Researching ‘under the radar’ practices: exploring restorative practices in sexual violence cases

Abstract

Sexual violence is a pernicious social phenomenon. The limited effectiveness of traditional justice responses has resulted in a search for alternative and innovative responses. This article highlights research and presents findings regarding one such innovative response to sexual violence: restorative justice. While the study adopted a multi-strategy research design to explore the potential of restorative justice in cases of sexual violence this article focuses in particular on one aspect of that design: a webbased survey used to map the global population of programmes engaging in these practices. The article highlights the many challenges inherent in researching emerging social responses and suggests that web-based surveys offer a means of mapping emerging or ‘under the radar’ practices and harvesting important qualitative as well as quantitative data on sensitive topics. They may be especially valuable when populations are geographically dispersed. However, tailoring survey instruments for respondents who are multi-lingual presents difficulties, particularly when the issues under investigation are linguistically and cognitively complex.