I met Jennifer in Medellín when she accompanied Mateo to one of his restorative justice sessions. She did not sit next to him. She chose a chair at the back of the session room, hands clasped tightly, eyes fixed on him as if watching something that could change direction at any moment. Mateo spoke calmly about his past. Jennifer listened with a tension that revealed what words had not yet surfaced. Mateo's story follows a pattern psychology knows well.
Camilo grew up surrounded by adults, yet without a stable father. His mother moved from one relationship to another, each new man arriving with promises of permanence and leaving with silence. By the time Camilo reached adolescence, he had called five different men "father," and none of them stayed. What formed inside him was not only grief, but confusion about what authority, protection, and masculinity were supposed to look like.
Her voice trembled in a way that tightened the air around us, as if the memory itself were still present in the room. She stared at the floor while describing how he threatened her into silence and how she froze, hoping someone would come, even though she already knew no one would. The next morning, she told her mother because she believed love meant protection, but instead her mother slapped her and accused her of lying.
He entered the restorative justice room with the careful steps of someone who had lived too long in survival mode. At 26, he carried the weight of a life shaped by hunger, abandonment, and the need to defend himself long before he understood his own emotions. As a teenager, he worked as a sicario in Medellín, pulled into a world where fear became currency and silence became armor.
The room carried a quiet stillness that afternoon as the young adults gathered for the restorative justice session. Their stories held old wounds, many of them shaped in childhood spaces where silence felt safer than truth. Mateo, 22 years old, entered softly and selected a seat near the edge of the circle, his posture revealing the weight of years spent swallowing words. On that day, however, he chose to speak.
The report was issued today by the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund, or LEAF, and the nonprofit Community Justice Initiatives. It says the Crown policy deprives those who have experienced sexual harm from choosing the form of justice that best fits their needs. Restorative justice is an approach that allows those harmed and those who take responsibility for said harm to reach a resolution together, typically with the help of a facilitator.
Restorative justice is a social science practice that focuses less on punitive punishment and more on communal healing. So it is asking questions about who's been harmed, what their needs are, whose responsibility it is to meet those needs, and how can relationships and trust be built and repaired in order to move forward. It also believes that punitive measures actually perpetuate harm rather than resolve the issue at hand.
About two in five people who are currently incarcerated have a history of mental illness, a rate twice as high as the national average, but data reveals that prison is designed for punishment, not care.
The face-to-face and ultimate dismissal of the criminal charges was 'based on the wishes of the victim and the defendant's willingness to make amends,' Brooklyn DA spokesman Oren Yaniv said in a statement at the time.
