While most restorative justice research would suggest that victims and offenders are often satisfied with their experiences, the number of referrals to these type of programs remain low. This lack of accessibility was the topic of the European Forum for Restorative Justice project, ‘Accessibility and Initiation of Restorative Justice’. This article reports on the project’s findings with regard to several factors which limit greater accessibility, as supported by the attitudes of referral bodies and restorative justice practitioners examined in the frame of this project. The results of previous research and the current empirical research illustrate how accessibility is hindered by (1) lacking or insufficient restorative justice legislation, (2) exclusion criteria regarding which cases may be suitable to restorative justice procedures, (3) a lack of knowledge among legal actors, restorative justice practitioners and the general public about restorative justice and its benefits, (4) the persistence of a retributive legal culture within criminal justice and (5) a need for greater cooperation among those who are involved whether as referral bodies or mediators or facilitators. Qualitative data is presented to provide a better understanding of these elements, in addition to potential solutions that were reported by the respondents. Furthermore, the authors take a closer look at the current situation in the Netherlands, including an overview of the trainings that were developed within the Accessibility project. The results of these trainings reinforce the factors that were identified by previous research and the current empirical research, and aimed to look for solutions to the main barriers to greater accessibility.

This article stems from a practice-oriented research on restorative justice and perceptions of conflict in a poor neighbourhood in Brussels: the Anneessens district. The first part of the article focuses on the conceptual shift from a crime-oriented towards a conflict-oriented restorative justice, including the search for a user-friendly working definition of ‘conflict’. The classical restorative justice story receives a facelift in order to address metropolitan challenges. The second part analyses 41 walking interviews of residents, focusing on conflict themes and zones. The third part cautiously checks the working definition in the frame of the analysed data. A provisional conclusion entails that the notion of crime and its related meanings should not be discarded too quickly.

This article describes the European research project ALTERNATIVE, which studies the possible implementation of restorative justice approaches in intercultural conflicts. Besides theoretical research into concepts such as justice, security, conflict (transformation) and restorative justice, action-research was implemented in four diverse intercultural settings (Austria, Hungary, Serbia and Northern Ireland). In order to compare those settings, an innovative comparative research method was developed through which the various realities are ‘thickly described’ within evaluation grids. The article describes the different aspects of the research and reflects upon the question whether a more broad understanding of restorative justice, surpassing the judicial sector and aspects, is emerging.

This article considers the fundamental restorative justice principles of voluntary participation, the impartiality of the facilitator and the confidentiality of the restorative process from the point of view of participants to victim-offender mediation in Flanders, Belgium. These principles have remained relatively theoretical; little is known about how they are perceived by the participants to restorative practices. Results of our study show that whereas victims and offenders unequivocally support the principles of voluntariness and impartiality, the principle of confidentiality causes dissatisfaction and frustration when they believe it hinders the judge trying the case in court from establishing the truth about the facts.