When seeking justice, the people most affected should be given a chance to have a say in what happens. So we engage the offender, the victim, their supporters, and other community members in a process that asks:
Sometimes we hear that this process is simply a “common sense” approach to
working with crime in communities. This is true, but working through the concepts
of harm, needs, and repair in an explicit way means that we draw a direct line
between the event of crime and the people who were affected, rather than between
the event of crime and the laws or rules that were broken.