The heated debate surrounding reports of sexual violence has at least one positive aspect. It demonstrates that an important tool is missing from the chest of victims: restorative justice.
The idea is not to discard traditional justice or the #MeToo movement, quite the contrary. Each has its use.
Over the past five years, the wave of #metoo reports has highlighted victims’ crisis of confidence in the traditional justice system, which has led to rapid and concrete improvements.
The movement has also helped to free women’s voices, to denounce the culture of silence surrounding sexual assault and to impose collective changes.
In short, the public denunciations hit the nail on the head. There is no shadow of a doubt.
And the journalistic investigations that have accompanied the #metoo movement have also done essential work. The traditional media have fully played their role as a vector of social change, which the courts could never have accomplished alone.
Whether in the cultural milieu, in the labor market or in sports federations, there was an abscess to burst. Nobody can deny it. And the work is not finished.
This week, the report on comedian Julien Lacroix published by our colleague Isabelle Hachey in collaboration with Marie-Ève Tremblay of 98.5 FM showed that some victims — but not all — who had denounced their attacker in the public square do not see more the same eye situation.
Some saw it as the backlash of the #metoo wave.
We have a completely different reading.
It should be noted that ambivalence is a very widespread phenomenon among victims of sexual violence. As time passes, it is not uncommon for them to change their posture towards their attacker, even if the actions committed remain the same. After all, the majority of abusers are loved ones — spouse, friend, family member — which keeps victims sensitive to their plight.
In fact, sexual violence is often part of complex human relationships that impose nuances. However, the criminal justice system works very poorly with these nuances, which can quickly raise doubts and derail the case.
But beyond a guilty verdict, the victim often seeks the possibility of speaking out and obtaining an apology from their abuser, while preventing the same thing from happening to others. Beyond the criminalization of the act, it wants to be heard, recognized, validated.
This is where restorative justice comes into play, responding to a real need on the part of victims seeking dialogue.
The objective is to bring victim and aggressor together, insofar as the latter recognizes beforehand the responsibility for the act committed. The dialogue makes it possible to expose the consequences of the gesture and to move towards a repair.
Demand is growing: the Équijustice network, which has 23 branches across the province, has received 200 requests for cases of sexual violence since 2016, more than half of them in the past two years.
Quebec has been a pioneer in restorative justice for young offenders, having had access to it since the 1980s. Unfortunately, the use of restorative justice is lagging behind among adults compared to other provinces.
What are we waiting for to promote it to police officers, social workers and players in the legal community?
What are we waiting for, above all, to integrate it into the specialized courts for sexual violence and domestic violence that Quebec has had the merit of creating to follow up on the report rebuild trust ?
Indeed, the committee of experts that wrote this report opened the door to restorative justice. In its recommendation 147, it called for an evaluation of the programs offered “to ensure that they take into account the specificities of these forms of crime, that they ensure the safety of victims and that they meet their needs”.
We need to think further.
Many victims of sexual violence prefer to have the crime that affects their privacy recognized through a restorative justice process, although this poses challenges since the abuser’s apology can then be used as a criminal confession.
Solutions must be found to these challenges.
Even today, a minority of sexual assaults are reported to the police. If we do not want victims to turn to social networks to seek justice, we must offer them an alternative approach. Restorative justice can respond to their aspirations, insofar as it does not become cut-price justice for the aggressors.
And it is better that this restorative justice be done in a supervised manner, with the support of specialists, rather than on a park bench, alone with the aggressor.