Charting progress, mapping the future: Restorative justice in South Africa

This publication is based on a project that sought to document current projects implementing restorative justice in South Africa; as is the case in many other countries, a number of significant attempts have been, made in this regard since the early 1990s. But what concrete progress has been made? Who is delivering direct restorative justice services to victims and offenders? What are the scope and quality of these services? What are the issues faced by these service providers? And who can the experiences of other countries help us respond to these and other similar, frequently-raised questions ? These were the kinds of question that the authors set out to try and answer in carrying out this project. The bulk of the text is found in Chapter Four, which contains a report from all of the more than sixty projects that were identified as relevant to the study. The reports are presented provincially, with a provincial summary at there end of each province's reports. Chapter Five presents some conclusions drawn from these reports, which are organised according to the various sectors surveyed, namely, probation services, correctional services, civil society (at the pre-trial, pre-sentence and post-sentence levels), traditional leaders, victim support services, child care work, and family law It is concluded that there are some pockets of good activity, but that these fall far short of addressing the actual need. Furthermore, efforts are seriously hampered by the fact that there are no proper arrangements for funding these services. The authors seek to place these conclusions within two current international debates judges as critical to the context in South Africa, those of practice standards and the respective roles of government and civil society. They end with some recommendations aimed at mainstreaming restorative justice.