Restorative practices and domestic violence don’t always mix!
Restorative practices can have a place in addressing people who have used domestic violence, but they must be approached very differently from ordinary restorative-justice models. The central issue is safety and accountability—not reconciliation.
What restorative practice means in this context
At its best, restorative work asks the person who caused harm to move beyond:
“I’m sorry.”
and toward:
“I understand what I did, I understand the impact it had, I accept responsibility without excuses, and I am willing to demonstrate sustained behavioral change.”
For domestic violence, that means addressing the pattern of power, control, intimidation, entitlement, coercion, and responsibility rather than treating an incident as an isolated conflict between two equal parties.
The most important distinction
Restorative ≠ forgiveness.
Restorative ≠ reconciliation.
Restorative ≠ getting the victim and abuser together to talk it out.
Restorative ≠ asking the victim to participate so the perpetrator can heal.
In some circumstances, bringing a survivor and person who used violence together can actually create additional danger, intimidation, retaliation, or emotional coercion.
A restorative approach should therefore never require survivor participation and should never make the survivor responsible for the offender’s rehabilitation.
What accountability can look like
A meaningful restorative process might require the person who caused harm to:
  1. Name the behavior accurately
    • “I threatened her.”
    • “I isolated her from her family.”
    • “I monitored her phone.”
    • “I used the children to maintain control.”
Rather than:
    • “We had communication problems.”
    • “She made me angry.”
    • “Things got out of control.”
  • Stop externalizing responsibility
The critical shift is:
“She made me do it” → “I chose that behavior.”
  1. Understand the impact
This includes examining the effects on the survivor, children, family system, finances, housing, employment, psychological safety, and sense of autonomy.
  1. Examine entitlement and power
Questions might include:
    • What did I believe I was entitled to?
    • What happened when I didn’t get my way?
    • How did I respond to another person’s boundaries?
    • Did I confuse love with ownership?
    • Did I believe fear or intimidation was a legitimate way to obtain compliance?
  • Develop replacement behaviors
Accountability isn’t complete simply because someone understands what they did. They need observable alternatives for handling rejection, jealousy, anger, conflict, separation, parenting disagreements, and loss of control.
  1. Demonstrate change over time
Insight is not the same thing as behavioral change.
Someone can become extremely articulate about trauma, narcissism, attachment, anger, or abuse while continuing to abuse.
The children must be included in the analysis—even when they aren’t participants
One of the most overlooked restorative questions is:
“What did the children learn about relationships by watching me?”
Children can learn that love means control, that anger means intimidation, that apologies erase behavior, or that the person with the most power gets the final say.
Restorative work should therefore include intergenerational accountability: What must change so the behavior isn’t transmitted to the next generation?
A critical safeguard
I would be very cautious about using the word “restoration” with survivors.
The goal isn’t necessarily to restore the relationship.
Sometimes the healthiest restorative outcome is:
The survivor becomes safer and freer, the person who caused harm becomes genuinely accountable and changes his behavior, and the relationship ends.
That can still be restorative.
And for professionals working with domestic violence perpetrators, I would make one principle non-negotiable:
The measure of restoration is not whether the relationship is restored. The measure is whether the harm stops, responsibility is accepted, safety increases, and the person who caused the harm demonstrates sustained behavioral change.
That distinction is especially important in family court, custody cases, batterer intervention, and high-conflict separation, where the language of “healing,” “mutual conflict,” or “reconciliation” can sometimes obscure the underlying pattern of abuse.
Kathie Mathis, Psy.D, DD, CAMS-V, CBIF, CDVC, DV Trauma Expert, Author, Court Expert Testimony and Consultant