High listeners, just a note that this episode involves discussions of sexual violence and trauma.

People sitting in a prison cell or being on the public registry, they don't get a lot of time to think about the impact of their behavior.

But when they are sitting face to face with a survivor who is very intimately explaining both the short and long-term impacts of sexual harm,

they have to face themselves and that's really really hard to do.

When the Me Too movement caught fire in 2017, the loudest demands centered on calling out offenders and seeing them prosecuted.

But Me Too founder, Toronto Burke has been clear that mass incarceration is not the solution.

Today's guest, Dr. Alyssa Ackerman, agrees.

Prison doesn't work. The fact of the matter is only 3% of people who commit rape will ever see a day behind bars.

And the process of going through the criminal justice system is incredibly, incredibly harmful for survivors.

They are disbelieved, they are victimized again, their entire sexual history is put on display in the courts.

So knowing all of that, we are looking for something that actually decreases harm, decreases violence, increases empathy, decreases recidivism.

And that's what we find with restorative justice.

Dr. Alyssa Ackerman is a criminal justice professor at California State University at Fullerton,

where she specializes in research on sexual violence and sex crimes policy.

She's also a pioneer in her field of resolving sexual violence through a process called restorative justice.

So ordinarily, our legal system responds to criminal behavior with three questions.

What law was broken? Who broke it? And what punishment is warranted?

But restorative justice asks, who was harmed? What are the needs and responsibilities of everyone affected?

And how can everyone involved collectively repair the harm that was done?

Basically, it's all about healing survivors, communities, and offenders.

Today, Alyssa is guiding us through the restorative justice approach to sexual violence,

what it feels like for survivors, and why it's a promising path toward preventing sex crimes in the first place.

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