Domestic Violence and Restorative Justice: expectation of the attendants of the specialized Courts of Salvador (Bahia, Brazil)
Domestic and family violence. Violence against women. Restorative justice. Criminal law. Legal system.
This work investigates the relationship between domestic violence judicial proceedings and restorative justice. It uses a qualitative approach and descriptive statistics. The absence of essentially restorative projects in the Domestic Violence Courts in Salvador/BA, despite the energetic and growing the National Council of Justice's stimulus given, indicates the importance of the research. The study carried a brief bibliographic review, and it proceeds to the empirical part, using, as methods, questionnaires sent to the specialized Courts and the Restorative Justice Center of the Court of Justice of the State of Bahia (TJBA), as well as semi-structured individual interviews with eight employees from the multidisciplinary service teams of the judicial units. The objective was to understand, from the perspective of Symbolic Interactionism (BLUMER, 1980), how the interviewees interpret and intuit restorative justice in the field of domestic and family violence against women. We found that restorative justice was mostly demarcated as a powerful instrument that transforms the way people relate to each other in everyday life, proving to be more effective than traditional criminal justice insofar as it promotes awareness of the intricacies of gender violence. The restorative methodology was recommended for the management of these types of violence, although some reluctance when the cases refer to serious crimes or that involve conflicts between couples and ex-couples, because of sociocultural issues and the insufficiency of institutional policies aimed at the necessary rigorous cases evaluation. From the interviewees' narratives, two measures emerge as indispensable for the safe use of the restorative methodology: the allocation of public resources in the area of personnel and professional training; and the expansion and improvement of debates in the most varied spaces of power, so that restorative justice is demystified and understood in its real essence by the actors of the justice system and by society in general.