Helerin Välba works as a restorative justice coordinator at the Social Insurance Board in Estonia. While victim support workers have been using victim-offender mediation in Estonia for more than a decade now, children have come along only in 2020. Yet the experiences have been promising.
‘We work with many kinds of cases involving children: violence, hitting and fighting, also cases from schools like difficult relationships among children and bullying. Sometimes also cases from closed institutions and other complicated relationships,’ explains Helerin.
Annemieke Wolthuis works as a children’s rights’ consultant in the Netherlands, and is the local project coordinator for Restorative Justice Nederland, the national knowledge and invocation centre on Restorative Justice. In the Netherlands victim-offender mediation and other restorative approaches have been around since the 1990’s, as several simultaneous initiatives took place. Right from the start, many of those cases involved children.
‘Our cases can be very varied as restorative justice referrals are possible in different stages of the criminal process. We can deal with cases of theft or violence, but also with more complex case like, serious knife incidents, sexual violence, family violence and sometimes even in murder cases sufficient time after the incident when parties still have questions to the offender or to the victim on,’ explains Annemieke.
Panagiota Kanellopoulou works as Project Coordinator for the Access to Justice projects in Greece. Restorative justice is not a new legal term in Greece. It is reflected, for example, in the writings of Aristotle (‘epanorthotikon dikaion’/ ‘restorative law’). Today, Greek penal and civil law contain provisions that promote conciliation and mediation processes between offenders and victims and between the parties involved in disputes.
‘As far as Greece is concerned, the most common offences involving children are property offences, such as theft, aggravated theft, robbery, burglary etc. The second most common are offences of violence such as insulting behaviour, bodily harm etc.,’ explains Panagiota.