Marlee Liss gives a talk at Mt.A about her case of restorative justice in North America
“I want to live in a world where we are not so quick to give up on each other,” said Marlee Liss, opening her talk at Mt.A. According to her webpage, Liss is “an award-winning speaker, survivor advocate, somatic educator, author and Jewish lesbian sparkle-loving feminist based in what is colonially known as Toronto.”. Her talk, Restorative justice for sexual harm: why I fought for a circle, not a courtroom, was a part of the President’s Speakers Series for 2025-26 at Mt.A. Since 2019, Liss has been sharing her personal story of survival, leading her to take the route of restorative justice .
As Liss said in her talk, “restorative justice is not a one-size-fits-all approach,” but rather an attempt to achieve justice through controlled discussion, rather than punishment in order to prevent crime. According to the Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat, restorative justice is “an approach to justice that seeks to repair harm by providing an opportunity for those harmed, and those who take responsibility for the harm, to communicate about and address their needs in the aftermath of a crime.” For Liss, restorative justice provided a “version of justice that was healing” and “preventitive response to sexual violence.”.
Despite sexual violence being categorized as common, in Canada, every third woman has experienced sexual harrassment at some point in their life according to the Government of Canada There is not a working system set in place to successfully prevent it from happening. According to the Government of Canada, “the rate of self-reported sexual assault has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years,” but several cases continue to go unreported.
Liss talked about her experience of reporting an assault to the police and taking it to court, which she highlighted as one of the two options she was given by her doctor. Her second option was to return home and have her assault go unreported.
At the end of her talk, Liss raised questions for the audience, or how she named them “calls to healing and action”:
“How can we all be that one friend who asks a question of what does justice look like to you?”
“How can we pass along that gift of making sure people can turn towards themselves and get clear on what they need in order to self advocate, or better yet, get someone else to help them advocate?”
“How can we all be a person who listens when a survivor says this is what I need, even when their own biases, the system or the institution they are with says to do something else?”
“How can we all be a member of the community that refuses to be complicit with dehumanization?”
“What if we come and bring our voices together and help shift the representation around what survivors want?”
If you would like to learn more restorative justice practices in Canada, visit https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/rj-jr/index.html. If you would like to learn about restorative justice specifics in New Brunswick, visit https://www.gnb.ca/en/topic/laws-safety/courts-jails/restorative-justice.html. Additionally, there is a restorative justice society of Cumberland County, a non-profit organization that provides help related to accessing restorative justice. More information about it can be found at https://cumberlandrj.ca.