“That sense of relief was something Gretchen Casey desperately craved, even 23 years after the night of her assault. No matter how determined she was to put the whole incident behind her, questions still dogged her: Had he been watching me? How did he know where I lived? And why would he do this to me?

In the aftermath of the attack, Casey remembers jolting awake each morning around 3am, gripped with an unshakeable need to check the doors and windows and make sure everything was bolted shut.

And then there was that nagging need to understand why the assault happened in the first place. ‘The prosecutor couldn’t answer that question. The detective couldn’t answer that question. They didn’t think to ask those questions,’ Casey said. ‘So there was no one else to ask but him.’..”

Read about how Casey and other advocates are pushing for restorative justice as an alternative approach to handling cases of sexual violence, in this article for The Guardian.