Restorative Justice and the Necessity of Its Use in the Family, Relying on Jurisprudential Foundations

As a new theory in criminal justice, restorative justice pursues the goals of compensating the damages inflicted on the victims, restoring the relationship between the offenders and victims, correction and rehabilitation of offenders, and securing the interests of the local communities affected by crimes. The essence of the mentioned process on the one hand and the intrinsic necessities of family environments on the other altogether make it essential to cover family relationships with restorative justice instead of penal justice. In addition, Islam too has based its precepts on restoration and correction of family relationships. In fact, advising to form familial courts, and to establish peace, kindness, and forgiveness point to the consistence between the mentioned lessons and the indices of restorative justice. And the important point is that the main sources of jurisprudential documents used to prove the credibility of the process of restorative justice in general relate to the relationships within the family, which highlights the necessity of using it within the family. The outcome of adoption of such a perspective can help remove familial issues from the domain of criminal justice, while also convincing the legislators to replace punishment with peace-based and civil solutions in the face of familial anomalies.