Allison Morris

Re-visioning Men's Violence Against Female Partners

This article considers some of the tensions surrounding criminal justice interventions to deal with mens violence against their female partners. Some commentators argue for the increased criminalisation and penalisation of violent men, and others focus on a more caring vision of justice, for example. This article reviews what has been achieved to deal with mens violence via the law and criminal justice system and explores the potential of more restorative approaches in this sphere.

Restorative justice and reconviction

Proponents of restorative justice have suggested that its practices have the potential to reduce reoffending by those responsible for a harm. This article examines these claims using the results of two separate studies of the reconviction of offenders dealt with by processes that had restorative characteristics. The first study examines reconviction rates overaperiodofsix years for a sample of young people who took part in family group conferences. The second study examines outcomes for samples of 100 offenders involved in each of two different community panel pre-trial diversion schemes for adults. One scheme involved offenders and victims meeting together with community panel members to determine outcomes that would repair harm to the victim and contribute to preventing reoffending. The second scheme involved Maori offenders meeting with representatives of their tribe in a setting with spiritual meaning for Maori. Those participating in both the community panel schemes were less likely to reoffend than matched samples of others who had committed similar offenses. There were also economic savings to the criminal justice system when offenders were dealt with by the panels compared to those dealt with by traditional methods. Taken together, these projects indicate that restorative processes and practices can have a positive impact on helping people to avoid reoffending.

Re-forming Justice: The Potential of Maori Processes

There have been a number of calls for the implementation of a separate Maori justice system. This paper examines these calls and the practicalities of moving in this direction by drawing from two pieces of research: first, an exploratory study of the views of more than 50 Maori elders on how Maori communities dealt with offenders in the recent past and how Maori justice practices might work in the modern context; and, second, an examination of the philosophy and practice of family group conferences. The paper concludes that Maori justice processes have the potential not only to provide solutions to the over-representation of Maori in the criminal justice system, but also to re-form conventional justice systems. It advocates a reconciliation of Maori and Pakeha justice systems.

Putting Restorative Justice into Practice for Adult Offenders

Many countries are now exploring new models of justice in the hope that they can be more effective than the traditional criminal justice system in responding to victims, reducing the probability of reoffending and contributing to community safety. This article describes two pilot schemes which used community panel meetings to decide on diversionary plans for adult offenders. Both displayed elements of restorative justice processes, particularly adopting plans designed to make amends for offending. One placed an emphasis on the participation of victims and taking part in rehabilitative programmes. The other placed emphasis on responsibility to the indigenous community and taking reintegrative measures. Despite these differences, both schemes resulted in fewer reconvictions and less serious reconvictions compared to matched control groups and both schemes represented financial savings compared to conventional court processes and correctional outcomes.

The Prevalence in New Zealand of Violence Against Women by their Current Male Partners

The Womens Safety Survey, conducted in 1996, asked a sample of 500 New Zealand women (selected from a pool of almost 2000 women) about their experience of any form of violence (psychological, physical or sexual) used against them by their partners. This article reports some of the surveys main findings on the prevalence of mens physical and sexual violence against their current partners and contrasts these findings with selected examples of recent research elsewhere and in New Zealand. The results suggest that New Zealand women, particularly Maori women, experience a comparatively high rate of violence at the hands of their male partners. However, violence by partners is a complex area to research and different surveys have used different methodologies in their attempts to measure its prevalence. The article concludes, therefore, with a discussion of some of the methodological difficulties in carrying out this type of research and suggests that, in interpreting and comparing research findings, methodological differences cannot be discounted.

Negotiating domestic violence: police, criminal justice and victims unwanted sex: the culture of intimidation and the failure of the law

be ignored. Local initiatives should be encouraged and supported; a solution cannot be imposed. Policy changes bring despair to those motivated by the ideal of reform, and in a world where it is likely that the provision of future community-based mental health services will be determined by staff availability, why work in prisons? Psychiatry’s investment in prison mental health care can be judged both by the involvement of academic forensic psychiatry in the area and by the signix8ecance which the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ forensic section places on the matter. I suggest similar motivations for the frequency of both prison reviews and prison research of the ‘How many mentally disordered are there in prison?’ variety. First, they serve political purposes; second, they are selfserving; third, they function as a useful defence mechanism in that anyone but a fool knows that the standard of health care is below an acceptable level but, unwilling to risk our own necks, we undertake displacement activities to relieve our guilt.