Apology–forgiveness in restorative justice: Victims’ experiences with justice-involved youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The exchange of apology and forgiveness in restorative justice is regarded as an important marker of symbolic reparation that is imbued with ritual significance. Despite this, how victims assess the sincerity of such remedial work has received limited empirical focus. It also remains unclear what role, if any, apologies play in precipitating victim forgiveness in restorative justice. The current study prioritizes victims’ experiences in Youth Justice Committees , a programme model of restorative justice in Canada, to explore the apology–forgiveness cycle. Analysis of data collected through 14 semi-structured interviews with victims who participated in 16 restorative justice programmes reveals that, for an apology to be deemed sincere, it requires the youth to accept responsibility for the harm, to express affect that conveys their recognition of the harm, and to take steps to make amends. In many instances, a sincere apology prompted forgiveness from the victim; however, the trajectory from apology to forgiveness was not always sequential. Results are discussed considering factors – such as the role of parents/guardians, age, and offence severity – that mediate the likelihood of apology and forgiveness in restorative justice programmes with justice-involved youth.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".