The Diversity of Restorative Justice
The term restorative justice refers to a range of approaches and not any single practice.1 It is more an orien- tation than a practice favoring the informal over the formal, aiming at providing victims and offenders alike with a voice. Furthermore, “there is no agreement on the actual nature of the transformation sought by the restorative justice movement.”2
Different views abound about what is restored and even the desired goals of restorative justice.
This lack of clear definition can make it difficult to discuss the topic because of the wide diversity of restorative approaches.3 Restorative
justice approaches are applied in schools, prison interventions, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconcilia- tion Commission.4 Restorative justice approaches are also found in appli- cations that are the focus of this article: restorative justice as an alterna- tive to traditional sentencing, includ- ing victim–offender mediation and restorative conferencing as practiced in England and Wales.5
The golden thread—or “conceptual umbrella”—uniting all of these diverse approaches to restorative justice is their focus on bringing closure to a conflict through informal, but not unstruc- tured, deliberation with the aim of