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ABSTRACT
Rising sexual violence threatens Nepal’s widely patriarchal, male-favoring, and gender-biased society. Research shows that the country’s traditional justice procedure commonly disappoints to address survivors’ holistic needs due to corruption, insufficient state capacities, and by restricting its engagement to penalizing the responsible party. A punishment-centered system is only a short-term answer, missing out on risks for repeated misdemeanors after detention discharge. Survivors of sexual violence stress their need for holistic justice that exceeds traditional courtroom scenarios. Restorative justice, a participatory alternative to sanction-centered systems, has proven its potential in Nepal and is, mostly unknowingly, applied in support programs. More awareness, support, and emphasis on the survivor-focused restorative mindset could greatly benefit many of those affected by or at risk of sexual violence.
KEYWORDS
Nepal, South Asia, restorative justice, alternative justice, criminal justice, survivor-centered approach, sexual violence, gender-based violence, violence prevention, violence against women, taboo, patriarchy, civil war, high—level corruption, police corruption, healing, mental health, COVID-19 lockdown, victim-blaming, awareness, online sexual violence, cybercrime, NGOs, funding challenges, advocacy, sexual and reproductive health and rights, reintegration, women empowerment
INTRODUCTION
Sexual violence against girls and women continues to be a pandemic threatening to harm psychologically, physically, and economically. For good reasons, it is declared as one of the most widespread human rights violations, depriving girls’ and women’s equality and self-worth.
According to the United Nation’s Populations Fund, UNFPA survivors of sexual violence need, among others, justice and healing the most. Survivors and their communities claim that the traditional criminal justice system often fails to meet their interests and needs. In a context with rising reported cases, Nepal’s rape survivors often experience that the police is not always their friend. Police and state mismanagement of sexual violence cases is a common issue, and victim-blaming still the knee-jerk response for many. One consequence is a debate over the opportunity to create and introduce a more innovative approach, including restorative justice principles.
Restorative justice focuses not only on the needs of the survivors and the community but also on the offending party’s reintegration. The approach, which includes conferencing, mediation, and circles, addresses the survivor’s need for validation and compensation and contributes to preventing future sexual offenses.
Ph.D. candidate Tobias Volz assessed the awareness of sexual violence through an online survey. He interviewed Nepali sexual violence survivors and experts to look into current procedures and analyze the potential of restorative justice in this setting. This article provides insights into the results and calls to more actively advocating for the concept.
MAIN CORPUS
Sexual Violence and the Need for Restorative Support
The South Asian country Nepal, rich in culture and nature, remains one of the least developed nations worldwide. The mostly Hindu-dominated society defined itself for centuries through the hierarchical caste system, which often outlines women’s roles as housewives and justifies violence against them. According to an assessment of sexual violence in different districts, a high prevalence of sexual violence exists among adolescent girls. Almost one in ten girls, 9.8 percent, stated that they experienced sexual violence.
Recent public incidents created concern, and issues like online sexual violence indicate the urgency for changes. Consequently, some women stopped checking the news since additional reports became unbearable to read. Women activists utilize the benefits of online activism, significant during COVID-19 lockdowns, a period in which intimate partner violence spiked.
The consequences of sexual violence are often severe and shattering, creating layers of needs within survivors. One of the first responses when asking about survivor’s needs is the necessity of getting justice. Interviewed women claimed that justice is subjective and individual in each case. Getting justice can often be equivalent to restoring survivors’ lives. Various survivors expressed the desire to talk to the harming party to learn the reasons or to hear explanations, validation, or an apology to move on.
The concept of restorative justice is most defined by what it is an option to. The idea helps to experience a real sense of justice, often not guaranteed through the traditional justice system. The restorative justice concept entered Nepal’s general discourse after signing the Comprehensive Peace Accord. Initially, it was a procedure meant to support the country dealing with the legacy of human rights violations from the past. Nepal pilot projects on trial and probation, bringing new opportunities to link restorative and traditional justice.
Restorative justice work for sexual violence survivors in Nepal is practiced in different forms. In most cases, those who work restoratively are either unaware of it or do not call it restorative, for example, due to fundraising challenges. Women’s rights experts believe community mobilization and involvement, a core principle of restorative justice work, is one of Nepal’s major strengths.
The vast majority of interview partners did not see significant risks in applying restorative justice in cases of sexual violence in Nepal. However, one needs to pay special attention to ensuring the confidentiality and safety of survivors, showing professional standards, and preventing re-victimization and community biases. If working restoratively means having a facilitated dialogue with the harming party, text- or video chats might be viable if safety can otherwise not be ensured.
Unfortunately, government actions are often oriented towards acute events, such as the civil war, the earthquake, political tensions, or managing the COVID-19 pandemic. While many live in poverty and struggle to cover their basic needs, restorative justice, and sexual violence prevention are seen as a comparatively secondary priority.
SUMMARY *
The research reported here rests on what survivors themselves said they needed. Their answers pointed less consistently toward punishment than toward validation, explanation and acknowledgment, and several expressed the wish to hear from the person who harmed them why it happened. Set against this, the criminal process is described as reaching only a small proportion of cases and addressing only a part of what those cases involve. The author’s finding that restorative practice already exists in Nepal without being named as such, whether through unfamiliarity with the term or because funders do not recognise it, is the study’s most practically significant observation.
CONCLUSION
Conclusion and Recommendations
Violence against women, especially sexual, is a global threat, including for many women in Nepal. The country’s patriarchal system discriminates against women based on cultural, religious, and societal practices, which are explanatory factors, yet no excuses for sexual violence. Restorative justice has excellent potential here.
