Restorative justice, sexual violence and avoiding writing about Russell Brand.

Statue of Lady Justice

This week we released an episode of The Sacred podcast, which I host, with Thordis Elva¹. Thordis is informed and fascinating on many things, but lives with the strange situation of being most well known for the worst thing that ever happened to her. When she was 16 she was raped by her first boyfriend. Many years later, in an attempt to get out from under the trauma that event caused, she got in touch with him. To her surprise, he responded. He immediately accepted responsibility and expressed deep contrition. Their correspondence and later meeting were captured in a book, South of Forgiveness, and a TED talk, together, Our Story of Rape and Reconciliation which has had more than six million views.

The man who raped Thordis Elva, and later wrote a book and shared a stage with her is called Tom Stranger. It was the sections from his perspective in the book which leapt off the page at me. Thordis is wonderful - persuasive and articulate and morally courageous, but the rarity of hearing directly from an admitted perpetrator means it will always stand out. He unpacks how he had been haunted by his actions that night, living in denial about what he had done, running from the memory into risky behaviours and self-medication. His sense of self (a young man from a “good family”, with friends who thought him a decent person) had a yawning black hole at the centre. Given the numbers of people who experience sexual assault or rape (1.1 million UK adults in 2021-2022 according to the ONS ) there must be a lot of men (and a much smaller number of women) with a story like Tom’s in their history. A lot of people who, if they were honest about their past, would become a pariah.

Thordis’s decision to include Tom’s voice, to tell their story together, has received a lot of criticism, as has her forgiveness of him. Her perspective is nuanced - she is clear that each survivor must forge their own path of healing, and perpetrators should not profit from speaking of their crimes. Tom has been unwaveringly clear about the seriousness of his actions and his own responsibility for them, and I think sees speaking out as part of his penance. His hope is that other “good guys” will not live in denial about the consequences of their violence.

They both, still, are attacked for the choice. But as Thordis said to me, we have rapists on our stages and televisions, anyway. They are just not admitting to it, or trying to make amends. She argues that if we do not seek to understand the causes from the perspective of those courageous enough to admit their wrongdoing, we can’t engage in active prevention. It is precisely this lack of curiosity which has led women to unjustly bear the burden of causality. She asks in her book “How can we recognise the damage done in human societies by sexual violence if we refuse to recognise the humanity of those who commit it?”.

As I was listening to Thodis and Tom’s story, I was thinking about how it echoed the principles of Restorative Justice. Remarkably, Thordis was following an instinct about what she needed for her own healing when she started a correspondence with Tom, but the organic process that unfolded shares many similarities.

“Restorative justice brings those harmed by crime or conflict and those responsible for the harm into communication, enabling everyone affected by a particular incident to play a part in repairing the harm and finding a positive way forward.”

It is often held up as an alternative to retributive justice, which focuses on punishment of the offender. It is always voluntary (on both sides) and often facilitated to ensure encounters feel safe and productive. It is founded on the principles that crime breaks relationships and communities, and that the healthiest way forward for everyone is not to cast perpetrators into outer darkness, but to give them a (costly, difficult) route to reintegration by repairing the harm they have caused. I have always been drawn to it because it carries an implied anthropology about criminals: that they are not some other, inhuman, class but are capable of taking responsibility. That ultimately, people can change. It’s origins are traced to various indigenous approaches to justice (especially amongst communities native to the US and New Zealand), but I find it also echoes what I see in my tradition by holding together justice and love. The tough edges of Christianity claim that injustice is never overlooked, that the harm we cause others is seen, that those who are violated and despised and humiliated matter. My scripture looks unflinchingly at our darkness and does not seek to explain it away. This is why I find the concept of sin so counter-culturally helpful. But my tradition also, perhaps even more uncomfortably, says no act and no person is irredeemable. Restorative justice seems to me a potential practical outworking of those principles.

While making The Sacred, I live with each guest and each interview for quite a long time, in prep and editing and reflecting and promoting. And so all these thoughts have been front and centre for me over the summer. Part of my mental background has been this main point: we have to resist the temptation to cast rapists as inhuman monsters. Put (uncomfortably) bluntly: rapists are humans. It is only when we treat them as such, as able to take responsibility for their actions, make amends and change, that we make rape less likely.

Into that mental space came the allegations against presenter, influencer and writer Russell Brand. If you are not in the UK, you may not have a sense of what a huge story it has been. “I always knew he was a wrong’un” takes abound, and those claiming a conspiracy against him. We have seen much hand wringing about how the Hostile Environment for women which defined the nineties entertainment industry was so readily accepted. I have watched all this unfold and held my tongue. I did not want to add my hot take into the noise, to loudly denounce or loudly defend or claim I knew it all along.

But the timing with Thordis’s interview is too strange. Putting out a podcast in which a key message is “the challenge to see rapists as human” felt insensitive, and yet pushing it back felt wrong too. It’s not as if sexual violence is more or less of a reality this week than any other. Thordis story is her story, and I didn’t want this man to suck all the oxygen out of it.

