Anadolu Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi Dergisi

Abstract

Sexual offences stand as a crime category that needs to be approached with significant care and attention in the conventional criminal justice system due to their devastating effects on the victim and their profound psychological consequences. By virtue of these characteristics, sexual offences require much more care and attention when it comes to the restorative justice, which appears as one of the alternatives to the conventional criminal justice system. For this reason, indeed, restorative justice practices in sexual offences are not allowed in every jurisdiction. Likewise, even in the jurisdictions that do not explicitly exclude sexual offences from the restorative justice system, restorative justice process is either not applied de facto at all or is rarely applied in these offences. In a similar vein, in Turkish criminal procedure law, despite the legislature’s tendency to increase the practice of victim-offender mediation, some difficult crime categories such as sexual offences, domestic violence and violence against women related offences as well as stalking is categorically excluded. As such, the study chases two main questions. Accordingly, the first question is whether sexual offences can be approached with a restorative justice approach or not. From that point, the study opens up the reasons as to why it is important to discuss the restorative justice approach for sexual offences too. Secondly, it shows the approach of the European Council in the Recommendation of 2021. Then it summarizes the views of both those opposing to the practice of restorative justice in sexual offences or such and those supporting the practice. After that, the study puts forward a set of possible implementation points for restorative justice in sexual offences in Turkish law, i.e., if it is possible to approach sexual offences with a restorative justice approach, and if so, what kind of restorative justice practice should be designed and carried out?