some ways, we would then find the true meaning of justice. Thank you.