Recent animal cruelty court cases have once again shown that the traditional justice system falls well short for both victims and offenders. Felicity Tepper, senior research officer at ANU’s School of Regulation and Global Governance explores how restorative justice could have better outcomes for humans and animals alike.

As an alternative response to addressing harm and crime, restorative justice offers an approach that seeks to repair harm and restore relationships by moving beyond the traditional punitive sanctions of many justice systems. By placing emphasis upon healing, rebuilding relationships, and seeking accountability for the harm done, restorative justice invokes the will to act conscientiously and knowingly to fix wrongdoings and to actively prevent future harm.

In the case of harm inflicted upon animal kin, the practices and ethos of restorative justice offer valuable approaches that support offender rehabilitation, inclusion of community, giving voice to animal kin, and potentially providing a broader forum for discussing deeper structural issues that lead to ongoing harm to animal kin. Restorative justice can help connect people to animal kin, animal victims to offenders, and policymakers to communities seeking to prevent animal harm.

Through its practices of bringing together the people affected by animal harm, people representing animal victims, offenders and those responsible for creating and enforcing animal welfare policy and law, restorative justice can provide a forum where healing can occur, harm can be repaired, and responsibility for the harm towards animals and preventive actions can be taken.

Restorative justice encourages dialogue and communication between all the parties involved to come to a collective resolution, reflecting a value John Braithwaite calls ‘democratic, deliberative empowerment’. In providing a forum for deep listening to the stories and experiences of people impacted by the animal harm and from the people representing how affected animal kin have experienced the harm, restorative justice can promote empathy and understanding towards animal kin.

This restorative process focused on understanding and healing rather than retribution can facilitate the offender’s willingness to take responsibility for the harm. Listening to the stories and experiences of the people affected and the animal voices represented can help the individual responsible for the harm inflicted on animal kin to grasp the gravity of their actions in a relational way, to connect both to the hurt of the humans and the harm to affected animal kin. In being open to suggestions for repair, the offender can further learn what they need to do to both fix the harm (for example, volunteering at an animal shelter) and to prevent the harm from occurring again (for example, respecting animal sentience, using humane practices, etc.).

Inclusion of animal kin as stakeholders in the restorative process is possible in restorative justice through human proxies such as carers, shelter aides, companions, veterinarians, zoologists, naturalists, environmental stewards, wildlife managers, and others. Further, we must take care to not privilege Western epistemologies—in many places, Indigenous peoples have long-held, respectful traditions for listening to and speaking on behalf of animal kin, potentially offering another way to bring to light animal kin experience and lives, decentring the human and avoiding speciesism, colonialisms and dualisms.

ID: a panel of six speakers from different backgrounds sit on a stage in San Sebastian in Spain

How we approach, care for and prevent harm towards animal kin is thus an apt area of focus for restorative justice. Already much is happening in using restorative justice for addressing animal harm. For example, the 5-year project Restorative Justice for Environmental Crimes and Crimes Against Animals: Designing Prevention, Intervention and Reparation Programs within a Globalised Framework, based at the University of the Basque Country’s Institute of Criminology, headed by Gema Varona. This project focuses on using restorative justice to address and prevent animal harm. In May 2023, a workshop in Donostia/San Sebastian brought together judges, regulators, animal rights advocates, restorative justice facilitators and others keen to progress policy and justice work on animal harm interventions to reimagine animal welfare cases through a restorative lens. This exercise showed great promise in reshaping justice restoratively rather than punitively to ensure the voices of animals and their advocates are heard and heeded. The workshop’s findings will be available later this year, and earlier research articles are in the Revista de Victimología/Journal of Victimology.

In 2022, Vermont Law School held an Animals and Restorative Justice Symposium . This brought together practitioners, advocates and scholars to discuss using restorative justice to address offender rehabilitation and structural causes behind animal abuse, in recognition that traditional approaches have proven ineffective. While the highly informative presentations raised myriad challenges, they also provided creative, hopeful and inclusive responses that can be implemented to handle animal harm in a restorative, preventive and participatory way.

More broadly than individual crimes, restorative justice can help us tackle how we treat animal kin during ecosystem restoration projects. We’re currently in the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and the Strategy accompanying the Decade acknowledges the importance of restorative justice as part of restoration plans, requiring these be ‘achieved through dialogue, participation and accountability’. This area is ripe for further work to grapple with tricky questions about animal kin well-being amidst difficult policy choices about matters like habitat loss, introduced species, traditional use, and wildlife management, which often involve decisions that harm some animals. Given restorative justice’s ability to provide a space for respectful, inclusive and participatory dialogue, in ecosystem restoration efforts it can also offer opportunities to collectively consider structural causes of animal harm, both raising awareness and stimulating ways to rethink our attitudes towards animal kin—for more on this potential, see The Animal Question in Ecosystem Restoration: Foregrounding animal kin through Environmental Restorative Justice.

Going forward, much remains to be done. Giving voice to animal kin is neither easy nor straightforward. Rehabilitating offenders will remain challenging in a world where animal kin are viewed as commodities, ownable, and less intelligent. While each assumption is entirely refutable, we remain entangled in dominant paradigms that sustain anthropocentrism and human superiority over animal kin that will require constant confronting. Restorative justice can offer an educative, conversational and inclusive pathway to help move us into more fruitful discussions about better treatment, increased awareness, and placing kindness at the forefront of our relationships with animal kin.

Happily, work continues across all continents by restorative justice scholars, practitioners and advocates with a keen interest in applying restorative justice practices and principles to resolving and preventing animal harm. The Basque University project has several years still, the European Forum for Restorative Justice’s globally inclusive environmental working group intends focusing more on animal harm, and in Australia, we’re planning further research and workshops on restorative justice in ecosystem restoration, local animal welfare issues and prevention of animal harm. If you’re keen to be involved or know more, please don’t hesitate to reach out—our animal kin need all our voices.

Restorative Justice for Animal Harm