Putting the child harmed at the centre of the response to harmful sexual behaviour in schools
The Olive Tree Project exists so that when harmful sexual behaviour happens at school, the child harmed has real voice and choice in what happens next. It's a pilot program supporting restorative justice processes, designed to supplement, not replace, existing responses. Led by OneResolve in collaboration with partner organisations, the project takes a children's rights approach that puts young people's agency and voice first, supports safety and promotes dignity-driven accountability responses, and runs across a two-year period of development, delivery and evaluation.
Born out of The Continuum Project
The Olive Tree Project grew directly out of The Continuum Project, which examined how schools respond to harmful sexual behaviour, with its restorative justice section authored by Anna Tydd. What it found about restorative justice is what shaped the pilot you see today.
The research found that a criminal justice response, on its own, does little to address the underlying causes of young people's harmful sexual behaviour, and is limited in its capacity to deliver a meaningful sense of justice to the person harmed, leaving many people who go through it unsatisfied. It also found that a children's rights approach, giving young people real agency and voice in how harm is addressed, aligns closely with restorative justice principles, and that no established restorative justice scheme existed anywhere in Australia specifically for harmful sexual behaviour occurring in schools.
That gap, and a clear framework for how a school-based restorative response could work safely, without ever replacing a school's core safety obligations, became the evidence base and the objectives that The Olive Tree Project was built to put into practice.
A crisis playing out largely without adult support
Young people are navigating rapidly evolving social, relational, technological and political contexts, often without adult guidance. Against a backdrop of normalised gendered violence, harmful sexual behaviour between young people is far more prevalent than most adults realise, and it carries real consequences for everyone it touches.
Schools are left to balance safety, accountability, repair and reintegration, often with approaches that were never designed for this. We need responses that address the impact of harm, are genuinely just, avoid shaming, and actually shift the dynamics that allow this behaviour to continue.
Every child's needs, at the centre
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child prioritises children's agency and voice, the ability to express, understand and have their needs met. That principle sits at the heart of restorative justice, and at the heart of this project.
We also know that punitive, exclusionary systems tend to compound trauma and increase risk, rather than resolve it: research consistently shows the large majority of children in detention have already experienced multiple traumatic events in their lives (Malvaso et al., 2022). Punitive, incarceration-focused approaches also directly undermine the prevention, early intervention and community safety outcomes governments are trying to achieve (Save the Children [54 Reasons], 2023). The 2022 National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children recommends restorative justice be made available to young people and children who have experienced violence, where appropriate. In 2025, the Australian Law Reform Commission went further, recommending legislative and funding reform to make restorative justice genuinely accessible to people who've experienced sexual violence, recommendations this project is helping put into practice.
Five commitments guiding this work
Promote health and wellbeing
Create a transparent, efficient pathway for addressing harmful sexual behaviour that complements schools' legal, regulatory and investigative responses, and build trauma-informed practices that centre the needs of the student(s) harmed, their families and carers, and the wider school community.
Provide access to real support
Connect all students, including the student(s) responsible for the harm, with appropriate support to address the underlying causes of the behaviour.
Support ongoing safety
Contribute to the assessment, understanding and support of the ongoing safety needs of students impacted by harmful sexual behaviour.
Build capability in schools
Provide knowledge, skills and training for school leadership and staff, so schools can support students and their communities through restorative engagements and processes.
Offer skilled, independent facilitation
Deliver a trauma-informed, culturally responsive restorative process, facilitated by external, independent and skilled restorative practitioners, in response to complex situations involving harmful sexual behaviour.
Why restorative justice offers something different
Restorative justice is provided in a school context only after police and other reporting obligations have been met, and where students don't want, or can't pursue, a criminal justice response, or where one has already concluded. Instead of a criminal justice response, restorative justice responses can provide a more participatory, trauma-responsive pathway that centres the needs and voices of people harmed, supports meaningful accountability, and enables those affected to participate in shaping repair and future safety.
Restorative justice
- Sees wrongdoing as harm done to people, relationships and communities, not just a violation of rules.
