'Why I confronted the man who raped me’

from David Barrett's article in The Sunday Telegraph:

Dr Claire Chung, who has agreed to waive her anonymity in The Sunday Telegraph, was raped twice in the stinking stairwell of a multi-storey car park, and the crime caused her life to collapse “like a pack of cards”.

Dr Chung, a highly regarded GP with more than 20 years’ medical experience, lost her job, her marriage and her home after being raped by Stephen Allen Gale, who had been released from prison for another sexual offence just one day earlier.

But following the attack, which she described in chilling detail, Dr Chung negotiated with the authorities to allow a meeting with Gale in prison.

The meeting was organised as part of a “restorative justice” scheme, which brings criminals face to face with their victims.

Mar 30, 2011 Country:England&Wales, Victim, Apology, Offender, Practice, Region: Europe, Case:Sexual

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Victims confront thief in jail

from the article in The Northern Echo:

The meeting was arranged by police as part of a restorative justice project and Mrs Turnbull, 57, of Deneside, had second thoughts about going along.

She said: “I had decided I was not going to go. I felt as if I could not face meeting him.

“It was only because the police turned up on my doorstep to pick me up that I went along because I did not want to waste their time.”

Mrs Turnbull spent 90 minutes with the offender in Durham Prison, where he is serving a five-year sentence.

Mar 28, 2011 Dialogue, Country:England&Wales, Victim, Offender, Region: Europe, Prison, Case:Theft

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No restorative justice for those bereaved by Potters Bar

from Louise Christian's article in the Guardian:

The farcical nature of the criminal proceedings against the companies so long after the [train crash in which two women were killed] is the consequence of the failure of accountability at the time it happened. Jarvis and its chairman, Steven Norris, made spurious claims of sabotage and there was a delay of nearly two years before liability was admitted by Network Rail and Jarvis.

Even then the admission was done with bad grace. The government initially delayed making any decision on whether to have a public inquiry until December 2005. The following year Lord Justice Moses refused to overturn this decision after the bereaved families challenged it in court. 

However, he said that any new evidence should lead to a reconsideration by the government and he stressed the importance of restorative justice: "They (the bereaved) do seek some identification; faces, names, the real people whose anonymity cannot be hidden behind the facade of monolithic organisations." And he continued: "If those individuals, whose actions or omissions might have saved life or contributed to death, fear that they may one day have to come face to face with those who suffer as a result of that they have done or failed to do, life may be protected in the future."

Mar 22, 2011 Case:White Collar, Other, Country:England&Wales, Region: Europe

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Restorative justice, policing and the Big Society

from the speech by The Rt Hon Nick Herbert MP, Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice in England:

There has been much talk about restorative justice. We’ve seen encouraging pilots and there’s talk about it not only in this country, but around the world. So why is it that something that offers such encouraging results should not have taken a greater hold in our system?

Well, I think it is because we’ve seen evolving over the last few years a criminal justice system that has been very much directed from the centre.

We’ve been through the recent era of targets and what has eloquently been described as ‘deliverology’. The idea of managing from the centre, of close direction in order to try and drive up the performance of public services. This was done for benign reasons, but we all know what the consequences were.

Mar 02, 2011 Country:England&Wales, Theory, Support, Potential, Region: Europe, Policy, Politics

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