“Anybody who knows me knows that I hate an injustice,” begins Ashley Scotland, the founder of a small charity in Glasgow that supports survivors of trauma. She is addressing an online audience of around 50 people in mid-May. Many have heard Scotland speak before. But word of her work has travelled, and some first-time listeners have logged on from Australia and the United States. In a talk that explores the power of resistance and the meaning of justice itself, they hear how the 39-year-old ventured into the field of restorative justice for cases of sexual violence, a service that dozens warned her was too risky.
Scotland, herself a survivor of trauma, tends to see solutions where others might see barbed wire fences. In 2016 she started her charity, Thriving Survivors, after her own experiences left her determined to create a recovery system that put the individual needs of abuse survivors centre-stage through counselling and mentoring programmes. When she encountered a shortfall in funding, she launched a Kickstarter campaign, appealing directly to Glaswegians. Scotland said she would oversee multiple support groups herself before she turned anyone away.
Four years later, her organisation, staffed largely by survivors of abuse, was helping dozens of people every week. At a survivors’ meeting she chaired in 2020, someone mentioned restorative justice. Scotland didn’t then know much about it. But when she was told that the service was ruled out as too dangerous for survivors of sexual or domestic violence, this struck her as unfair. She went “back into that survival instinct”, she later told a focus group, triggered by the feeling that a choice was being denied to all the women that flowed through her centre and others like it. “That fire in my belly was well and truly lit. And I suppose I just left that meeting feeling like I had to know more. So I went away. I did my research.”
There’s no single definition of restorative justice, or RJ as it’s known in the field. But practitioners generally agree that it’s about supporting a dialogue between the victim of a crime (or a victim’s family member, in cases of murder) and the offender. It relies on the perpetrator taking responsibility for the offence. By addressing the harm directly, it aims to help those involved move forwards. The term itself was coined in North America during the 1970s, though the approach has far older roots in Native American, Māori and other indigenous communities. In the UK, it has been used formally for all sorts of offences since about 1980, from theft and bullying to hate crimes and murder. But some crimes—namely, sexual or domestic violence—have typically been avoided because of the specific challenges they pose.
Scotland’s response to this status quo was characteristically bold and methodical.
Within weeks of chairing that pivotal meeting, she set up an appointment with a Scottish government adviser on RJ and proposed a solution: a nationwide consultation to find out what survivors themselves thought. Over the next three months, she led the rollout of a questionnaire, focus groups, Facebook Live panels and a punchy social media information campaign in search of views on a subject that was about to storm out of the shadows.
Among the first details Lindsey Prosser* recalls about the day she was raped in June 1996 is that it was “red hot”, one of the warmest evenings in England that year. At some point during the night, her five-year-old son climbed into her bed. “It was so hot I put him back in his own bed,” she says. “It had been a really unsettled night in all.” Earlier that evening, her neighbour had popped around while she was doing the ironing. They chatted over cups of coffee. Her son and eight-year-old daughter were already asleep, so when the two women heard the front door creak they went to check. “The door was closed and we laughed it off that we were hearing things.” Half an hour later, Prosser let her friend out, waiting at the doorstep until she saw her enter her home. She bolted the front door shut and after some more chores went up to bed. “The next thing I know is I’m being turned onto my front. And I couldn’t think what the hell was happening,” she says. “I looked and there was a man wearing a balaclava at the end of the bed.”
Prosser reported the rape at her local police station that night. The next day, she moved into her sister’s spare room, sleeping on a sofa bed with her children either side. She searched for a new flat on the other side of town and appealed for new primary school spaces. Two weeks later, she learned that her son had seen the attack. “I became a shadow of who I was,” she says. “And I can’t even remember who that girl was. I’m sure she was okay and I’m sure I would have liked her. But instantly, overnight, everything changed.” After nine months, the police closed the investigation into her case.
Thriving Survivors began hosting panels on RJ for sexual or domestic violence during the third national Covid-19 lockdown. Although Holyrood had already committed to rolling out restorative services by 2023, it shared reservations, like other parts of the UK, about extending it to the most serious crimes. “If we don’t have the conversation, if we continue to avoid it, then we’ll never know what the questions are. We’ll never have any answers,” Scotland said at the opening online session in February 2021. By then she knew the biggest resistance to the service didn’t come from the Scottish government but from other women’s aid groups. “We don’t want loggerheads and stalemates. We want to actually move forward with this,” she said, “with us all singing from the same page.”
RJ sceptics, who were also invited to the events, raised their worries about revictimisation—putting survivors back into a potentially harmful situation. At one meeting, Pam Hunter, the CEO of SAY Women, put it this way: “How you can control, in a restorative justice conversation, what is going to come out of somebody’s mouth I don’t know… My job is to protect our young women. My job is to make sure that their recovery is independent” of such risks. The panels were often tense.
Survivors have to have the right to say, ‘Can I consider this?’
Estelle Zinsstag, a criminology lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, has spent 20 years studying restorative justice and how it can help survivors of sexual violence. When she joined the Scottish government’s RJ stakeholder group, she already knew the kind of opposition they might confront. Even still, “the constant lobbying, the sometimes personal attacks—it has been really challenging at times”, she says.
