ABSTRACT
Attempts to assess the role of victims within restorative justice processes are bedevilled by the sheer variety of restorative justice practices, while efforts to evaluate those processes in terms of their potential benefits for victims are hampered by the wide range of contexts in which they operate. As a rapidly evolving international phenomenon restorative justice initiatives have been adopted in many different countries encompassing a variety of legal jurisdictions and widely differing cultural contexts. The way restorative justice relates to the wider criminal justice system within such settings, which is the main focus of this chapter,1 provides yet another set of potentially confusing variables. The range of offence types and categories of offenders for which they cater also differ markedly from one restorative justice scheme to another. Indeed, much the same point could be made in respect of individual victims, including the type and degree of victimisation they experience and also the way they respond to it. An additional problem is that the evaluation of restorative justice is still in its infancy, of very variable quality and again still has a tendency to focus primarily on offenders and reconviction rates rather than specifically victim-related concerns.
