A major Australian Institute of Criminology evaluation shows restorative justice in the ACT has improved victim wellbeing and significantly reduced reoffending in domestic and sexual violence cases.

The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) was a global leader in extending restorative justice into the fraught area of domestic and sexual violence – and it has resoundingly worked.

A comprehensive Australian Institute of Criminology research report has found victims felt better supported, perpetrators learned that victims are not to blame and – most importantly – the frequency of re-offending has dropped.

Principal research analyst Dr Siobhan Lawler gave the annual McAulay Oration to the ACT Chapter of the Australian Academy of Forensic Sciences on 27 November – and the results were clear:

• Improved feelings of safety, support and wellbeing for persons harmed;
• Improved understanding that the violence is not acceptable and is serious for persons harmed and persons responsible;
• Improved understanding by the persons responsible of the impact of their behaviour and that the person harmed is not to blame; and
• Decreased re-offending by the person responsible (both during the lead-up to the conference with the victim and post-conference.)

The report declared that, in the almost four years to August 2022, 162 cases, involving 208 persons harmed and 165 persons responsible, had been referred to the extended program. Most common among them was family violence (including child abuse and child-to-parent violence) at 60 per cent, followed by intimate-partner violence at 36 per cent.

One in four participants (numbers were the same for persons harmed and perpetrators) referred to the scheme were found suitable to participate in a conference.

The report said, “Interviews identified that persons harmed were motivated to take part … to confront the person responsible in a safe setting and have their experiences to encourage the person responsible to get help or give back to the community and to try to make sure that the person responsible would not reoffend.”

Often, victims wanted nothing more than information, some insight into why the perpetrator had acted as they had.

It was the re-offending findings that were most startling: “All the persons responsible who completed a post-conference survey agreed or strongly agreed that, because of the conference, they were committed to not offending again; they understood how their actions affected people; and they felt that they could move forwards.

“Further, the recidivism analysis found that adult persons responsible who participated … had a lower rate of domestic or family violence reoffending than a matched control comparison group.”

One can only hope that such findings, so comprehensively made after an exhaustive study by Dr Lawler, Hayley Boxall and Christopher Dowling, are noticed by the law-and-order forces in our parliaments, who think that ever longer prison sentences are the only answer.

The report is a ground-breaker.

“To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available process and outcome evaluation of an RJ program for both DFV [Domestic and Family Violence] and sexual violence in Australia,” they wrote. “The evaluation found that [the ACT’s 2018 extension of RJ] provided an important mechanism enabling persons harmed to seek redress in the aftermath of … victimisation and persons responsible to address the factors associated with their offending.”

However, further investment and support were required. The report made 10 recommendations, including, most importantly in my view, that the perceptions that RJ is “soft justice” should be challenged and addressed among referring entities.

It is certainly the case that many offenders would prefer to rock up to the traditional, familiar, somewhat impersonal courtroom, rather than have to face their victims. But the value from having the guts to enter a conference is clear.

One offender said: “I learnt more about these sorts of cases and how victims can be affected by it.

“I hope that I never truly have to know how it affects them, but it does feel better to know just a little bit. I got definitely more understanding about these sorts of situations and the effects that they have on people.”

Critically, this person had been made to look to the future.

“This entire process has been very eye-opening, it made me a lot more careful about my actions [and] a lot more careful knowing the impact it has on people. I guess I have just become a lot more careful and a lot more of, I guess, a better person. If that makes sense. And I do feel like I am a lot more sympathetic, a lot more cautious with my actions than I was before the whole process.”

The final component of the evaluation focused on the impact of the scheme on reoffending. This analysis was informed by interviews with persons harmed, persons responsible and support persons; post-conference surveys completed by persons responsible; and analysis of administrative data from ACT Policing and Corrections extracted for persons responsible referred to RJ and a matched control group.

“The inclusion of reduced recidivism as a goal of RJ processes is controversial, partly because the prevention of recidivism is a goal closely aligned with traditional criminal justice,” the report noted. “However, numerous researchers have noted the potential impact of RJ on desistance processes, but as a ‘happy side-effect’ …

“One of the reasons why persons harmed chose to participate in the scheme was to prevent the person responsible from being violent towards them, or anyone else, in the future. Some persons harmed thus viewed reduced recidivism as a victim-centred justice goal.”

The frequency of recidivist offences was significantly lower in the RJ group than the comparison group: “the estimated average number of recidivist offences is 0.47 lower for [RJ] perpetrators than it is for those in the comparison group.

“This represents a 52 per cent difference in the estimated average number of recidivist offences…

“Perpetrators referred to [RJ], on average, have around half the number of recidivist offences as those in the comparison group. The estimated average number of recidivist offences is 0.57 lower for [RJ] perpetrators than it is for those in the comparison group [a 59 per cent difference].”

Sadly, this was the case only for adult perpetrators, with RJ appearing not to have had a significant impact on DFV and sexual violence recidivism for young perpetrators.

But, the report noted, “Importantly, these findings should not be taken as suggesting that [RJ] referral has a criminogenic effect for young perpetrators, because there were no significant differences in recidivism between young perpetrators who were and were not referred …

“Critically, it is probable that a larger proportion of young perpetrators were referred to [RJ] for violence against their family members (ie parents, siblings, extended family), while a larger proportion of adult perpetrators were referred for violence against current or former intimate partners. If this is so, one could expect many young perpetrators to continue to have contact with their victims in homes within which their offences occurred, while adult perpetrators are arguably more likely to have been subjected to family-violence orders and other legal and informal measures to keep them separated from their victims and their families.”