From Silence to Listening: Design and Evaluation of a Pilot Restorative Justice Project with Victims of Sexual Abuse in Educational Institutions of the Catholic Church in Navarra

Abstract

This article presents a pilot restorative justice project promoted by the Department of Migration Policies and Justice of the Government of Navarre and evaluates the experiences of its participants. The project was aimed at adults who were victims of abusive intrusions into their sexual development within Catholic religious institutions during their school-age childhood. Emerging in a context of growing social demand for truth, justice, and reparation, the initiative enabled the development of innovative restorative processes centered on the acknowledgment of harm, ethical dialogue, and the re-signification of suffering.

Through direct encounters between victims and institutional representatives of the Catholic Church, supported by an interdisciplinary facilitation team, the process created spaces for listening, emotional validation, and symbolic accountability for the harm caused to the victims. The external qualitative evaluation highlights the subjective impacts experienced by the participants, including emotional release, narrative reconstruction, and the emergence of an inner peace previously unattainable. The findings underscore the transformative potential of restorative justice as a complementary -and, in many cases, the only- path to addressing historical harms when the criminal justice system can no longer provide an adequate response.