Mr. Speaker, restorative justice is very important, when used appropriately. Both parties, the victim and the offender, have to be willing to participate. Also, the offender has to take full responsibility for his or her actions and be willing to be accountable for what he or she did.
In this case, when an offender has sexually assaulted a young girl for over two years and is then allowed to serve his sentence at home right across from the victim, it was a revictimization of that victim over and over again.
Could members imagine what it would be like to be the parent of a child who had been sexually assaulted and watching that child go through depression and all kinds of emotional anguish? Could they then imagine realizing that he or she had been sexually assaulted by the neighbour across the street and that the courts had allowed that sentencing to happen? Restorative justice does not work in that case.