Can face-to-face meetings between a victim and an abuser—a form of restorative justice—help a society overwhelmed with bad behavior?

What Set You Off? Didn’t You Care About Me? What Did I Do to Make This Happen? Have You Learned Anything From This? Will You Ever Change?

- By Amelia Schonbek

LATE ON A FALL afternoon ten years ago, Cheryl and Troy walked into a room and shook hands. It was a small space at the Justice Center in Portland, Oregon, almost entirely taken up by a conference table and chairs. Beads of rain covered the room’s one long window. Cheryl sat next to it so she could lookout, which helped remind her to breathe. She had barely eaten that day, just enough so she wouldn’t be sick to her stomach.

Cheryl and Troy were strangers, though, in one sense, they knew each other well. For years, Cheryl had been in a string of violent relationships, and Troy had a long history of getting drunk and abusing his partners. In 2005, he went to prison for 22 months for choking his girlfriend. Cheryl and Troy met that afternoon because both of them wanted desperately to change, yet nothing had freed them from the destructive patterns they were in. By this time, Cheryl, who was then in her 60s, had tried therapy and found it isolating to sit opposite someone who hadn’t lived through violence. And Troy, then in his 40s, attended Alcoholics Anonymous, though he sometimes struggled to accept the pain he had caused others without making excuses. After years of trying to move on from their experiences, they both discovered restorative justice, a form of conflict resolution that brings together survivors and offenders with a focus on repairing the damage done, rather than punishing the person responsible. They each agreed to participate in a practice called a surrogate dialogue.