Interviews

5.3.2.1 Recruitment of participants

In this case study, the potential interviewees were a small group of people. All potential interviewees were invited to participate. No sampling method was applied. The potential interviewees can be categorised into four groups who were involved in the restorative justice practice for domestic violence in the Initiative: (a) criminal justice officers: including officials at the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), and probation officers and prosecutors at the two District Prosecutors Offices; (b) restorative justice practitioners: including case managers, supervisors, and facilitators; (c) victims and (d) offenders. The interview recruitment started from Project A from January 2011 to March 2011, involving the four groups of interviewees. In the second phase of data collection, from October 2011 to December 2011, the recruitment proceeded in Project B. In Project B only criminal justice officers and restorative justice practitioners were available for interview. This was because the policy of the Ministry of Justice was altered at the later time, forbidding other research48 directly involving participation of victims and offenders involved in the Initiative. The Ministry’s official declaration was explained

48 _{With regard to the operation of the Taiwan Restorative Justice Initiative, the Ministry of Justice had}

commissioned the evaluation work to a research team composed of restorative justice scholars in Taiwan.

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in terms of the need to protect privacy. Thus, there were no interviews with victims and offenders in Project B. In the third phase of data collection, in August 2012, the interview recruitment proceeded at the Ministry of Justice, where officials were invited to share their work and opinions with regard to Projects A and B.

Interviews with participants and practitioners were mainly invited by the researcher directly via phone or email. To the group of criminal justice officers, the invitation was mostly made through the head prosecutor of the Section for the Protection of Women and Children in two local jurisdictions. The recruitment had a fairly satisfactory outcome for the three groups of restorative justice practitioners, victims, and offenders49. By comparison, in the group of criminal justice officers, there were fewer prosecutors willing to participate in the research, as seen in Table 5.2.

49 _{The high response rate could be attributed to the endorsement of the justice agencies of this research}

and the researcher’s voluntary work in Organisation A, which helped potential interviewees develop basic trust in this research and the researcher. While inviting potential interviewees to participate in this research, the researcher stressed that future restorative justice implementation desperately needs their thoughts and comments on the restorative justice processes they were involved in. Over half of the potential interviewees were happy to share their own experiences, either good or bad. Other potential interviewees were afraid that they might not have enough ‘correct knowledge’ of restorative justice to share. But such hesitation was all successfully resolved by the researcher’s encouragement that what they thought and felt was more important to this research than what might be correct.

In the meantime, the researcher assured potential interviewees that participation in this research is voluntary and that their participation and information will be kept confidential and anonymous. Particularly to safeguard the voluntariness of victims’ and offenders’ participation, the researcher clarified that whether they participate in this research or not will not be known by others, including the justice agencies and practitioners. A few practitioners were worried about what they said in the interview may hurt their personal reputation or the reputation of their affiliated institution. In response to their concerns, recording was stopped for a period of time in the interview. An interview recording and an interview transcript were given to them afterwards. No further questions were raised.

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Table 5.2 Recruitment of interview participants

Number of expected interviews Number of Completed interviews

Reasons for unsuccessful recruitment Criminal justice officers Officials at the MOJ 3 1 Unwillingness Prosecutors 22 4 Unwillingness Probation officers 3 3 - RJ practitioners Case managers 2 2 - Facilitators/ supervisors 12 11 No response

Offenders in Project A 15(a) 10 One offender declined the invitation; three offenders could not be reached; one offender was incapable of speaking due to inherent disabilities.

Victims in Project A 16(b) 14 One victim declined the invitation; one victim could not be reached.

Total 45

Note: (a) There were nineteen cases referred to Jurisdiction A during their first 10-month experiment. Fifteen cases entered the restorative justice process, with fourteen cases finalised with agreement and one case dropped (see Table 5.1). This dropped case was handled more intensively by the facilitator and was provided with subsequent services and long-term care by the case manager. For this reason, the dropped case was included in the expected interviews. (b) Within these expected fifteen cases (of sixteen interviewees), one case involved two accusations concerning three persons: a man was the victim of the first accusation and also the offender of the second. This man was identified as a victim here for two reasons: (1) He was physically harmed to a certain degree. (2) According to this man’s victim, he scarcely hurt her. She reported that the accusation against him was made with the intention of forcing him to quash the first accusation, which was against her brother.

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5.3.2.2 Participants

There were a total of 45 participants in this research, including eight criminal justice officers, thirteen restorative justice practitioners from two local projects, and fourteen victims and ten offenders from Project A. The majority of participants were females. Among the group of offenders, most were men.

The group of criminal justice officers was concentrated in the age group from 30 to 50. Such a distribution was slightly different from the age distribution for the group of restorative justice practitioners, which was bimodal. There was a younger age group (30 to 40 years) and an older age group (50 to 60 years), with two case managers belonging to the younger age group and most facilitators belonging to the older age group. Victims and offenders were aged from 23 to 72. Within the oldest age group, domestic violence involved father and son or mother and daughter-in-law and did not occur in a marital relationship. Table 5.3 shows the details.

It also can be seen from Table 5.3 that before joining this Initiative, all these criminal justice officers and restorative justice practitioners had been working with victims or/and offenders of domestic violence cases. To the restorative justice practitioners, a certain portion of their previous work related to domestic violence while they acted as mediators in the family court, social workers or counsellors. It is also worth noting that within the most experienced group of restorative justice practitioners, five out of nine were deeply dedicated to working in the field of domestic violence.

