Restorative Action Alliance and its partners are passionate about addressing sexual harm while honoring the humanity of every person and seeking real solutions to make people and communities whole again.

Together we work to address:

1) Intimate and gender-based violence:

Sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, rape and assault & other types of intimate harm.

2) Ineffective approaches that our criminal legal system utilizes to address sexual harm:

Public registries, community notification, lengthy & mandatory minimum sentences, overreaching and punitive probation and parole practices, civil commitment and solitary confinement, coercive mental health treatment, proximity and housing restrictions (banishment laws), retroactively applied punishment and restriction to liberty interests.

Why is change necessary?

Rape, sexual abuse and other harms represent a public health crisis. Unfortunately, our nation's current approach to addressing sexual violence and intimate harm actually undermines our ability to hold people accountable for those offenses and prevent them in the first place. Our adversarial criminal legal system discourages people from taking real responsibility and often ignores the voices of survivors who are looking for real services, healing and hope.

As a society, we divert an enormous amount of resources and attention into systems of continuous punishment for people who have already served their sentence – with no public safety benefit, while cases of sexual abuse and rape routinely go un-investigated or unsolved.

Most people on sex offense registries do not re-offend, and other models of post-incarceration re-entry have been demonstrated to be more effective at keeping people crime-free. Our current policies force people into homelessness while stripping them of their support systems, create barriers to employment, and stigmatize people for life. Marginalized and poor communities are disproportionately affected. State-mandated violence is a human rights issue. Current policy and practice makes the clear choice to weaponize the pain of survivors for the carceral state, while ignoring their needs.

RAA supports policies that meaningfully invest our resources into practices such as restorative and transformative justice, survivor services, and primary prevention - things that will actually produce public safety, as opposed to creating a false sense of security. We approach the work through the overlapping lenses of gender, racial and economic justice.

Our aim is to work with policy makers, professionals, educators, and the public to effect change. And, when civil liberties and constitutional rights are infringed upon, our organization will seek to take action through litigation.