- Is concerned first with repairing the harm that's been caused.
- Puts the people most affected at the centre of defining what justice and repair look like.
Criminal justice
- Treats wrongdoing as an offence against the state and the law.
- Is focused on determining guilt and imposing punishment.
- Often leaves the person harmed without a meaningful role in shaping the outcome.
Restorative justice is one option among many, not the only answer
This project doesn't assume that a facilitated dialogue, or restorative justice at all, is what every person needs. The child harmed, the child responsible, other children affected, and the wider school community and families around them can need very different things, and what's genuinely helpful has to be worked out with them, not decided in advance.
Therapeutic support
Advocacy
Criminal justice
Restorative processes
Community care
Changing the conditions that allow harm
The question guiding all of it is the same: how do we respond with greater safety, dignity and care? Where a restorative process is the right fit, there's no fixed template, engagement is shaped around what's actually needed, which can include parents, and can contribute directly to safety planning centred on a student's needs. No single approach is the answer for everyone.
Scope & eligibility
What's in scope
A targeted program using restorative justice practices in schools, taking a children's rights approach. The behaviour must include harmful sexual behaviour, though the response may also address associated harms, primarily student-to-student. All students involved must be school-aged, and the process can involve students from different participating schools.
When a referral proceeds
Only when engaging in a restorative process will be safe for everyone involved. Referrals are considered after the harm has been reported to police, and where the student(s) harmed do not want to pursue, or cannot pursue, a criminal justice response, or where that process is already complete. Every referral is assessed case by case.
The response pathway
Each stage is paced to the people involved, timing varies considerably depending on how many participants there are and how ready each person is to move forward.
Referral & intake: child harmed
A referral is received and assessed against eligibility: is this within scope for the project?
Initial suitability assessment
Intake appointments are held with the student(s) harmed and their support people, to explore their willingness and suitability to participate.
Invitation to the child responsible
If assessed as safe and appropriate, an invitation is extended in a format suited to the context, through professional supports, or community and family connections.
Intake: child responsible
Intake appointments are held with the student(s) responsible for harm and their support people, to assess willingness and suitability.
Preparation meetings
Often the longest stage. Individual preparation meetings, sometimes running over several months, explore the goals of the person harmed, support the responsible student's steps toward meaningful accountability, and continually reassess readiness, suitability and safety.
Facilitated dialogue or restorative engagement
Independent facilitators support a facilitated dialogue (in person, shuttled, or online), a shared recorded video, or a letter exchange, whatever best fits the needs and safety of those involved. This may lead to an agreement setting out commitments for how to be in shared spaces going forward.
Post-process reflection
Facilitators meet with participants to debrief and reflect on how the process went.
Independent evaluation
Participants, and others in the school community involved in responding to harmful sexual behaviour, are invited to share their experience through a de-identified survey and, potentially, an interview.
The role of parents and guardians
Parent and guardian consent and support matter deeply to this work: they help build the safety and stability a restorative process needs in order to progress. That support is built through genuine engagement, trust and rapport with parents and guardians, starting with how information is shared from the very first conversation about a referral, and continuing all the way through to the end of the process. But how much a student wants their parents or guardians directly involved in the process itself is guided by the student: engagement with parents is shaped around what the young person needs and wants, so the process stays child-focused throughout.
We also recognise how significant, and often distressing, this experience can be for parents and guardians in their own right: learning that your child has been harmed, or that your child is responsible for harming someone else, can be one of the hardest things a parent or guardian faces. A parent or guardian's role in relation to the harm, whether they're supporting a child who was harmed or a child responsible for harm, is something we take into account throughout, including in decisions about whether, and how, they might take part in a restorative conversation, dialogue or circle themselves.
