"The Inherent Feminism of Restorative Justice"

"More typically, my Socratic method exchanges were as follows. My teacher would ask me whether I agreed with a court opinion. I’d answer the best I could. The professor would play opposing counsel and retort with a “But what about x, y, or z?” My instinct was always to listen, to hear their point, to say, “Oh, right, I hadn’t thought about that” (particularly because they were a fucking law professor, and I was 23).

But my instinct to compromise, I soon learned, should be suppressed if I wanted to be a lawyer. Instead of hearing the other side, I was supposed to stick with my initial position and defend it to the death. The law is inherently adversarial. Each person has a side from which he must not falter. This is how the court arrives at the “correct answer,” we were taught....

while working in family court, she noticed that her clients were all facing serious economic, social, and educational hardships but were not given a process to understand how their behavior harmed others and themselves. “They were overwhelmed with the harm they were suffering personally,” Walker told me, “and to be punished only made them feel worse.” While participants in the adversarial system often feel deeply violated, she complained, their emotions are not part of a criminal prosecution. Walker began to realize that the criminal justice system was creating harmful outcomes for the most vulnerable populations...

This January, Sara Davidson wrote for the Los Angeles Times that criminal accountability is difficult in the realm of sexual assault “because we’re dealing with the intricacies and contradictions of the heart, and with the deep and often treacherous river of sexual urges.” She believes the #MeToo movement has not sufficiently grappled with this nuance. Anne K. Ream similarly wrote for the Chicago Tribune that because 80 percent of sexual assault cases involve victims who personally know their perpetrators, it’s time to look to restorative justice to redress sex crimes. This means implementing a system that focuses on perpetrator accountability to the victim and community rather than criminal punishment."

https://medium.com/s/all-rise/the-inherent-feminism-of-restorative-justice-71eca6fa9f42

FB: "criminal justice scholar Katherine van Wormer lamented in 2009 that the adversarial system hearkens back to “primitive practices related to combat”; Australian professor and former attorney Kate Galloway called it a “performance piece.”