Crime without punishment: can a different kind of justice offer something more to sexual assault survivors?

The Guardian

06-02-2025

One evening in her parents' home in New Zealand in 1993, Shirley Jülich told her father something she had kept secret from him for her whole life.
Jülich revealed to her father that she had been a victim of sexual assault by a man known to the family. Decades before. Her brother revealed the same. Their father, a police officer, did not waste any time.
'My father just said, 'OK we'll have a meeting tomorrow morning,'' she recalls. He called on people in the family network to gather the next day. He called the man who had allegedly hurt his children. He said, Jülich remembers, ''I will ring him up and I will tell him to be here at 10.15.''
'And I thought, he won't come, he won't come,' she says.
But he did.
The next morning the man, his wife, Jülich and other family members sat in her parents' lounge room. Her mother and father sat together. Jülich sat opposite them, next to her husband, feeling nervous. Not knowing what to expect. Her father chaired the meeting. He called it a 'confrontation meeting'.
Jülich, now 75, remembers her father turned to the man. 'He said, 'I'm going to allow you to speak and then I'm going to ask your victims to speak,'' Jülich recalls. 'And so we all had a turn of saying what had happened and how it had affected us.'
She says the man admitted to assaulting Jülich and her brother, and that he apologised to Jülich's parents.
'It was so validating to hear him say yes he did that,' she says.
When her father wrapped up the meeting, he asked if everyone had their say. 'Do you want to say anything more to the offender?' he asked.
'And I said [to the man], 'I'm going to ask you to leave the house now,'' Jülich recalls. ''Your wife can stay and have a cup of tea.''
Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email
She and her brother would go on to seek legal redress, but it was that morning in her parents' lounge room, the confrontation that she had not expected, the meeting where her alleged abuser owned up to what he had done to her and her brother, 'that was the process that gave me a real sense of justice', she says.
For Jülich, that morning also represented the start of something that would shape the course of her life and work for the next three decades.
As she began researching ways to transmute the type of meeting her father had held in their living room into something with structure and safety for sexual assault survivors, she says: 'I just kept thinking, this has got to be way better than anything else we've got.'
More than 30 years after that morning, Jülich speaks to Guardian Australia from her office in Auckland. Since that 'confrontation meeting' in her parents' lounge room, Jülich has gone on to become an associate professor, specialising in restorative justice. She also became a founding member of what many say is the gold standard in restorative justice for sexual assault in the world: New Zealand's Project Restore. And in the years between that lounge room morning and today, conversations about sexual assault, and whether restorative justice might be a safe, effective and just response to it, have shifted.
Restorative justice can be a difficult concept to define. It takes different shapes the world over. But, in essence, it is a flexible, victim-survivor-led process which brings two parties together – one, the person harmed, the other, the person who caused the harm – facilitated by professionals, in which the act of harm, its causes and consequences are explored. It is a process, in short, in which the person who caused harm is asked to face the person they hurt, and answer to them.
Australia is having a reckoning with sexual violence, and the failure of the criminal courts system to adequately hold offenders to account or not re-traumatise victim-survivors. Fewer than one in 10 women who experience sexual assault in Australia contact police. In May last year, the New South Wales justice department revealed that just 7% of sexual assaults reported to police resulted in criminal conviction in that state. This chasm between crime and consequence is known as the 'justice gap'. Even when complainants receive a guilty verdict in their case, a 2023 report found that those working in the system in NSW questioned the value of a trial, given the often traumatising impact of the process on the complainant. Which leaves many with a question: what kind of justice is that?
For many, improving the experience and the quality of criminal trials for sexual assault complainants is the best way to improve justice outcomes. But for others, alongside improving the criminal courts is an emphasis on providing a suite of options for victim-survivors. That includes the criminal system, but also improving avenues for civil courts and access to restorative justice.
It is being considered within the current Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into sexual assault justice responses, the 2021 Victorian Law Reform Commission recommended restorative justice be made available as one of various options to victim-survivors, the Greens have pledged to fund a pilot program and in 2022 the Queensland government committed to exploring options for adult restorative justice in cases of sexual violence in its response to the Women's Safety and Justice Taskforce report, noting that 'restorative justice places victims at the centre of the criminal justice process'.
The idea that the shape of justice could be malleable, that it might look like different things for different people is what is at play in restorative justice. It asks the question: what is the purpose of justice? And who is it for?
'It's really been in direct response to victim-survivors themselves and what they need,' says Meredith Rossner, professor of criminology at the Australian National University. 'A real recognition of, well, who gets to decide what someone's justice path is?'
Over recent decades, more attention has been paid to the needs of people who have experienced sexual assault, and the paths – or justice – that are important to them. Griffith University's Prof Kathleen Daly has identified five justice needs of victim-survivors of sexual assault: participation, voice, validation, vindication, and the offender taking responsibility and accepting accountability. Other research has identified information, validation, voice and control as needs.
And this is where, some argue, restorative justice may have something to offer.