What justice can look like
People are different, but survivors of sexual harm who choose to engage in a restorative process often express one or more of these needs.
| Need | What it means |
|---|---|
| Voice | To be able to tell their story in their own words, and be heard. |
| Validation | To be believed, and to have their experience acknowledged. |
| Information | The ability to ask questions of the person responsible for displaying harmful sexual behaviour, to make sense of what happened. |
| Accountability | To have the person responsible for displaying harmful sexual behaviour take responsibility in active, meaningful ways, apology, acknowledgement, or actions of repair. |
| Relationships | The ability to repair or reset relationships that have been affected, including new agreements about how to be in shared spaces, particularly at school. |
| Prevention | To play an active role in making sure the person responsible has learned from the harm, and that others don't experience the same thing. |
| Resolution | To feel that their needs, in relation to the harm, have genuinely been met. |
What accountability offers the child responsible
Young people who display harmful sexual behaviours experience a range of contexts and needs, including their own histories of abuse or neglect, exposure to harmful gender norms, and developmental challenges. While many young people who display harmful sexual behaviours struggle to understand and name the impacts of their behaviours on others, many feel shame, guilt or regret at having acted in ways that don't align with who they want to be. Restorative justice treats every participant with dignity and respect, while ensuring no further harm occurs.
Harmful sexual behaviour sits on a continuum, not a single fixed category, and the earlier a concerning pattern is interrupted along that continuum, the better the outcome for the child responsible, and for anyone else who could be harmed by it continuing or escalating. A restorative approach supports that early interruption by centring the child's own autonomy: rather than a young person simply complying with an outcome imposed on them, the process centres meaningful accountability, genuine acknowledgment, and commitments that the child or children responsible make themselves, about how they want to realign their behaviour with their own values and sense of who they want to be. That self-directed change is itself a prevention tool, reducing the risk of the behaviour escalating or happening again.
Through the process, a young person responsible for harm may come to acknowledge what they did and offer a genuine apology or expression of empathy; build a clearer understanding of what led to their behaviour and its impact; commit to acting in line with their own values and hopes for the future; and take real steps toward repairing relationships that matter to them.
Collaboration, funding & evaluation
Collaboration
We work alongside the Weaving Repair Project (Open Circle), based at RMIT's Centre for Innovative Justice, a parallel restorative justice program addressing harmful sexual behaviour occurring in a familial context. Current joint work centres on developing a shared practice manual.
Funding model
The pilot's development and evaluation are funded through The Snow Foundation, a family philanthropic organisation. The pathway itself is open to any school and runs on a fee-for-service basis, with the referring school covering the cost of workshops and facilitation. We're advocating for government to recognise and directly fund those costs, so price is never the reason a school or a child can't access it.
Evaluation
Independent evaluation isn't an afterthought here, it's how we find out whether this pathway is genuinely working for the people who matter most. Social Outcomes, experts in evaluating the impact of initiatives and projects of community importance, have been engaged to assess whether children impacted by harm are experiencing real repair, and having the power taken from them in the context of that harm restored. We're grateful for their partnership in holding this pilot to that standard.
Where we are
Project establishment and design, July to December.
Facilitation of restorative processes begins, continuing into early-to-mid 2027.
Project evaluation and close.
Advocating for systemic change
A pilot can only reach the schools we're funded to work with. So alongside delivering the program, we're advocating directly to government and the Department of Education to recognise how widespread harmful sexual behaviour in schools actually is, and the gap that exists in how it's currently addressed.
Our aim is for restorative justice to be understood not as an add-on, but as a properly resourced part of the system's response, informed by the evidence this pilot generates, and by the Australian Law Reform Commission's own recommendation that restorative justice be funded and made genuinely accessible to people who have experienced sexual violence. Every school and family we can point to as evidence strengthens that case.
Want to bring this pathway to your school?
This pathway is open to any school, referrals, workshops and information sessions are coordinated directly with your school once you get in touch.
Sources & links: Malvaso, Day, Cale, Hackett, Delfabbro & Ross, Adverse childhood experiences and trauma among young people in the youth justice system, Australian Institute of Criminology (2022); Save the Children [54 Reasons], Putting children first: A rights respecting approach to youth justice in Australia (2023); Weaving Repair Project (Open Circle), RMIT Centre for Innovative Justice, cij.org.au/opencircle/weaving-repair; Social Outcomes, socialoutcomes.com.au.