It has been shown in other countries that victims who voluntarily participate in diversion programmes such as victim-offender mediation or conferencing often report a higher satisfaction with these types of processes than they do with the outcomes reached in the mainstream criminal justice system. These are all the reasons why those working in the area regard diversion as a good idea, and why it is a central aspect of the draft Child Justice Bill that will serve before the South African Parliament this year. However, we need to realise that when we take children out of the criminal justice system to give them a chance, or to work with them in ways that we believe may have more impact on them, we also remove them from a system with finely-tuned procedural safeguards. The criminal justice system has, over hundreds of years, developed rules which ensure that offender s rights are restricted only according to firmly enforced procedures. We must also realise that involving communities in justice processes and outcomes does not automatically mean that the results will be more restorative.
Communities are capable of very retributive actions.
We therefore need to build in measures to re-educate communities, and processes involving communities must be carefully managed and monitored. Having accepted that diversion entails a certain amount of risk, we, as professionals working in the field, must ensure that any possible risks to the rights of offending children are managed and contained. The draft Child Justice Bill sets out a number of provisions to do exactly that. Firstly, the Bill has certain rules about referral of children to diversion, to ensure that children s rights are protected, and that they are not coerced into opting for diversion. No child may be excluded from a diversion programme owing to an inability to pay any fee required for such program me.