Listening to Victims—A Critique of Restorative Justice Policy and Practice in the United States

FOR AT LEAST the past 25 years, the victim role in criminal justice has been debated in theory and contested in practice. Of particular significance to proponents of restorative justice is Christie's (1977) assertion that conflict is the "property" of the victim. Normatively then, victims should assume a central role in justice responses to crime and anti-social behavior. But empirically, have they? Elias (1992; 1993) rather emphatically makes the case that they have not: the use and abuse of victims, he claims, is the stock and trade of the U.S. justice system. A very different response to the prospect or the reality of a central victim role suggests just as emphatically that they should not. A recent iteration of this view (Ashworth, 2002) argues several familiar "points of principle" that would circumscribe or circumvent a victim role, including the limited legitimate interest of victims in compensation and reparation, and the "risk" that victim participation and prejudice threatens proportionality (the direct and unfettered link of the sentence to the seriousness of the offence) and undermines the independence of tribunals, courts and conferences. More critical considerations range from the impact of research and policy initiatives on the status of victims within the criminal justice system (Mawby and Walklake, 1994; Lamb, 1996) to focused consideration of advantages of informal versus conventional justice responses for victims of crime (Strang, 2002). This paper, and the research it describes, seeks to address the conjecture about the victim role in restorative justice policy and practice in the United States. Minimally, it attempts to encumber the debate with evidence, by taking the elemental step of listening to what victims and their advocates have to say.