Increasing Gender Inequality or Balancing Social Relations: Restorative Justice as an Intimate Partner Violence Intervention

The traditional approaches for intimate partner violence intervention tend to ignore issues of social justice, including conflict resolution and the need for increased competencies within group relations, yielding unsatisfying results as this problem continues to be endemic across the globe. For a solution to repeated IPV victimization to be possible, alternative approaches are needed. One such approach that specifically applies and tests the tenants of social justice to IPV intervention is restorative justice conferencing between victims and offenders. However, restorative justice, a practice more common in other parts of the world, has been banned in some regions for cases of IPV with articulated concern that it might increase risk given the innate inequality that contributes to gendered violence. However, others argue that restorative justice can balance social relationships within families and communities yielding favorable outcomes. Though rare, the application of restorative justice for IPV exists in the United States and elsewhere suggesting that our work continues to explore the strengths and weaknesses of this intervention. This exploratory study is first known to focus on identifying and examining the only five programs in the United States that apply restorative justice in response to IPV. In-depth qualitative and two-year follow-up interviews reveal that these programs consider the external criticisms and have identified means of providing resources to both victim and perpetrator while insuring safety and reducing re-victimization. This study also identified that the primary barriers to this approach for IPV intervention include lack of funding and knowledge, by others, about the process.