The virtues claimed for restorative justice include its emotional engagement with crime and the opportunities afforded to participants by its discursive character. Yet these issues are rarely explored from a perspective that is attentive to gendered or other asymmetrical forms of social relations. This article explores key issues that remain under-developed in the restorative justice literature from a feminist perspective, taking domestic violence as a focus. Central to this analysis are questions of victims' interests and safety, expectations about the victim's (...) role and the appeal to apology and forgiveness in much of the restorative justice literature. It is argued that the challenge of taking gendered harms seriously may require an approach that differs from common restorative justice practices such as the development of hybrid models that draw from both conventional criminal justice and restorative justice. (shrink)

This article explores the epistemological and strategic issues facing feminists embarking upon narrative explorations into women's experiences. It considers the implications for feminist epistemology of acknowledging women's participation in dominant ideologies about their social role. Focusing upon questions of women's agency, it asks how this `conforming knowledge' might complicate postmodernist feminist notions of resisting and reconstructing law's categorisation of `Woman'. It also represents an attempt to clarify, in advance of my own analysis of women's agency in abortion decision-making, why postmodern (...) feminists might talk to women – the `subjects' of law's constructive power. It seeks additionally to open a discussion among a wider audience of feminists about what we might do with the information uncovered through listening to women's own stories in an area pronounced upon authoritatively by a multitude of discourses. (shrink)

This chapter deals with domestic violence rather than other possible forms of family violence. It also proceeds from the position that domestic violence is different in many ways from other forms of crime. It takes as fundamental the need to provide safety to those who experience domestic violence, most commonly women and their children. An appeal to victim safety need not imply a punitive or exclusionary logic (see the debate between Scheingold, Olson and Pershing, Braithwaite and Pettit, and Daly in (...) Law and Society Review, 1994). Restorative justice has made strong claims about providing better outcomes for victims than conventional criminal justice system practices and these claims are analysed with reference to empirical data concerning domestic violence. The chapter also examines the extent to which restorative justice practices mobilise resources for the protection of women and children - this is especially crucial at a time when resources are being withdrawn from the formal legal system and from the community. (shrink)

In this now established text the author presents her analysis of the power of law and argues for a feminist post-structuralist approach. She comments on pornography, as well as discussing recent research on rape trials and abortion legislation.

This book offers an original and challenging reading of the `crimino-legal complex' - criminology, criminal justice, criminal law, the media and everyday experiences - in the light of cultural studies and feminist theory. Through an exploration of the crisis engendered by the failure of the crimino-legal complex to solve the problems of crime and criminality, Alison Young exposes the cultural dimension of its institutions and practices. She analyzes the far-reaching effects of the cultural value given to crime, showing it to (...) be rooted in a powerful nexus of the body, language, the community and everyday life. Imagining Crime examines a number of key events and issues which have signalled shifts in th. (shrink)

This pathbreaking book examines the experiences of women in the legal profession in Australia. Based on interviews with more than 100 women lawyers, it sets out to explain why simply "letting in" more women to public life does not necessarily change the masculine culture of the profession. This book includes contributions from Australia's leading feminist legal scholars and addresses the notion that there is a separation between public and private life. Although it is a myth that the line of demarcation (...) between public and private was ever fixed, the relationship between the two spheres has become increasingly ambiguous. The trends towards state intervention in private life, on the one hand, and privatisation of heretofore public processes, such as wage-fixing and dispute resolution, on the other hand, have accentuated the emergence of fault lines. The authors consider the pros and cons of the changing visibility/invisibility dualisms that correspond with public and private in regard to a range of issues that significantly impact on women's lives, including sexuality, the family, work, violence, and participation in public life. (shrink)