A very good and inspirational article on the benefits of restoratitve justice.
"When Joanne Nodding met the man who raped her, the first thing she noticed, she says, was how scared he was. "He thought I was going to be angry," she says, "he was expecting me to shout and scream and tell him that I hated him. But if I had [been uncontrollably angry] they wouldn't have allowed me to meet him."
Instead she told the man, who cannot be named, how she had felt during the attack, and how it had affected her family. She explained that she had been terrified, while he was raping her, that he was going to kill her.
"That had a really big impact on him," she says. "He said 'sorry', and I did feel like it was a genuine 'sorry'."
Read more here.
Justin Patten, Mediator