The human services are fraught with history of failure related to grasping oversimplified, across-the-board solutions that are expected to work in all situations for all groups of people. This article reviews some of the long-standing and current challenges for governance of programmes in maintaining cultures that safeguard restorative and responsive standards, principles and values, thereby amplifying and enhancing their centrality to relational engagement within families, groups, communities and organisations. Despite their potential for helping groups of people grapple with the complex dynamics that impact their lives, restorative justice approaches are seen as no less vulnerable to being whittled down to technical routines through practitioner and sponsor colonisation than other practices. This article explores some of the ways culture can work to erode and support the achievement of restorative standards, and why restorative justice and regulation that is responsive to the ongoing experiences of affected persons offers unique paths forward for achieving justice. Included in this exploration are the ways that moral panic and top-down, command-and-control management narrow relational approaches to tackling complex problems and protect interests that reproduce social and economic inequality.

Feminists have viewed the implementation of restorative practices warily, particularly in the context of gender-based harms. Concerns include the devaluing of gender-based harms, the reprivatisation of violence against women and the inability of restorative practitioners to guarantee safety for people subjected to abuse. But this article will argue that restorative justice can be a uniquely feminist practice, growing out of the same mistrust of state-based systems and engagement of the community that animated the early feminist movement. Although some caution is warranted, restorative justice serves the feminist goals of amplifying women’s voices, fostering women’s autonomy and empowerment, engaging community, avoiding gender essentialism and employing an intersectional analysis, transforming patriarchal structures and ending violence against women.

The purpose of this article is to examine restorative approaches to campus sexual harm. A restorative response may provide support and validation for survivors, a pathway for personal change for those who cause sexual harm, and assist in changing campus culture. The article addresses three significant challenges to developing a restorative response. The first challenge is the influence of a pervasive ideology that I refer to as crime logic. A second challenge is the need for an intersectional response that addresses the potential for bias in decisions by campus administrators and restorative justice practitioners. The third challenge is to develop restorative approaches for circumstances in which a victim/perpetrator dyad is not appropriate.

Drawing upon Gert Biesta’s concept of the learnification of education, we maintain that a meaningful purpose for Canadian schools has been lost. We demonstrate that the very fact of relationship is limited in curricula. The absence of relationality enables the continued privilege of normative identities. A restorative approach, based on asking who is being educated, could repurpose schooling. We draw upon examples from literature, current political events and our classroom-based research to illustrate how conflict dialogue, based on relational pedagogy, offers one path for a restorative approach. We conclude that conflict dialogue provides opportunities to engage diverse students in inclusive curricular experiences. Such a restorative approach exposes and explores the who of education for the purpose of promoting positive social conditions that allow for human flourishing.

The dialectic of the ‘personal is political’ is starkly evident in the lives of abused and neglected children and their families involved with child protection services. State intervention into families renders private matters into public issues. Restorative approaches in the child protection context offer a vital test of their efficacy in reshaping family and family-state relationships. Drawing upon the author’s experience as a young feminist and child protection worker, this article identifies three dynamics of the restorative dialectic: children’s testimony, women’s responsibilisation and child validation. A case study of a sexually abused teen demonstrates how the restorative process of family group conferencing transforms these dynamics. Children’s testimony of giving evidence in court becomes speaking for/speaking with; women blaming becomes collective responsibilisation; and child protectionism becomes validation of children and their cultural heritage. Together these movements uphold a relational approach to restorative justice that nudges norms toward greater equity.