Researchers and practitioners speaking to Guardian Australia are insistent that restorative justice is not for everybody. Not for every victim, not for every perpetrator. But what it does offer is another way of thinking about justice.
The meeting in Shirley Jülich's parents' lounge room was not a restorative justice process. It did, however, have the blurry outline of the restorative justice processes that Jülich would go on to develop over her career.
Project Restore, which began in 2005, is one of a small number of restorative justice programs which now address sexual assault as a crime. Whereas Jülich's father called their meeting at less than a day's notice, at Project Restore the process takes months. During that time, a survivor specialist works with the person hurt by sexual violence, and an accountability specialist works with the person who caused harm; each trained in the dynamics of sexual violence and each supporting the individual to understand the harm, the consequences and what they want to achieve through a restorative justice process. A third person facilitates any coming together. The form the process and its culmination takes is led by the victim-survivor; it may end with a face-to-face meeting, an exchange of letters, or a meeting by proxy.
In Melbourne, Open Circle – part of the Centre for Innovative Justice at RMIT – has been running since 2019. In 2018 the ACT government's Restorative Justice Unit began accepting cases of family and sexual violence. Their own models differ slightly from Project Restore, but share similar principles and processes. Case numbers through all remain very low in comparison to criminal courts, and in the case of the RJU and Project Restore often come after or in an adjournment from a criminal trial.
What these processes do not involve, and what we as a society have come to expect and value as a consequence of a serious crime, is the ability to sentence a criminal to prison.
What survivors of sexual assault want from a justice process can vary between individuals and over time. Jülich, however, says that her research of victim-survivors of sexual assault found that imprisonment was not necessarily a priority. They did not want insincere apology. They wanted to tell their story in a safe forum, and they wanted the offender – who is in most cases known to them – to take responsibility, accept accountability and be censured by their community, though not necessarily by the courts.
An evaluation of the ACT scheme released in January 2025 found that 90% of people harmed felt they were supported and treated respectfully in the conference. Eight in 10 said they felt they were heard, and were able to say what they wanted to say. It also found the scheme had a positive impact on those responsible for harm, and that adults in the program had a lower rate of reoffending than those outside the scheme. The report, believed to be the first evaluation of a restorative justice program for domestic and sexual violence in Australia, found the scheme broadly successful.
Prof Julia Quilter of the University of Wollongong notes that in a recent NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research report, 'a number of complainants did say that their primary reason for reporting to police was that they didn't want this to happen to somebody else'. She asks: 'Is that going to be solved only through restorative justice or is that going to be solved through the criminal trial process?
'I don't think restorative justice is an option for every complainant,' she says. 'But it may be for some and I think that it's important to ensure that all complainants have all of the relevant available options.'
Proponents for restorative justice like Jülich say that – while the number of sexual assault cases going through restorative justice is too small to be able to produce strong data on recidivism – in being required to engage deeply with the harm they have caused, with the misogyny at the core of the actions, 'it makes sense to me that that would be a strong deterrent to reoffend'. In the criminal courts, defendants are afforded the right to silence and may progress through a trial without answering any questions at all about their alleged actions. At Open Circle, the person responsible for harm will meet with an accountability specialist about 15 to 20 times over a period that can last up to 12 months.
'It's excruciating,' says Renee Handsaker, Open Circle's principal restorative justice convener. 'It's huge for a person responsible for sexual violence to actually engage deeply.'
The take-up of restorative justice processes in Australia is tiny compared to criminal complaints – in the ACT, the RJU may only deal with cases once there has been a criminal guilty plea or finding, while at Open Circle, referrals come more from the community than criminal justice. An Australian Institute of Criminology review of the ACT restorative justice program published last year found low numbers through the process were in part due to the perception among those who had the power to refer cases that restorative justice presented a 'soft option'.
Handsaker rejects the critique.
'The criminal justice system can require certain things of [alleged offenders], but it also requires them to kind of position themselves pretty fiercely as, 'no, this didn't happen,'' she says. 'To me, that's a kind of a soft option, as opposed to actually requiring someone to deeply engage in the harm that they've caused.'
Another criticism of restorative justice is that it undoes the decades of work by advocates making sexual assault understood as a serious and public crime. If a society agrees that this is one of the worst categories of crime, it should warrant the treatment we give to serious crimes: courts and imprisonment.
Rossner, who has been working in restorative justice for two decades, says there are good reasons to argue for consistent due process across all crimes. That means that we treat crimes as infractions against the state – against all of us. A crime against one woman is serious enough that as a society we decide it is a crime against the sum of us. 'But [that approach] leaves a big gap,' Rossner says. 'And that gap seems to be even worse when it comes to sexual harm than to other crimes, in terms of victims.'
Now, she says, there is more enthusiasm for change, with survivors at the centre. 'It's pretty uncontroversial to say that what we're doing now is not working, is not helping.'
She is glad, she says, but 'I mean, it's tragic what it's taken to get to that point, right?'
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html