The most common question asked of the restorative practitioner is: ‘Does it ever go wrong?’ The glib answer is: ‘No – it doesn't go wrong – unless the practitioner is at fault.’ The process of assessment should identify when a person who caused harm is asking for communication with those they harmed for the wrong reason: to threaten, manipulate or intimidate them. It should identify if communication is simply unwise, for example, reinforcing contact between someone convicted of a stalking offence and the person they are stalking. It should identify if the person harmed is unable to advocate for themselves: if they are too raw, fragile or enraged to benefit (although, in practice, those people usually deselect themselves).

Careful preparation and timing ensure that people are willing and ready and know roughly what to expect, the practitioner checking with each person: ‘How would you feel/what would you say if X said such-and-such?’ Expert facilitation keeps the process as safe as possible, with particularly careful planning (eg time out, use of a co-facilitator, extra supporters, breakout spaces) for complex and sensitive cases. Using the maxim ‘We look for repair, and in doing so, we cause no further harm’, the restorative practitioner simply doesn't risk bringing people together in one room if, somewhere in their gut, they feel that it could go either way. Down (the empathy scale) is not an option.

Some services rule out certain categories of crime, asserting that it isn't safe to bring people together in cases involving, for example, rape, murder, hate crime or domestic violence. There may certainly be stronger dynamics of manipulation, control and denial coming from the person responsible in such cases, demanding particular care in establishing their motives, although the literature contains plenty of examples of successful meetings. An argument against excluding offence categories from a restorative service is that, in most of these cases, the people were previously known to one another, and are likely to meet one another again anyway – sooner or later. How much better for that first encounter to be at a carefully managed meeting rather than a random bumping into one another on a street corner. And as Claire Chung said to me, reflecting on her meeting with the man who raped her: “If not an offer of restorative justice, what else? Victims may currently feel they have nothing else.”