“If you asked someone on the street, ‘Should a survivor meet their perpetrator in a case of sexual violence?’, any normal person would say, ‘No, that’s crazy.’ But if you understand how safe a practice it can be and what the process can do for survivors, then it has to become a choice,” she adds. In 2022, Zinsstag authored a pioneering study—the culmination of a decade of research—with fellow academic Marie Keenan on how RJ was being used in sexual violence cases around the world. It found that “the practice was much more developed than anybody actually believed” while still being largely “under the radar”, even in countries, such as Spain, where RJ isn’t permitted for cases of sexual violence. Practitioners told Zinsstag and Keenan, “We can’t turn people down… It might not be appropriate and then we don’t go forward. But survivors have to have the right to say, ‘Can I consider this?’ It’s a part of their recovery.” Zinsstag found in case after case that RJ offered survivors who were stripped of power something the criminal justice system alone did not: a chance to claim some of that power back.
The success of RJ, particularly for the most serious crimes, lies in the months and sometimes years of groundwork that facilitators put in before a meeting between the harmed and harming parties, which is known as a conference. The process, mostly initiated by survivors, has to be voluntary for all involved. Even then, not every request will move forwards: some cases are deemed too high-risk, though they could be re-evaluated in the future.
For those that proceed, there’s no one way to deliver RJ. “It’s a step-by-step, case-by-case approach,” says Gemma Fraser, the head of restorative justice and recovery at the Edinburgh-based Community Justice Scotland, which has been helping the Scottish government deliver RJ services together with partners such as Thriving Survivors. “It isn’t an apology, it isn’t forgiveness, and there’s no requirement for any of those things. That’s personal and sometimes happens years and years later, if at all,” she says. “It’s the questions left unanswered. The ‘Why me?’ questions. The when, the how, the what. The ability to get those answers that potentially you wouldn’t be able to in court.”
In 2009, Prosser was at work when a colleague passed her the local paper, pointing to a story about a man who had been arrested for a rape that took place 19 years earlier. The details leapt out: he had broken into a stranger’s house and disconnected the phone wire (in her case, it was the answering machine) in the same town where she was raped. Prosser remembers scanning the article to see if there was mention of a balaclava. That same day, her colleague, a former police officer, called his friend at the local cold case unit; it turned out that the team was about to contact Prosser themselves.
Her case was reopened. After seven months of investigations, which produced a DNA match, police charged the same man for also raping Prosser in 1996. The offender, now in his seventies, pleaded guilty in both cases; a year later he was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Prosser’s was now among the 1 per cent of reported rape cases in England and Wales that end in a conviction—a statistic that fails to take into account all the assaults left unreported.
Prosser remembers how her family and friends jumped up in the courtroom when they heard the prison term. Her own feelings were more conflicted. “I wanted him to serve his sentence,” she says. But “as they were taking him away, I wanted to shout ‘Stop!’… I wanted me and him to sit in a room and sort this out.”
Unlike most sexual assault survivors, Prosser already knew a lot about restorative justice by the time her rapist was sentenced. That same week, she had completed training as a restorative justice facilitator. What she didn’t know was that it would be another seven years before she got the chance to even attempt that process.
This is about healing harm. It’s not about addressing crime
One of the biggest barriers to accessing RJ is a lack of awareness that it exists in the first place, says Keeva Baxter, the campaigns manager for Why me?, a charity founded in 2009 by two men who’d engaged in a restorative meeting after a burglary in London. This spring, the group ran a national billboard campaign to tell more victims of crime that they too had a right to seek RJ. The blazing ads—placed alongside motorways, outside police stations and at bus stops—represented a growing momentum among RJ networks to propel the service into the public eye. Another group, Restorative Justice for All, lobbied to have RJ included in the Westminster government’s Victims and Prisoners Act for England and Wales. It didn’t make it into the recently passed law, but the organisation raised the profile of the service and won a public commitment to have the right to RJ reinforced UK-wide through the Victims’ Code and in providing guidance to criminal justice agencies.
Last year, Baxter began leading a Why me? project focused on domestic or sexual violence survivors, who face greater barriers to accessing RJ than victims of other crimes. Under the victims’ codes of the UK’s various jurisdictions, the service must be offered to all, but the reality, she says, is “a postcode lottery” that often comes down to the relationships between local RJ providers and criminal justice services. In Prosser’s case, the biggest battle was against those she called “the gatekeepers”. Because she already worked in services allied to criminal justice, she had a head-start in navigating the system. But at one point, she was accused of stalking her attacker. “I was told I would never get to meet him,” she says. Many would have given up, but she decided to try for a final time when she heard he was due to be released on parole. She credits one group, Restorative Solutions, for turning a long line of nos into an unexpected yes.
In May 2022, Holyrood announced that it would launch an RJ hub run by specialists in Glasgow for survivors of sexual or domestic assault, led by Thriving Survivors. Dozens of women had been in touch with the organisation since Ashley Scotland’s consultation, which concluded there was demand for such a service. What until then had been a relatively low-key and fragmented RJ practice in other parts of the UK grabbed national headlines.
