Today, one in four women will be sexually assaulted between the time she enters college and graduates college, and the risk of sexual assault is even higher for young women who do not attend college. These experiences can have a major impact on people’s health and wellbeing, education, careers and relationships. Only 13% of campus rape victims “make any kind of report to police or campus officials, including health services, counseling, and conduct administrators” (Campus PRISM Project).

Many survivors who do not report their assaults desired some form of healing and accountability, but were not satisfied with the existing options available to them for reporting. Furthermore, the goals of campus investigation processes can be incompatible with the needs of survivors – often inflicting additional harm on survivors, called secondary victimization.

Restorative justice can be seen as an additional or alternative means to traditional judicial processes.

Restorative justice on college campuses has been described by Campus PRISM as “a non-adversarial approach to addressing offensive behavior that seeks to identify and repair harm and rebuild trust through facilitated dialogue.” Studies have shown restorative justice to be effective at reducing repeat offenses by perpetrators, as well as reducing PTSD for victims and increasing both parties’ satisfaction with justice processes.

Restorative justice fundamentally shifts power in response to campus sexual assault. In traditional response processes, a survivor, who has already lost power in an assault, then is dependent to the power of an institution that is seeking to answer the questions, “Was a policy violated? What should the punishment be if so?” The vast majority of sexual assault cases never result in responsibility findings; often, perpetrators become more defensive through the process, and the processes are designed to minimize a sense of responsibility, while not supporting assailants in preventing repeat offenses. However, a restorative justice process, the survivor is empowered through a process that asks, “What harm was created? What action can be taken to heal that harm?” The process also asks, “How can the community ensure the person who caused this harm never does it again?” Restorative justice is an optional process for both parties and will only happen if a person who has caused harm acknowledges the harm – rather than denying it – often through extensive “pre-conference” counseling before meeting with a survivor.

While many survivors want restorative justice options and the evidence is extensive about their benefits – and while colleges have community environments and structures, as well as staff protecting confidentiality, that make colleges relatively well equipped to offer restorative justice options – almost no college today offers restorative justice as an option to responding to sexual harm.

Our mission is to promote and advocate for restorative justice to be an additional option for response processes to sexual violence on college campuses – one that can heal harm created and prevent future harm. Our main ongoing project is researching, writing, and developing a written “toolkit” for student activists working to bring restorative justice for Title IX to their campuses. This toolkit will be a holistic guide to building campus support, interfacing with administration, and designing a restorative policy tailored to individual communities. We plan to disseminate our toolkit alongside a centralized resource list and directory of existing resources for students working towards restorative justice for Title IX. Our website will include a contact form for students and others to reach out to us to build connections and support. In addition to researching, writing, and disseminating our toolkit, we plan to begin working towards building a strong national network of student activists and leaders by building relationships with related organizations and interested individuals, attending and presenting at local and national conferences, and advocating for restorative responses to sexual violence in the media. We ultimately want to build a national network of survivors and allies who can advocate for national legislation and direction to support restorative justice as an additional option for response to sexual assault.