Profs and Pints Online presents: “Restorative Justice and Sexual Assault,” with Lara Bazelon, law professor and director of the criminal and juvenile justice and racial justice clinics at the University of San Francisco and author of Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction.

The #MeToo movement, the recent conviction of Harvey Weinstein, and indictments of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell have refocused the nation's attention on the widespread problem of sexual assault. As more victims come forward and demand for justice, a question arises: is the criminal justice system the best method of delivering it?

The Victims’ Rights Movement, which brought important reforms to the prosecution of sexual assault cases, seems to presuppose that sexual assault victims are a monolithic group whose single goal is to punish the offender with the longest sentence the law allows. However, sexual assault victims are a diverse group racially, ethnically, socio-economically, and with respect to sexual identity. They also suffer varied harms, because sexual assault encompasses a wide realm of misconduct and victim-offender relationships, including the lack of any relationship at all.

Victims also often have distinct though sometimes overlapping needs and objectives. Some have no desire to participate in the criminal adjudication process, and some will be re-traumatized by a successful criminal prosecution. Most will not get justice from the courts: Less than 1 percent of sexual assault crimes result in a felony conviction.

Proceeding from the premise that victims have different needs and the criminal justice system often fails them, Professor Bazelon will argue that the restorative justice process can be the preferred option. Although victims’ rights advocates have traditionally rejected restorative justice as inappropriate in sexual assault cases, she’ll argue that for some victims who voluntarily engage in the restorative justice process it can be healing, by letting them seek a reckoning that fits their particular needs and repairs harm in ways that a criminal prosecution cannot.

Professor Bazelon will answer questions about these fraught issues based on 20 years of experience as a trial lawyer and more than a decade of writing about crime, punishment, and alternatives to the adjudicatory process. (A recorded version of this talk will remain available online.)

Profs & Pints Online: Restorative Justice and Sexual Assault