What a Courtroom Can't Ask: Restorative Justice, Institutional Accountability, and What It Means for Australian Sport

Why sport keeps outsourcing the one question it already knows how to answer

Some institutions are genuinely good at collective accountability. Not in theory. In practice, every week, in public.

When a team has a bad season, nobody points at one player and calls it done. The coach answers for it. Recruitment answers for it. The culture of the dressing room, the board's ambition, the academy that did or didn't develop talent. All of it answers for it. A team rises or falls together, and the people who set the conditions, are held accountable for the conditions they set.

Sport didn't set out to build a machine for accountability. It set out to compete, to entertain, to give people somewhere to put their tribalism. Accountability is just what falls out of a system where results are public, and consequences are real. Sport does not care about intentions.

And then something serious happens away from the field, and sport reaches for a courtroom. The one place guaranteed not to look at the system.

What the trial was never able to ask

In July 2025, an Ontario judge acquitted five former junior hockey players of sexual assault arising from an incident in London in 2018. The verdict is not my subject, and I take no position on it. Courts do what they are built to do.

What interests me is what the trial was never able to ask.

A criminal trial answers one question: did this person commit this act, beyond a reasonable doubt? It is the right tool for that question and a blunt one for any other. It cannot ask what the culture of elite hockey rewards, or what a group of young men understood consent to mean that night, or what the institutions around them knew, tolerated, or quietly settled.

Here is one detail that stayed with me. Researchers Jennifer Llewellyn and Daniel Del Gobbo reviewed the trial transcript and found that the word "hockey" appeared almost entirely as background description. References to hockey as a cultural institution, a set of norms, a system of incentives that shaped what happened, were almost entirely absent from the proceedings. The sport that gave the case its name was barely present in the courtroom.

Professor Llewellyn, who holds the Chair in Restorative Justice at Dalhousie's Schulich School of Law, put this plainly after the verdict. The criminal system, she said, "is simply not designed to deal with complex social and cultural issues." It is designed to say who broke the law and exact punishment. Where that is the nature of the problem, it works. Where the problem is a system, it tells, in her words, "such a simple story." If we are serious about the conditions that produce harm, she argued, "we have to hold a mirror up to the context in which they happened, which is Hockey Canada here."

A courtroom points a finger. It does not hold a mirror.

There was one more detail worth noting. On the courthouse steps after the verdict, counsel for one of the defendants stated publicly that the Crown had forced "a distressing and unfair trial" rather than pursuing restorative justice. The argument for a different path was being made by the defence. The institution whose culture was never examined said nothing.

The simple story is useful

Here is the uncomfortable part.

A criminal trial does something for an institution that no internal reckoning can. It relocates the entire question to a venue where the institution is not on trial. It converts a systems problem into what Llewellyn calls "such a simple story," one person, one act, one verdict. And a verdict, whichever way it falls, lets the institution say the matter has been resolved by the proper authorities.

For an organisation that would prefer not to examine itself, a criminal trial is not just inadequate. It is convenient. It is the place you send a question you do not want to answer.

To Hockey Canada's credit, that is not quite what happened here. Even after the acquittal, and even after the Crown chose not to appeal it, the organisation's own independent appeal process kept going. In August 2026, it found that the players had breached Hockey Canada's code of conduct regardless of the criminal outcome, and upheld suspensions for four of the five, running as far out as 2030. The institution did not simply point to the verdict and call the matter closed. It kept asking its own question.

That deserves to be named as the different outcome it is. But it is worth noticing what kind of question Hockey Canada asked. A code of conduct breach is still a finding. A suspension is still a sanction. It is accountability built on the same architecture as the courtroom: determine who did what, impose a consequence. What it still does not do, because it was never designed to, is what a restorative process does: sit the people affected down together, name the harm as it was actually experienced, and rebuild something between them. Hockey Canada held up a mirror. Nobody has yet asked what the person who looked into it needs to hear back.

