 My charge for this afternoon is to make the case that restorative justice can be a feminist approach to addressing harm, particularly gender-based harms, and to changing culture. And in a different crowd, I think that would be a very large task in a short amount of time. I'm hoping that in this crowd it will be somewhat less talking of a task in the same short amount of time. But just a couple of notes about how I came to this work. So I'm a lawyer, so unlike lots of you who are restorative practitioners, that's not my main line of work. I'm a lawyer and I've represented people subjected to abuse, primarily women, the last 20 years. And like Gayle said this morning, I want to acknowledge that what you'll hear from me is a combination of my own experiences as a lawyer, looking at clients, but also the ideas and thoughts of those I've been lucky enough to learn from, including Donna Coker, and Amy Kim, and John Petal, and others who are here in this room. But after two decades of work in the courts, on behalf of people subjected to abuse, I know you're all saying to yourself right now, she's so young, two decades, is that possible? I just want to make sure that you are awake after lunch. So thank you for that. Thanks for allowing me, I appreciate it. I come to believe that the United States legal system, and I should say my lens is necessarily a United States lens, notwithstanding the opportunities that some of you in this room have given me to study these issues in other places, but that the US legal system, and in particular, the criminal legal system, is not particularly effective in addressing gender-based harms. For those who want a purely retributive response, the system sometimes works. It works when a harm doer is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to something that roughly corresponds to what the injured person sees as just. But for many, many people, retributive justice does nothing to meet their goals. What they want is justice in some other form, economic or emotional, through voice or validation or vindication, and the criminal legal system is poorly suited to provide that sort of justice. And in achieving whatever justice it does provide, the criminal legal system does a tremendous amount of harm to victims, to offenders, and to communities. So over the last several years, I've started to think more broadly about what justice really means to those who've been harmed, and how we can achieve that justice. It isn't necessarily the most popular position in the feminist community, and so just in case you're not familiar with it, let me lay out briefly the feminist critique of using restorative justice to respond to gender-based harm. There are concerns that the process is unsafe, particularly for women when we bring together offenders and victims. There are concerns that offenders won't be held sufficiently accountable through restorative practices. There are concerns about the politics of gender and of race, and the idea that we are taking women's problems, and particularly the problems of women of color, and reprivatizing them after so many years of working as a movement to bring those problems into the public eye. In addition, feminists at least in the United States have expressed concern about whether restorative justice is sufficiently victim-centered, and whether it forces forgiveness on women who are not yet ready to forgive, or creates sufficient spaces for women to be able to express emotions like anger. So as a result, many feminists have as they all know that this morning thrown in their lot with the state, believing that the carceral system can and will deliver justice. I believe, though, that that feminist faith of the state, and particularly the carceral state, to enter into violence is problematic, at best, and misplaced at worst. The criminal legal system often does not hold those women's harm accountable, and women are not always safer when they turn to that system. And to achieve that limited safety and accountability, people who've been subjected to some form of harm must go through the adversarial justice system, a process about which psychologist Judith Herman notes, if one set out intentionally to design a system for provoking symptoms of traumatic stress, it might look very much like a court of law, and those of you who have taken clients through that process know how true this is, Judge talked about it this morning, that that is a difficult process, a damaging process. And so we really need to think, oftentimes I think if we think about kind of the best litigation or court best outcomes versus the worst restorative justice outcomes, and frankly some of us who are on the other side tend to do the same, right? We think about the best restorative outcomes versus the worst litigation outcomes. We need to be thoughtful and nuanced about what either of these systems can provide, and how we might best use them to our clients' advantages. I think that restorative justice offers us a radically different way, and I would argue a feminist way, to think about achieving justice for people who've been subjected to harm. First, restorative justice could, in fact, provide meaningful accountability in the aftermath of gender-based harm. Although holding offenders accountable is the main goal of criminal intervention, the relationship between the criminal legal system and the notion of accountability is a complicated one. On the one hand, factors of the system like the plea bargaining process provide incentives for admitting guilt, which I would argue is not the same as admitting responsibility or accepting responsibility. On the other hand, some of the bedrock principles of the criminal legal system, things like the right against self-incrimination, or the right to remain silent, or the presumption of innocence, create disincentives to ever accepting responsibility, and certainly set a tone going into the system that says, don't apologize, don't tell anyone what you've done, don't admit. And even after a finding of guilt, the notion of what constitutes accountability may be contested. I think the best place you can see this is in the recent sentencing of Brock Turner, the Stanford University swimmer who raped an unconscious woman. So Turner, as many of you will have heard, I would imagine, did that use crossover here? No way. I thought so. No way. He was six months imprisonment, which has led to a tremendous outcry in the United States about the judge's failure to sentence him to a longer term of imprisonment. And let me just say, I have two minds about this whole thing, and I think there's a lot of really interesting conversation that can be had about it. It's not clear to me that a longer term of imprisonment is the answer, except to acknowledge, of course, that it had been a Black or a Brown man who had done the same crime, that longer term of imprisonment probably would have been inevitable, but putting that to the side for a minute. The issue, I don't think, is so much with the length of his incarceration, but with his complete and utter failure to take any responsibility for his actions. So how do we get him to do that? I think a system that requires offenders to face the people that they harm, their victims, their families, their communities, might be more likely to give us that