RT Article
T1 Moral work in victim–offender meetings
JF Criminology & criminal justice
VO 24
IS 1
SP 59
OP 78
A1 Birkbeck, Christopher
A2 Smith, Greg
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1878566369
AB Although many studies of restorative justice touch on its moral dimensions, they provide a rather fragmentary view of the moral work that takes place in meetings between victims and offenders. We treat moral work as a discursive phenomenon that emerges through the evaluative rendering of character and behaviour in extended sequences of talk. Using transcripts from four victim–offender meetings, we explore how participants work within the structural constraints of the script to develop or resist particular moral conceptions of the incident, themselves and each other. We identify the significant role of the facilitator in the construction of narratives and reflections by the offender and victim, and find that ambivalence, selective attention and persuasion all appear to be necessary for achieving the moral work implied by the script.
K1 victim–offender meetings
K1 scripts
K1 Restorative Justice
K1 Moral work
K1 Facilitators
DO 10.1177/17488958221095976