In a recent ABA Journal essay, former sex crimes prosecutor, Brittney Frey, reflects on her own experience seeking accountability for child sexual abuse outside of the criminal legal system.
What makes the piece compelling is not simply that a survivor chose a restorative path but that she did so after years of working inside the very system most of us assume is the only option.
She describes the tension between her professional identity and her personal needs. As a prosecutor, she advocated for registries and prison sentences.
As a survivor, she found herself wanting something different: dialogue instead of testimony, a full accounting instead of an adversarial contest, community presence instead of isolation.
As Howard Zehr, one of the founders of the modern restorative justice movement, has written, the criminal system tends to ask:
• What law was broken?
• Who broke it?
• What do they deserve?
A restorative framework shifts the inquiry:
• Who was harmed?
• What do they need?
• Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?
The difference is not semantic. It reflects two fundamentally different understandings of justice: one centered on punishment, the other on repair and repair and prevention.
The piece also highlights a structural gap. When the author inquired about restorative justice through official channels, she encountered a lack of infrastructure and, in many cases, categorical exclusions for sexual harm cases. In other words, even when survivors seek alternatives, those pathways are often unavailable.
We do not read this essay as an argument to eliminate the criminal system. Rather, it is a reminder that one system cannot meet all needs. Many survivors decline to report. Others report and leave feeling unheard. The binary choice of prosecution or do nothing leaves too many without the options they want.
The larger question raised by the article is not whether restorative justice is “soft” or “hard” on crime. It is whether we are willing to expand our understanding of accountability beyond punishment alone. If our ultimate goal is prevention, stopping future harm and strengthening families and communities, then we must build processes that address relational damage, not only legal violation.
Survivors and their families deserve more than a single path.