Diane Crocker

Innovative models for rural child protection teams

This paper describes child protection teams in rural Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The teams have developed an innovative model that encourages a community-based response to child abuse. Child protection teams usually follow the case consultation model, which is a group of professionals dealing with specific cases of child abuse. In Newfoundland and Labrador, child protection teams evolved away from this type of approach. Communities in the province face unique social and economic conditions and as a result child protection teams now mainly focus on prevention through public education and awareness, advocacy, and professional development. Many of the child protection teams have developed a two-tiered model. The first tier of the team includes community representatives who participate in the activities listed above. The second tier is involved with case conferences and is composed only of professionals dealing directly with the cases of child abuse. This paper discusses the child protection team model emerging in Newfoundland and Labrador in contrast to those described in the literature.

Counting woman abuse: a cautionary tale of two surveys

This paper describes how the findings of two nationally representative Canadian surveys on woman abuse were taken up by both academics and the media. It puts the surveys in the context of debates about feminist epistemology and measurement. This context does now, however, fully account for the ways in which the findings were mobilized for apparently different purposes. Using a governmentality perspective, the paper illustrates the parallels between the way in which anti‐violence policies and the surveys have constituted the problem of woman abuse in ways that facilitate a particular form of governing gender. The paper argues that the wider shift to neo‐liberal forms of governance must be considered by feminists who count woman abuse in order to avoid contributing to this shift. The paper concludes with ways to undertake survey research on woman abuse.

Balancing justice goals: restorative justice practitioners’ views

Abstract Despite the importance of facilitators, staff, and volunteers to restorative justice programs, we know very little about what they think about the goals of restorative justice. This paper fills that gap by reporting the findings of a survey of restorative justice practitioners in Nova Scotia, Canada. Participants rated the importance of 29 justice-related goals such as punishment and accountability. The results show how respondents distinguish between, prioritize, and balance competing justice goals. A factor analysis shows how goals cluster together revealing more depth about how practitioners understand goals, such as accountability, that have different meanings depending on the context. The findings are particularly interesting because the restorative justice program in Nova Scotia is deeply embedded in the criminal justice system. The findings speak to concerns about whether programs rooted in the mainstream system risk being diluted by dominant criminal justice system discourses. I conclude that restorative justice practitioners can prioritize the values of restorative justice in a program that is deeply rooted in the mainstream criminal justice system.

The institutionalisation of restorative justice in schools: a critical sensemaking account

ABSTRACT In this paper we use a case study to describe how one school successfully implemented restorative justice (RJ). We ask: how do teachers and administrators make sense of a shift from traditional discipline to RJ? How might their sensemaking process affect whether a shift toward RJ is sustainable? We answer these questions by drawing on critical sensemaking—a set of heuristics designed to map social-psychological processes underlying organisational change. Our findings affirm that RJ in schools cannot be mandated as a policy change or implemented through training in practices isolated from changes in organisational rules and formative context. In the language of critical sensemaking, implementing RJ as a programme or set of tools will not ‘make sense’ to teachers. In contrast, the approach at St Catherine’s school leveraged specific sensemaking properties in a way that allowed the change process to become empowering, develop from the ground up and generate radical change in the school.

Implementing and Evaluating Restorative Justice Projects in Prison

This article describes a restorative justice project run in three Canadian prisons. The project, Partners in Healing, aimed to promote restorative justice by running restorative justice committees inside and recruiting volunteers from the community to participate along with prisoners. The main goals of the project were to increase participants’ awareness of restorative justice and help prisoners gain an understanding of the effects of their crime(s). An evaluation of the project solicited stories about the restorative justice committees and this article reports on some of the evaluation findings. The qualitative data offer insights into how to best design a restorative justice project in prisons. It also reveals dilemmas associated with evaluating such projects. The article concludes that projects need to be guided by a clear conceptualization of restorative justice.