kind of accountability, right? And a system that promises reintegration upon acceptance of responsibility might be more likely to give us that kind of accountability. The restorative justice could help us change community norms around gender-based harms, which is something that we've been working for since the inception of the feminist movement, say, with questionable success. The early feminist movement believed that passing laws declaring violence against women a crime would begin to create this kind of change because those laws would assert the community's disapproval of bad behavior. But like you, we've had laws in most of the United States for at least the last 30 years and community norms have not changed as much as we would have hoped. Intimate partner violence and rape are still depressingly common in the United States. Sexual harassment in the workplace, on the street, and in education is widespread. Frankly, it is hard to find a woman who has not been subjected to some form of gender-based harm. And society still asks the kinds of questions that suggest that women are responsible for their victimization. How did she provoke her partner? What was she drinking? What was she wearing? Or we make excuses for men's behavior that kind of boys won't be boys typing. And I think relevant, in some cases, to the Dalhousie situation, the internet comments are harmless. What happens on the internet isn't really what happens in the real world as though that's not coming out of a culture of misogyny and gender-based harm that kind of reflects and then circles back on itself. I think that's a sign of our failure to fundamentally change community norms through law. So we have to figure out another way to do that. I think restorative justice might be by recapturing the community's responsibility to address those kinds of harms one way to go about that work. Restorative justice puts power into the hands of the person who's been harmed. That person decides whether the process is gonna take place, and what supporters shall have at the table. She can tell her story as she wishes, without the mediation of legal rules and norms. She can accept or decline in apology. She can ask for the reparations that will make her whole rather than having to take whatever it is that the legal system will offer. Restorative justice is empowering in ways that the criminal legal system with its restrictions on when and how victims can tell their stories and the relegation of the victim to a second class status in the process as a witness rather than a party can never be. Restorative justice honors the humanity of both the person who was harmed and the offender. And while Shane, as we talked about earlier today, is a key component of restorative responses, shaming and stigmatizing may simply produce more violence if those who offend feel that they've not been heard in the process. Shaming must be reintegrated, which is something again that the criminal legal system can't do. We have to move away from the stereotyping and demonizing of people who engage in gender-based harm and towards a world where we expressed disapproval for the act, but hope and trust in the person who commits it unless and until they show us that they are not worthy of our hope and our trust. Without such an approach, people who abuse may curtail some of their violence to avoid further criminal involvement, but they're unlikely to fundamentally change their behavior and preventing gender-based harm, changing those behaviors have always been at the core of feminist organizing. Restorative justice work in the context of gender-based harm has largely focused on the use of conferences, but conferences aren't the only way to bring the principles of restorative justice to those seeking redress. There is, in fact, a continuum as you all well know of restorative practices that we could offer, including victim-offended dialogues, post-eviction dialogues and community-based justice forums, somewhat similar to the truth commissions that many places are now engaging in. All of these practices create space for victims of harm to be heard and for individuals and communities and institutions and systems to be held accountable for their failed failure to recognize and remedy gender-based harms. And all of these practices engage the community in supporting victims of harm and thinking about how to change the norms that enable violence against women to continue to flourish. The goal of these practices at court is societal reconstruction, challenging community complicity and acceptance of gender-based harm, creating community norms that reject such harms and conceptualizing the pursuit of justice as the right of the individual subjected to harm rather than the responsibility of the larger society. That's why restorative justice is a feminist project. It's a grassroots victim-centered space in which you can challenge not just the attitudes and responsibilities of individuals, but of the community and of systemic institutions as well. Do we know that any of this will work? No. Cameron pointed out in the context of an incident at partner violence the bar for success at this point is pretty low. Since there is no evidence that standard justice is any more effective than doing nothing in response to an incident of domestic violence, the only challenge to restorative justice is to do better than doing nothing. And I think most importantly, I think for my particular project, the stories of the women students at Dalhousie and the male students at Dalhousie who went through that process successfully suggest that there is good reason to believe that restorative justice is much better than nothing. So are there limitations? You know, absolutely. The requirement that an offenders take responsibility for before engaging in restorative practices is gonna mean that cases are gonna get screened out. And it's important not to jettison those kinds of requirements of restorative justice in order to bring in a greater number of cases. We need to stay true to the really core principles that make restorative justice what it is. Restorative justice is not gonna meet the justice goals of some people subjected to gender-based harms. It'll be difficult to scale up and there's danger anytime we take a great idea, a beautiful idea, to scale and make it part of a system that operates in a systemic fashion and churns lots and lots of cases through that system. You know, we have to be careful to protect what we have in this practice, this idea, and not lose what makes it unique and special. Nonetheless, there is an important role for restorative justice to play in a feminist response to gender-based harms. The charge then for those of us who study these issues and worry about just how badly this could all go, if these processes are initiated by those who are not sensitive to the issues or not eligible about the issues, is to create and to cultivate and to evaluate such practices ourselves. God put our money where I'm at this, right? Until, less than until we do that, we'll continue to encounter the resistance that says, this can't be a feminist project. And until we do that, people subjected to gender-based harms will not have any choice but to seek justice through the criminal legal system or to not seek justice at all. Thank you.