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Table 5.3 Demographics of interview participants

Criminal justice officers RJ practitioners Victims Offenders Gender Female 8 10 11 3 Male - 3 3 7

Age (years old) 20-30 - - 2 1

30-40 4 5 6 3

40-50 4 1 2 4

50-60 - 7 2 1

> 60 - - 2 1

Working with victims or/and offenders of domestic violence

< 1 year - 1 2-5 years 5 3 > 5 years 3 9

Note (a): Most of the interviewees were Taiwanese; but a number of victims and offenders were of other original nationalities. One female victim and one female offender were from Vietnam; two female victims were from Mainland China; and one male offender was from Thailand. All of these female interviewees of different nationalities first came to Taiwan for arranged marriages. A third wave of cross-national marriages in Taiwan started in 1990 and was an attractive option for certain groups of Taiwanese men, particularly those who were disadvantaged in the marriage ‘market’ by intellectual, physical, or economic conditions or by age.

Note (b): All the RJ practitioners took restorative justice basic or/ and advanced training courses delivered by the Centre for Restoration of Human Relationships (CRHR) from Hong Kong.

The interviewee groups of victims and offenders had a number of criminal accusations made against them, including offences of violation against a protection order, causing bodily harm, abandonment, offences against reputation and credit, abduction, and offences against public safety. The 14 victims who were interviewed came from 13 cases. Some cases contained more than one accusation so that accusations exceeded in number the cases involved in the study and victims interviewed. Table 5.4 shows the breakdown of offence type for the 18 accusations.

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Table 5.4 Information of interview cases

Offence type Number of accusations

Relationship between victim and offender

Violation of protection order 7 5 between married couples; 1 between father and son; 1 between mother and daughter-in-law Causing bodily harm 5 4 between married couples; 1

between bothers in law Abandonment 3 between married couples Offences against reputation and

credit

1 between mother and daughter-in-law Abduction 1 between a married couple

Offences against public safety 1 between a married couple

Total 18 -

Only half of the victims (7/14) lodged their cases with the accusation of violation against a protection order. Through interviews, it was found that the other half of the victims included two victims whose protection orders had expired, three victims who had never experienced severe domestic violence in the past, and two victims who had filed cases with other accusations: one was the offence of abduction50, and the other was the offence of damage to reputation and credit51. Most of the cases were between married couples. Even in the remaining cases where the offences happened between in-laws or blood relatives, spousal conflicts or violence were lurking in these families and sometimes incubating the offences between in-laws or blood relatives, according to interview findings.

50

In the abduction case, the female offender was a victim of spousal violence in the past. Her husband had intermittent drinking problems and in order to have her children properly cared for while she was working away from home, she took her children back to Vietnam, leaving her husband angry.

51 _{The case of offenses against reputation and credit took place in a constant discordant relationship}

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5.3.2.3 Semi-structured interviews

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four groups of interviewees: criminal justice officers, restorative justice practitioners, victims, and offenders. A core set of interview questions were put to all four groups. Themes included: (1) their perception of domestic violence, such as the explanation for domestic violence, depiction of victims and offenders (or depiction of themselves and the other party), and appropriate treatment or sanctions imposed on victims and offenders (or appropriate treatment or sanctions imposed on themselves and the other party); (2) personal information, such as age, gender, the information about the offence, length of domestic violence/conflicts that they were dealing with. Professionals were also asked about the length and extent of their work experiences in the field of domestic violence.

Two additional themes were introduced in interview questions for victims and offenders. These regarded victims’ or offenders’ participatory experiences of the restorative justice project, and their feedback on the process and outcome, and on the work of criminal justice officers and restorative justice practitioners.

Special interview themes with criminal justice officers and restorative justice practitioners were their work experiences in the restorative justice project, such as their working approaches, the principles or goals they valued, challenges faced, or expectations they had for restorative justice practices in domestic violence. As the interviews with these two groups of interviewees were being conducted, two new interview themes emerged. The groups of criminal justice officers and restorative justice practitioners were invited to share how they considered the similarities or differences between restorative justice and their previous working approaches for domestic violence. They were also asked about their partnership with other implementation team members, at the individual and institutional levels.

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5.3.2.4 Procedures

Interviews were in both Chinese and Taiwanese because Taiwanese was a more common dialect used in the local communities52. The interviews with the criminal justice officers and restorative justice practitioners were mostly done at their work places; the interviews with the victims and offenders were half done at their home and half done elsewhere53, depending on their preference. Sometimes, when the interview was conducted at the interviewees’ home, the interviews involved other family members who had been invited to be present by the interviewees.

Due to variation in the processing of referred cases, victims and offenders were interviewed one to eight months after their cases were finalised. But victim(s) and offender(s) associated with the same case were interviewed within a couple of weeks of each other54.

Most of the interviews were tape-recorded; two out of a total of 45 interviews relied on notes because these two victims doubted the protections for taped interview data. They were afraid that the recordings could become evidence against them in future lawsuits. Among these 45 interviews, the longest interview lasted two and half hours, the shortest half an hour, with an average interview length of 69 minutes.