Restorative Justice
These are links to help people with disabilities cut down on the emotional labour of self-advocacy. This page can help you understand what restorative justice is, where it comes from, its treatment of complex ethical matters, and why it is a more constructive framework for navigating harm than the prevalent shame-driven alternatives available.
Before You Continue
This page assumes familiarity with a terms that do a lot of the work here using specific and current definitions that are widely accepted by disability scholars and advocates. If you have not reviewed these recently, they’re worth reading first.
- Ableism — Why punitive systems fall harder on disabled people, and why institutions so often respond to a person’s distress rather than the conditions that produced it
- Strategic Ignorance — What happens when someone opts out of the information that would make them accountable, and why restorative processes cannot work when one party refuses to be informed
- The Double Empathy Problem — Why harm between neurotypes is so often the result of mutual misattribution, and why accountability processes need to account for that before assigning blame
- Spoon Theory — Why the format of accountability matters, not just its content: punitive processes extract energy that many neurominorities cannot afford to spend
What Is Restorative Justice?
Restorative justice is a framework for responding to harm that centers the needs of those affected, rather than the rules that were broken (Zehr 2002).
The question it asks is not:
“who broke the rule and what do they deserve?”
It Asks:
“Who was harmed, what do they need, and what does it take to make things as right as possible?” (Van Ness et al. 2022).
This is a meaningful shift. Most of us grew up in institutions: schools, workplaces, families, legal institutions that default to a punitive model.
Find the person responsible, assign consequences, move on.
Restorative justice challenges that default directly. It understands harm as damage to relationships and people, not just violations of abstract rules, and it treats repair as something that requires the participation of everyone involved (Zehr 1990).
Where Does It Come From?
The term restorative justice has roots in Indigenous and community-based traditions of conflict resolution that predate Western legal systems by centuries (Van Ness et al. 2022). It entered contemporary academic and policy discourse in the ’70s and ’80s, largely through the work of Howard Zehr, whose foundational framework distinguished restorative justice from retributive justice as two fundamentally different lenses for understanding wrongdoing and cycles of violence (Zehr 1990).
The framework has since been applied well beyond criminal justice: Schools, workplaces, communities, and interpersonal relationships. It is useful wherever the goal is genuine accountability that prevents and heals cycles of violence, as opposed to approaches that favor mechanisms based in punishment and exclusion.
Restorative vs. Retributive Justice
Most institutional responses to conflict are retributive: They focus on determining guilt and assigning consequences proportional to the offence. The state, the employer, the institution becomes the central party, not the person who was actually harmed.
Restorative justice inverts this. The central questions become (Zehr 2002):
- What harm was done, and to whom?
- What are the needs that have arisen from that harm?
- Who is responsible for addressing those needs?
- How can the community support that process?
The key distinction is not leniency. Restorative justice is not about going easy on people who cause harm. It is about ensuring that accountability is real, that it involves genuinely facing what was done, understanding its impact, and taking meaningful steps toward repair — rather than simply absorbing a punishment and moving on (Zehr 2002).
The Role of Shame
This is where it gets important for a lot of us. Punitive systems are not just structured around consequences. They are structured around shame and fear.
It assumes that people and systems:
- Change for the better with sufficient negative reinforcement
- Absolution is given through penance
The problem is that shame does not work that way: not reliably, not for everyone, and rarely in situations involving systemic cycles of violence where it often makes things worse.
Brené Brown draws a distinction that matters here: guilt is the feeling that I did something bad. Shame is the feeling that I am bad (B. Brown 2010). Guilt can motivate repair. Shame tends to motivate hiding, withdrawal, defensiveness, and in people who are already carrying a lot of it, collapse.
For neurominorities, shame is rarely a fresh wound.
Many Autistic and individuals with ADHD carry years of accumulated shame from being repeatedly told that the way their nervous system works is a problem to be corrected as far as the behaviour, one’s actions, the world perceives from the outside and that the subjective consequences it has on the person’s inner world are irrelevant to the conversation.
Masking, rejection-sensitive dysphoria (RSD), and the chronic low-grade sense of being too much or not enough are all partly shame by another name.
When a punitive process adds more shame to that load, it rarely produces genuine accountability. More often than not it produces collapse, dissociation, or a defensive response that looks, from the outside, like not caring.
This then generates more consequences, which generates more shame.
Restorative justice interrupts this cycle. It is not structured around making someone feel like a bad person. It is structured around a more useful question: What happened, why, and what needs to happen now?
That is a question a person can actually engage with, including a person who is already dysregulated, burned out, or shame-saturated.
A note on accountability: Replacing shame with something more workable is not the same as removing accountability. Genuine accountability, facing impact, understanding harm, following through on repair, is more demanding than absorbing punishment and moving on. Restorative justice demands more and is not a path to absolution, but it also demands it in a form that results in sustainable change, renewed understanding, and relational healing.
Why It Matters for Neurominorities
Punitive frameworks are particularly poorly suited to situations involving disability, chronic illness, or co-occurring conditions.
When someone causes harm through a miscommunication rooted in a processing difference, a sensory response, or an executive function gap, a punitive response addresses none of the underlying conditions that produced the harm. It assigns blame to an individual for a systemic mismatch, and then applies consequences, including shame, that frequently worsen the conditions that caused the problem in the first place (Gibbs 2025).
Neurominorities are disproportionately exposed to punitive systems: in schools, workplaces, and legal institutions, and disproportionately harmed by them (L. X. Z. Brown 2016). Restorative frameworks create space for the actual conditions of harm to be named, heard, and addressed, without being satisfied by performative remorse to neurotypical observers, which is its own exhausting and often impossible task.
This is also why the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network (AWN) grounds its disability justice work explicitly in restorative and transformative justice principles: because disability justice is not complete without them (Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network 2021).
The Four Cornerposts
Van Ness and Strong identify four principles at the foundation of restorative justice practice (Van Ness et al. 2022):
Inclusion - All parties who have a stake in the harm, those who caused it, those who experienced it, and the wider community, should have the opportunity to participate in the process.
Encounter - Those involved should have the opportunity to meet, share their experiences, and ask questions when it is safe to do so.
Repair - The process should result in meaningful steps to address the harm caused: materially, relationally, or both.
Cohesion - The process should work toward reintegrating everyone involved,including those who caused harm, rather than permanently excluding them from the community.
What This Is Not
Restorative justice is sometimes misread as:
- Forgiveness without accountability. It is not. Accountability is central: defined as genuinely facing the impact of what was done, not as absorbing punishment or performing contrition.
- Mandatory reconciliation. Participation is voluntary, considering the fact that performative engagement is antithetical to the process (Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network 2021).
- A way to avoid consequences. Affected parties often have to settle for conventional punishment when restorative justice is not available. The restorative justice process is in fact typically more demanding, not less because it requires presence. It requires challenging one’s self image at the cost of pride. As opposed to mere endurance, it is based in an ethical belief system that requires relational honesty and follow-through.