Restorative Justice for Severe Harm: Creating a Trauma-informed Practice

Arti is working as the Restorative Justice Fellow at Counsel to Secure Justice, New Delhi, India and is involved in designing Counsel to Secure Justice’s pilot restorative justice project for youth involved in lower level offences.

Restorative Justice's benefits for addressing severe harm have been recognized, even to the extent of therapeutic impact. On exploring the intersection of restorative justice and trauma informed practice, it becomes evident that restorative justice principles are fundamentally in consonance with trauma informed principles: Restorative Justice processes aim to offer a safe environment, enable voluntariness and choice, and prescribe safeguards to deal with harm which may be caused during the process. At the same time, recommendations ensuing from the use of restorative justice in severe crimes suggest that, in order to properly address the harms caused by severe crimes, justice agencies should seek to utilize explicitly trauma-informed restorative practices.

This presentation explores how trauma informed practice can help better realize the aims of restorative justice by:

- Understanding the implications of trauma;

- Addressing trauma triggers;

- Reducing chances of re-traumatization;

- Accounting for the impact of one person's trauma on participants, facilitators and the process; and

- Maximizing the potential of healing.

Arti has rich experiences in both law and Restorative Justice. As a practitioner that has worked with both victims and offenders, her sharing is going to provide us insight into helping trauma victims and perpetrators. She will also share will share specific frameworks and tools that can be used for creating a trauma informed restorative practice.

While a fully trauma-driven response may be un-achievable, the acknowledgement of the pervasiveness of trauma and the challenges that it presents can serve as a means of minimizing harm and providing more effective healing mechanisms to those who have been affected by severe harm.

The proposed presentation is the product of an independent study supervised by Dr. Frida Rundell of the IIRP and is based on a handbook we are creating for Trauma-informed Restorative Justice practices.

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