Only not everyone was on board. By September, 30 women’s aid groups and 26 gender-based-violence experts presented an open letter urging the Scottish government to withdraw domestic or sexual violence from its RJ purview. They pointed to the risks of coercive control and further harm, particularly in cases where perpetrators were known to survivors. They also questioned the speed of the rollout. Among the objectors were some of Scotland’s oldest and most influential feminist organisations. By banding together, they were successful in putting the government’s plans on pause.
Two years on, Isabelle Kerr, the CEO of the women’s support service Beira’s Place and one of the letter’s signatories, says she maintains the same concerns. She also raises a broader fear—one that critics of RJ commonly state, and which proponents of RJ say contributes to misconceptions: that restorative justice will push cases of sexual or domestic violence out of the courts. In some parts of the UK, such as Northern Ireland, RJ has been used to divert young people from prison for less serious crimes.
But experts say that, for offences such as sexual violence, it is predominantly used after sentencing and when an offender is in prison. “It’s not an alternative to something that needs to be in a criminal justice system,” says Community Justice Scotland’s Fraser. “If it needs a crime response, that’s what it gets. This is about healing harm. It’s not about addressing crime.” Yet despite the assurances, Kerr worries about the longer-term implications. “It could start out with very, very good intentions,” she says. “But I’d be really concerned that restorative justice would then be used as an alternative to custody” in order to tackle challenges such as overcrowding in prisons. She also has reservations about putting resources into a service that she expects will “have a very low uptake”.
There were a few main questions Prosser wanted answered: “Did he get in my house when I heard him, and where did he hide? I think he’d hid under the stairs. Did he see my little boy standing in the doorway watching him assault his mother? And had he ever seen me since?” Tying them together was a need to hear him take responsibility: “I needed him to say, ‘Yes it was me. It was me in your house that night, in a balaclava. I terrorised you.’”
Ahead of the conference, the RJ facilitators raked through the different eventualities, like chess players. They talked about what Prosser would wear on the day of the meeting (she bought a “hideous pink-checked shirt” to throw away afterwards). They swapped out the narrow table for a bigger one, to ensure there was no chance of the offender stretching out his legs and touching hers. They set ground rules: whatever happened, Prosser wanted to be the first one to leave the room. “He doesn’t get to walk away from me again,” she told them.
“We didn’t just have an A, B, C scenario,” she says. “We had the entire alphabet.”
It’s the questions left unanswered. The ‘Why me?’ questions
The Scottish government’s pilot RJ programme—some of it delivered by Thriving Survivors and Community Justice Scotland—is now under way. Sexual or domestic violence cases remain excluded, but are not ruled out for the future. “We remain committed to developing a national service of restorative justice to all those who wish to access [it],” said a government spokesperson, while “ensuring services are safe” and “without risk of victims being re-traumatised”—language that echoes the concerns raised by Scottish women’s groups. The spokesperson added the government was “building up experience among facilitators” to support RJ in “more sensitive cases, such as those involving sexual harm and domestic abuse”.
Where the government paused, Ashley Scotland’s Thriving Survivors has powered forwards. She told the online panel that her team had secured funding from another organisation to pursue these more sensitive cases. They’ve received no domestic assault referrals but are facilitating a few that involve sexual harm. None have so far led to a face-to-face conference, which despite being the best-known outcome of restorative justice is not always its end result. For some people, an indirect approach might work better—such as letter writing or a video meeting. At times, people get halfway through the process and decide it has already addressed what they sought to achieve.
“There was such resistance and pushback to what we were trying to do that, actually, it created a space in Scotland for us to be able to, I suppose, take advantage of the noise,” Scotland said in answer to a question from the audience. Thriving Survivors has recently been fielding inquiries from as far as Germany, Ireland, Australia and the United States. “Of course, we are unable to respond to some of those that come in internationally,” she said. “But watch this space, is what I would say.”
The day before the conference, Prosser told her facilitators that she didn’t care if the offender didn’t show up. “I’ve been incredibly brave, and this is empowering,” she said. On the morning itself, she thought: “he’d better be in that room.”
Her first reaction, when he entered, was shock: “I can remember looking at him and thinking, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ It was this old man of about five foot four. Really small in stature. And I thought: ‘My god, I have been terrified of you for 21 years.’” He described the events that led to his breaking into her house, his heroin-addicted daughter, his initial intention to rob her and leave. None of what he said mattered, Prosser explained. The meeting was about what she wanted to tell him: “I needed him to know the extent of the damage and the extent of the people that it hurt… The fact that he didn’t break us… The fact that he had to take responsibility. Nowhere else did that really happen. It was about validation.”
She walked out of the room first. “I can remember coming out of the prison 10 foot tall and bulletproof. That’s how I described it to everybody and how I still describe it. It was this feeling of euphoria that I thought would pass and it never did,” she says. Every night since the attack, Prosser had slept with her bedroom light on. “That night, I came home and slept in the dark,” she says, “and I’ve never slept with the light on since.”
*Not her real name