Working restoratively can start as small as through a basic conversation. For example, the author experienced that some of the interviews with survivors, especially on their needs and justice understandings, had restorative effects. Interviewees expressed that the conversations about their experiences through the restorative justice lens are helpful and valuable in themselves, and this idea might be utilized for projects in the field.
One survivor shared that talking about sexual violence during the interviews made her realize that she has been more frequently affected by sexual violence than she was initially aware of. She learned how sexual violence she experienced through numerous harassment experiences accumulated and unconsciously affected her attitude towards men. She agreed that talking about restorative justice has been a restorative experience and helped her express her emotions.
Nepal progressed significantly within the last decade in terms such as literacy and education, which brings hope that women’s situations can continue to improve when it comes to sexual violence. Positive experiences in applying restorative justice must be utilized for advocacy and build upon. While possible future scenarios discussed in interviews often projected mixed pictures, the general consent was that more work needs to be done to present future generations a more bright picture.
POTENTIAL SOLUTION *
Restorative approaches to sexual violence are among the most contested questions in the field, and the article’s contribution is strongest where it stays close to what survivors said. It is worth setting out both the case and the objections, because a journal advancing this approach should be seen to have considered them.
The case begins with what conventional prosecution actually delivers. Attrition rates in sexual offence cases are high in every jurisdiction; most reported cases never reach trial, most trials that occur do not convict, and the process itself is frequently experienced by complainants as a second injury. Meanwhile the questions survivors most often raise, why did you do this, do you understand what you did, will you acknowledge it, are questions a criminal court cannot ask and a defendant is advised not to answer. That gap is real and is not closed by improving the courts.
The objections are equally serious. Sexual violence is an offence of power, and any process bringing the parties together risks reproducing that power in the room. Where community or family pressure to settle exists, a survivor may participate without genuinely choosing to. And there is a danger that restorative processes come to be treated by overburdened systems as a cheaper alternative to prosecution, which would transform a survivor centred option into a means of disposing of inconvenient cases.
Practice has converged on safeguards that address these objections, and any programme in this field should adopt them explicitly. Participation must be initiated by the survivor and revocable at any point without consequence for the criminal case. The process must be additional to prosecution rather than a substitute, so that choosing it costs nothing. The person who caused harm must have accepted responsibility before any meeting, since a process that becomes a forum for denial re injures the person it was meant to serve. Preparation must be extensive, often months, conducted separately and by facilitators specifically trained in sexual violence and trauma. Indirect formats, letters, recorded messages, shuttle communication, of the kind the article mentions, are frequently the safer choice and deliver much of the benefit. And the survivor defines what the process is for; where the desired outcome is acknowledgment rather than reconciliation, reconciliation should not be an objective.
The article’s finding that restorative work is already happening unnamed points to the most immediate opportunity. Practitioners doing this work without the vocabulary are also doing it without the safeguards, without supervision and without shared standards. Naming the practice, documenting it, training those who conduct it and building peer supervision would raise its quality substantially, and it can be done without waiting for legislative change. The observation that funders do not recognise the term is a solvable problem of communication rather than of substance.
Finally, the article’s report that the research interviews themselves had restorative effects deserves to be taken seriously as a finding rather than as an aside. Being asked, in a structured and unhurried way, what happened and what one needs is a rare experience for survivors in most systems, and it appears to be valuable in itself. That points toward something achievable at scale and at modest cost: trained listening, offered early, independent of whether any case proceeds. It also carries an obligation, which is that research contact of this kind must be accompanied by referral pathways to continuing support, since opening such conversations without anywhere to direct people afterwards leaves them exposed.
* Added by the WMO Editorial Team
REFERENCES
- UNICEF, Domestic Violence Against Women and Girls, Innocenti Digest. Florence, Italy: Innocenti Research Center, June 2000, 2.
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- Bhrikuti Rai, “For Rape Survivors in Nepal, Police Is Not Always Their Friend,” 2019, accessed December 28, 2020, https://kathmandupost.com/national/2019/07/17/for-rape-survivors-in-nepal-police-is-not-always-their-friend.
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- Ibid.
- Tobias Volz, “Restorative Justice in Nepal: An Analysis of the Approach in Cases of Sexual Violence Against Women” (Ph.D. diss., EUCLID, 2021).
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- John Braithwaite, “Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts,” Crime and Justice 25 (1999): 1–127.
- Amnesty International, “Nepal: Recent Steps Undermine Transitional Justice,” 2020, accessed October 25, 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/01/nepal-recent-steps-undermine-transitional-justice/.
Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2020). Handbook on Restorative Justice Programmes (2nd edition), New York, including guidance on serious and gendered violence.
Daly, K., & Stubbs, J. (2006). Feminist Engagement with Restorative Justice. Theoretical Criminology, 10(1), 9 to 28.
Keenan, M., & Zinsstag, E. (2022). Sexual Violence and Restorative Justice: Addressing the Justice Gap. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Jülich, S., & Landon, F. (2017). Achieving Justice Outcomes: Participants of Project Restore’s Restorative Justice Processes. In Restorative Approaches to Sexual Violence. Routledge, London.
Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (Istanbul Convention), 2011, Article 48 on the prohibition of mandatory alternative dispute resolution.
World Health Organization (2013). Responding to Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Violence against Women: WHO Clinical and Policy Guidelines, Geneva.
National Penal Code Act, 2017, Nepal, provisions on sexual offences and the statutory limitation period.
