Hey everybody. Welcome to Proxy. I'm Yo-A Shaw, your emotional investigative journalist. This week, as we work hard on episodes that will be coming out soon, we are taking the unusual step of sharing a Patreon-only bonus episode on the wider feed. This is one of my favorite bonus episodes we've made, one which

wrestles with a really challenging question. What do we do with people who've committed sexual

harm? Elisa Ackerman is a criminal justice professor, also a survivor of sexual violence.

And one day, her friend asked her to speak to a group of men

in a sex offense program. Elisa had never shared her story face-to-face with men who'd committed

rape, and she was terrified. But in the process of opening up about her experience and the men

opening up about theirs, Alyssa was able to ask questions she'd never

asked before. Like, how did they live with themselves? Did they still think about their victims?

For Alyssa, that day ended up being unexpectedly powerful in healing. And it gave her this question.

Could proxies be used in restorative justice for victims of sexual assault? Restorative justice, maybe you've heard of it, it focuses on repairing

harm done to victims rather than just punishing offenders. And one of the cornerstones of this approach

is a face-to-face meeting between the victim and offender, which with sexual assault can

obviously be retramatizing, which is one of the reasons it's generally not done. But Alyssa wanted to

see if there was a way to do it safely and responsibly.

And since that accidental proxy conversation, she's pioneered the use of proxies in restorative justice with cases of sexual harm.

She's facilitated hundreds of these conversations by now.

And she's written a book and founded

an org called Amper Sands Restortive Justice, all with the goal of preventing further sexual

violence. In this conversation, I talked to Alyssa about her work with Me Too cases in particular.

I have to say this was a challenging conversation, but also a hopeful one.

It's not often I hear about men trying to make amends in a going well.

If you want to hear more conversations like this, go to patreon.com slash proxy podcast to sign up.

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