Towards integrative frameworks for addressing sexual violence: Feminist, abolitionist, social harm and restorative perspectives

Theories and practices of justice fail to address the socio-political challenges of our times. In terms of practices, the Criminal Justice System (CJS) and its system of punishment remains still the prevalent way to handle many social problems which have been framed and constructed as ‘crime’, including sexual violence. For those theorists and practitioners attempting to develop an alternative to the CJS, restorative justice (RJ) has provided an alternative horizon. This chapter explores theoretically the potential of addressing the phenomenon of ‘sexual violence’ from a restorative framework. Several additional perspectives within critical criminology are highlighted in relation to this phenomenon, the feminist perspective, the abolitionist perspective, the social harm perspective, and their major tenets are compared with the restorative perspective, the main principles of which are considered to be the lifeworld element, the participatory element, and the reparative element. It is argued that besides integrative practices, a theoretical integration is also necessary in addressing ‘sexual violence’. Each of the perspectives, including the restorative one brings on the one hand important insights to the problem of 'sexual violence', and on the other hand none of them alone is able to counter all the problems related to it. Besides necessary integration, the chapter also argues that the restorative framework has many lessons to learn from the other perspectives within critical criminology in its attempt to provide answers to 'sexual violence'.status: publishe