This is not cynicism about sport. It is a refusal to believe that institutions this good at collective accountability are genuinely incapable of it when the stakes are reputational rather than competitive. Hockey Canada's own appeal board just proved as much. The simple story is not a limitation. It is a choice, and most organisations still make the easier one.

Restorative Justice as Institutional Accountability: Where Sport Is Already Leading

These are examples of restorative justice functioning as institutional accountability, not policy for its own sake. When the Australian Human Rights Commission published Change the Routine in 2021, documenting systemic abuse in gymnastics, Gymnastics Australia responded with a Restorative Engagement Scheme, not just new policies. The Australian Sports Commission opened a Restorative Program offering acknowledgment and redress rather than defended claims. In 2024, Major League Soccer built an anti-discrimination policy with Black Players for Change, grounded in restorative practices rather than punishment alone, on the premise that punishment by itself had not been delivering either healing or prevention.

These efforts are early and uneven. None is a finished model. But they share a recognition that accountability can look like something other than waiting for a court.

Done well, a restorative process delivers something a courtroom cannot. Marlee Liss, an Ontario survivor whose sexual assault case was paused in 2019 so she could pursue a restorative path, described what it gave her: "Your voice matters, what you need matters, your boundaries matter, your healing matters. Let's act according to what you need." She called the experience "immensely healing." That is not a softer outcome. It is a more demanding one for everyone, except the person harmed.

There is also a hard irony in all of this. In Ontario, a survivor cannot choose a restorative path for a sexual offence. The option does not exist. Crown policy removes it before anyone is even asked, on the reasoning that such cases are too serious. Llewellyn and Del Gobbo, in a paper forthcoming in the Criminal Law Quarterly, argue these policies should be revised. The complainant in the Hockey Canada case, known publicly as EM, testified that what she first wanted was for the men "to be spoken to so they would know what they did was wrong." She moved toward a criminal complaint only after learning the players could simply decline to speak to police. The system offered her the one path she had not asked for, and closed off the one she had.

What Australian sport should do with this

Brisbane 2032 sits on the horizon. Not just as a chance to host a world-class event, but as a genuine opportunity to demonstrate that Australian sport governance has kept pace with what the world is learning about harm, accountability, and what it takes to build cultures worth protecting.

Australian sport has made a start. The frameworks coming out of gymnastics and the Australian Sports Commission are real. The institutional appetite is growing. What is needed now is the depth of practice to match the ambition.

Key Questions

Why can't a criminal trial address institutional or cultural problems?

A criminal trial exists to answer one question: did this person commit this act, beyond a reasonable doubt? It has no mechanism for examining the culture, incentives, or institutional conditions that surrounded the act, because that was never the question put before the court.

What is restorative justice, and how is it different from a criminal or disciplinary process?

Restorative justice brings the people affected by harm together to name its impact and decide what repair looks like, rather than determining guilt and imposing a sanction. It addresses the relationship and the harm as experienced, not just the act itself.

Can restorative justice be used in sexual assault cases in Canada?

Currently, Ontario Crown policy categorically excludes sexual offence cases from pre-trial restorative diversion, regardless of what the people involved might want. Legal scholars, including Jennifer Llewellyn and Daniel Del Gobbo, have argued this blanket exclusion should be revised.

What should Australian sports organisations do ahead of Brisbane 2032?

Build the depth of restorative practice to match the institutional appetite that is already growing. Frameworks from Gymnastics Australia and the Australian Sports Commission show the intent is there; what's needed now is practical capability to deliver it.

Where This Leaves Us

ProActive ReSolutions has been designing and facilitating restorative processes for 26 years, across harms as serious as sexual assault and homicide. If this piece has raised questions about your own organisation's response to serious harm, I would welcome that conversation.

The mirror was never the courtroom's to hold. It belongs to the people who built the conditions. Sport, more than most, already knows how to look.