Dr. Theo Gavrielides is the founder and Academic Director of Independent Academic Research Studies (IARS), a UK-based international network of young researchers. This not-for-profit think-tank works with its members to prevent and combat antisocial behaviour and violence in all its forms.

Theo currently works for the British government’s Department for Constitutional Affairs as a human rights and criminal justice strategy advisor. During 2002-2004, he worked as a research officer at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Theo also taught law courses at the University of London and is also a legal counsel.

Theo’s research includes international fieldwork with practitioners and researchers who utilize restorative justice to help resolve discord. His research provided qualitative data on the discrepancy that appears to exist between the practical priorities of various programmes that are labelled ‘restorative practices’ and the abstract theoretical norms and principles that constitute the normative notion of restorative justice. The results of this five-year study will be published in his book, Restorative Justice Theory and Practice: Addressing the Discrepancy.  

Theo graduated from the Law Schools of the National University of Athens with an LL.B, and he holds an LL.M in Human Rights Law from Nottingham University. He also completed a Ph.D. in restorative justice at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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As the restorative tradition expands to deal with crimes, ages and situations that it has never addressed before (at least in its contemporary version), and as it starts to make sense in national, and also regional and international forums, then the responsibilities of restorative practitioners and academics redouble. Bridges must be built in order to synthesise. The conceptual tensions characterising the field have to congeal to create a stable platform. Awareness must be increased both at the macro and micro level.

Restorative justice may no longer be mere idealism, but neither is it a panacea for all the deficiencies of the criminal justice system. Most often criminal justice system evaluators are supplied with predefined tasks that aim to prove or disprove an approach’s viability. Consequentially, evaluators are compelled to work within the retributivist and utilitarian understanding of the research funding bodies. Typical criminal justice research goals entail the reduction of re-offending, costs, and the prison population, and even saving police time.

These foci narrow the scope of restorative justice evaluation schemas which may not always reflect practical reality. The evaluators themselves also carry an enormous amount of responsibility in seeing through this long-term process of cultural transformation. While in theory the measurement of outcomes is important to any evaluation, in practice this significance is overstated. A good evaluator should focus on collecting information relevant to all of a programme’s identifiable aims. Especially in the case of restorative justice evaluations, researchers must include all targeted audiences: victims, offenders and communities, in both qualitative and quantitative ways.

--Theo Gavrielides

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Currently, Theo is co-directing a research and implementation project exploring the potential of restorative justice to help resolve sexual offending cases and other abuse cases involving children and young people. To carry out this project, the international research network IARS has formed a consortium of partners encompassing universities and research centres from around the world.

This project is also linked to a parallel study that Dr. Gavrielides has been carrying out with Mr. Dale Coker and Ms. Lisa Rea. The three researchers investigate the possibility of using restorative practices to disentangle the sexual offending cases that occurred within the Catholic Church.

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Reach Theo Gavrielides at T.Gavrielides@iars.org.uk

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February 2006