Book review: Restorative Justice – Society’s Steady March Towards a Civilized Justice Paradigm
| Author | Tinneke Van Camp |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/02697580211052113 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
further legal reform, particularly through bolstering the coordinated community response in which
criminal justice and social services work together to assist victims of violence against women and
hold perpetrators accountable. He recommends innovative approaches to prevention and protection
services, including through the establishment of women-only police stations and collaborating
with church and civic groups to challenge tolerance for domestic violence. Perhaps most impor-
tantly, he emphasizes the need to build more diverse rural economies to end gender-based eco-
nomic inequality and provide survivors with more opportunities to enter the workforce.
In addition to the individual chapters’ strengths, the book does a fantastic job of linking the
author’s extensive review of the literature with developments in the neoliberal university, thus
making an additional contribution to Critical University Studies’ focus on how the contemporary
university shapes (and limits) knowledge production in specific ways. For example, Chapter 4
offers a powerful critique of criminology in raising the troubling fact that ‘some (maybe many)
researchers will never collect original data in their entire career’ (p. 80) and instead rely on
databases that are already often ten years out of date before they are available. Throughout the
book, DeKeseredy threads discussions of how the contemporary universi ty shapes knowledge
production. He addresses the difficulties many academics who study domestic violence face in
obtaining research funds and how the pressures to publish extensively and quickly limit the type—
and, in some instances, the quality— of work criminologists can produce.
In the interestsof full disclosure to readers, I shouldmention that I am a huge fan of DeKeseredy’s
work and that his body of scholarship has been enormously influential to my own. However, this
would not be much of a book review if I failed to note some areas for potential future exploration in
the study ofviolence against rural women.The field tends to reinforcestereotypes about rural women
as oppressed, backward, and otherwise lagging behind their urban and suburban counterparts with
respect to indices of gender inequality. Yet researchers would do well to focus more on rural
women’s tremendous resilience and how this resilience fosters unique responses to domestic vio-
lence. As womenwho, on any given day, may have to shoot a coyote who triesto get into the chicken
coop, treat familymembers at home for illnesses due to lackof adequate medical care within driving
distance and/or lack of health insurance, and determine how to salvage a failing harvest or care for
sick animals in order to ensure the family will have a food supply, rural women have to be much
more resourceful than many of theirpeers in more settled areas. Likewise, very littlework addresses
the success ruralwomen have had in workingwith police to effectively respond to domesticviolence
incidents and instead focuses on the shortcomings of these relationships. In my experience working
with rural domestic violence shelters, my colleagues could call the sheriff at any time and have a
thoughtful person-to-person conversation about a case, which speaks volumes about how rural
domestic violence organizations may, in fact, be at the forefront of anti-violence work.
As always, DeKeseredy’s work offers a major contribution to the field and should be required
reading for anyone concerned with violence against rural women.
Ezzat A Fattah, Restorative Justice – Society’s Steady March Towards a Civilized Justice Paradigm, self-published,
2019, xxiv þ191 pp. ISBN: 9781999215606 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Tinneke Van Camp, California State University, Fresno, USA.
DOI: 10.1177/02697580211052113
Book reviews 135
To continue reading
Request your trial