Child Victims and Restorative Justice: A Needs-Rights Model

Abstract

This book comes garlanded with praise from experts in, and advocates of, restorative justice (RJ). Not least amongst those exponents is the most renowned and honoured academic in the RJ field, John Braithwaite (1985). It is potentially an important book, since it represents an advance in terms of the rigour of its arguments and the clarity of its purposes over much writing on children's rights and child victimisation. That said, it is not an easy read. In many ways, this is a challenging book, not least in the paradigmatic change surrounding children we are invited to explore by the author. This is also a dense text in terms of both its physicality (i.e. the font size is small and the pages closely packed) and its theoretical weight. It is certainly the most intellectually systematic and wide-ranging account of childhood victimisation and the responses to childhood victimisation, particularly with regard to the weakness of the current criminal justice system, that I have read. This powerful and thoughtful inter-disciplinary review is combined with an exploration of the tenets of RJ and uses a needs/rights model to demonstrate the challenges to RJ involving child victims (including cases of child sexual abuse that the author describes as a ‘special case warranting special consideration’) and its potential benefits for them.