Indigenous youth and restorative justice in Western Australia

Restorative justice has the ear of the community, legislators and courts. Direct and indirect mediation between offenders and their victims of crime is a powerful tool and attractively conflates notions of punishment and rehabilitation through the conduit of shame, empathy and just retribution. However, when the offender is dislocated from and disinterested in the broader norms and assumptions implicit in the restorative process then how valuable an exercise is it? For many Indigenous youth in Western Australia restorative justice can have only a limited impact and application because their life circumstances and realities are often far removed from a process which seeks to restore participants to the position that they occupied pre-offence. What is required is a new way of looking at engaging the restorative justice process so that it has true meaning and practical application to the lives of these children and their families. To genuinely engage the process at this level will require, first, a shift in the way these young offenders are viewed and, second, a significant allocation of time, energy and resources so that transformation can begin.