If your child got into a fight with a friend or kicked down a door, would you call the police? I wouldn’t. I’d be angry, of course. And worried. But I wouldn’t be calling 999. For children living in care homes, though, this is too often the outcome of an incident that in a family home would be dealt with informally. As a result, looked after children and young people, an already vulnerable and marginalised group, are dragged into the criminal justice system.
Yesterday, a young woman called Ione Wells took the courageous step of waiving her anonymity to publish an open letter to the man who sexually assaulted her. The letter powerfully and eloquently expresses her outrage at the attack and confronts the anonymous offender with questions about the effect of his actions.
The Restorative Justice Council commissioned researchers at the Hallam Centre for Community Justice at Sheffield Hallam University to undertake a national restorative justice mapping project which aimed to provide a snapshot of restorative justice provision across England and Wales. A restorative justice mapping exercise has never before taken place on a national scale and this is therefore the first time we have been able to provide a picture of provision across the country.
Are you interested in supporting victims of crime and their families? Could you facilitate at Restorative Youth Caution meetings between young offenders and their victims at police stations across Kent. The Restorative Justice Service is a provision delivered jointly by Salus and Restorative Solutions. This service brings together Kent County Council’s Integrated Youth Services, Kent Police and Kent Probation to provide improved services to victims of crime in Kent and Medway.
It’s only a few weeks until the general election and, as always at general election time, there are opportunities now and in the next couple of months to promote new ideas that could reshape the policy environment. This will be harder to achieve once the daily grind of government sets in for whichever party or parties are successful in May.
The exhibition, Never throw out anyone, opens today at City Hall, London. It shows the restorative community reparation work done by young people who have offended and been supported by youth offending services across London and the Surrey Youth Support Service.
The latest evaluation of the youth conferencing restorative justice process in Northern Ireland has confirmed what previous studies have shown: that restorative justice is an effective way to deal with youth offending.
An evaluation of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) restorative justice capacity building programme has been published. The 27 month programme, delivered by Restorative Solutions, aimed to increase provision of restorative justice within the prison and probation service through a large training programme for staff.
I’ve been working for the RJC for almost a year now and there’s one question that I’ve been asked more often than any other in that time, by everyone from members of my family to members of parliament: ‘What is restorative justice?’
For somebody like me, immersed in the justice system, giving a long, detailed and highly technical answer is the easy way out. I can describe the minutiae with the best of them. But that approach won’t work with people who are, let’s face it, just being polite.