I was also pondering a minor connection with my own past. In 2019 I was a guest on Brand’s podcast, Under the Skin. The invitation came out of the blue. I had no idea what he wanted to talk about. A friend, a woman in comedy, balked at the news, surprising me with the depth of her distaste. I wasn’t especially drawn to Brand either, having written him off as a narcissistic clown, but in the lead up men I knew and trusted told me how much his writing, especially about recovery, had helped them. How someone wrestling honestly with their demons in public, and trying to be a better, kinder, less selfish man had inspired them. With these mixed impressions, I showed up at the studio in his garden somewhere west of London. We had a very intense conversation, in which we mainly, much to my surprise, spoke about the radical call of my tradition and the relief I find in grace. I found myself in response to his seemingly genuine and urgent curiosity, being more explicit about why I think Jesus offers freedom than I think I have ever been in public before or since. It was stimulating and liberating.

Afterwards, I wrote a piece, entitled How Russell Brand Won me Round, which I have been half expecting someone to find and fling in my face. It starts with a (now) blackly comic line: “I have a background in radio and television, where Brand’s reputation, especially amongst women, is poor.” It details why I think that someone who had been steeped (by his own admission) in an entitled, dysfunctional and aggressive masculinity might be exactly the right messenger, post recovery, to help other men move away from that toxic soup. And it ends on a hopeful, wistful note about the possibility of change.

I obviously have complex feelings about that piece now. Listening to Thordis’ story has helped crystallise something I’d never noticed. The recovery methodology, the 12 Steps which Brand has written about so compellingly, also echoes restorative justice principles. It encourages addicts to be honest about the harm they have caused, take responsibility, and make amends. Or as Brand paraphrased: “Prepare to apologise to everyone affected by your being so f*cked up…Now apologise. Unless that would make things worse”.

The idea that an apology could make up for a rape is ridiculous, of course. Sexual violence of any kind leaves a long tail of trauma. Still, though, Thordis left me wondering whether - even typing this feels risky- restorative justice could be a more common way forward. Retributive justice is so clearly not working in many situations of sexual violence anyway. It is such a hard crime to prove, often committed in private, without witnesses, leaving physical evidence too similar to consensual sex to be definitive. Women know the hurdles, the chance reporting will just retraumatise them, the low odds of a conviction.

I do not have to decide if the allegations against Brand are true. The reporting seems credible, and what he has already said about his own past is congruent with them, but, like most of us, I will never know. That is between Brand and the women involved, him and (if it comes to this) the justice system, him and (I believe) God. My tradition leads me to expect soul-darkness, in myself and others, but also says “judge not, lest you be judged”, a statement that sounds a lot more controversial in some contexts than others, a lot more forceful than the easy, breezy phrase “no judgement”. It implies, in the words of this exquisite, horrifying song about a serial killer, John Wayne Gacey Jr by Sufjan Stevens

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floor boards
For the secrets I have hid

I am more interested in the wider questions: can we change? Can even those who commit sexual violence change? And what might make that more likely? The repentance Tom Stranger demonstrates seems genuine. Because of Thordis’ courage and moral vision, because she has worked on her self sufficiently to be able to say “There is nothing in the human condition [I] cannot relate to. That is when it becomes impossible to judge”, he was offered a way out of his tortured self-hatred and denial. He has been able to go through the fire of taking responsibility, seeking to make amends and has even found some peace. I will never cease to be impressed by them both.

I do think people can change. My unease with the piece I wrote in 2019 is because I don’t know if I was duped, whether the change I thought I saw in that case was genuine. If the spiritual rigour of the recovery process had really worked some restorative justice. I don’t know what private repentance may have occurred, what attempts to repair. If the allegations are true, seemingly not enough.

Ultimately, restorative justice only works if perpetrators are prepared to tell the truth, to themselves and others, and that, of course, is a terrifying thing to do (with potential legal consequences). There are many reasons that is currently unlikely. I’m left wondering if holding on to the conviction that even rapists are human and that they can change, by offering restorative justice pathways, might tip those scales a tiny bit. Not all survivors will want to, or should feel in any way compelled to take this pathway, but for some it might be (as it was for Thordis) the path of healing. Not least because it allows them to confront the perpetrator with the impact of their crime, with no expectation that they will forgive the person who harmed them. In a Ministry of Justice evaluation, restorative justice programmes (not just for crimes of a sexual nature) were found to reduce reoffending by 14%, and 85% of victims were satisfied by the process. Only 2% said it made them feel worse.

It is hard to hold love and justice with equal seriousness, to avoid the temptation to either downplay the impact of our harms or the possibility of restoration. It feels like a tight rope, for a human being at least. But sexual violence is too big a problem for us not to at least consider different paths. I don’t think things change though denial and hiding. Only truth frees.

Image: iced mocha, Shutterstock

1. I make The Sacred with and for Theos, but this newsletter is all my own - as are, it goes without saying, all my views, wherever you find them.