Abstract
Gender-based violence is a widespread global phenomenon that mostly affects women from all social sectors, ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, or ideologies in all societies worldwide. Despite the pervasiveness of gender-based violence, the responses of the adversarial criminal justice system around the world have been problematic. Based on secondary data, this study looked at the support restorative justice may provide to strengthen adversarial criminal justice in tackling gender-based violence, especially in responding to the needs of victims. Its findings prove that in gender-based violence cases that went through restorative justice processes, victims’ satisfactions were higher compared to victims whose cases went through the adversarial criminal justice processes. However, the findings also demonstrate that some scholars have been careful and, from time to time, resistant to the use of restorative justice processes in cases of gender-based violence due to the risk of domination and the reproduction of power relations. Therefore, for restorative justice to be truly successful and accepted by all, there is a need for strong procedural safeguards to be applied.
 
Keywords: Restorative Justice, Gender-Based Violence, Criminal Justice System, Victims, Adversarial Criminal Justice System