Restorative Justice, A Healing Community Initiative

By Julie Clarke, Child & Youth Care Practitioner


Restorative Justice has always been an interesting concept to me. The very idea that any one community is able to embrace the concepts of what restorative justice is, is a community I want to live in. Why? Because it demonstrates the power of people, the power of community and continues to ride along the path of something I have mentioned before; the village a child grows up in plays an enormous role in raising that child.

I have done community volunteer work before. As a busy mom to two pre-teen boys, a child and youth counsellor in private practice as well as inpatient/outpatient psychiatry at a local children's hospital how could I possibly have time to do volunteer work? I make time. I believe in giving back to my community. Plain and simple. Therefore I recently sought out a new volunteer opportunity and stumbled upon a community justice initiative in my local county. I pursued this program because of the very nature of what they do. This initiative plays a role in helping people heal, forgive and move forward in their lives. This is a big part of the work I do as a child and youth counsellor as well but my one on one work is not enough.

The Lanark County Community Justice Program defines restorative justice as "a systematic response to wrongdoing that emphasizes healing the wounds of victims, offenders and communities caused or revealed by the criminal behaviour". Healing the wounds of both victims and offenders! For some of you this will be an entirely new concept, how could one possibly even consider playing a role in healing the wounds of someone who wronged you, right? Is that what you are thinking? At the same time your thinking is on par with our cultural norms and views on who an offender is and how they should be treated. So I don't judge you but ask you to please listen up!

As a child and youth counsellor I aim to empower and motivate individuals to seek strengths within themselves. I can do this as an individual working with an individual. Most times I am also working with the families but I can only do so much, I am only one piece of a very large puzzle (see my previous posts where I mention Bronfenbrenner's (1994) Bioecological Theory of Human Development). Opportunities like the community justice initiative do tremendous work in our communities, if these types of programs do not exist then the one piece of the puzzle I am able to do as a mental health care worker is unable to  be maintained adequately. This is especially within the adolescent population! If programs like restorative justice are not available or offered in our communities then we have failed our people; young and old alike! Those who find themselves involved in the justice system are denied opportunities to repent and accept responsibility for their choices. For anyone who has been a part of the justice system be it as an offender, victim or otherwise it is a very difficult and complex system to be involved in. I won't even begin to summarize here the feelings and/or emotions that go along with a justice experience, just know they are not positive.

 

Community justice initiatives like the restorative justice programs help communities to de-stigmatize.

Imagine. In a time where stigma and mental health are hot topics and in the news regularly, imagine a program that can help de-stigmatize? Imagine a program that can assist in healing individual's both emotionally and mentally, help them restore a sense of health. Imagine a program that could prevent future mental health issues; things like depression even suicide. Would that not be a program you would want to be a part of?

As an offender or a victim imagine sitting in a room with people from your local community, trained facilitators in the restorative justice concepts who have already committed to be non-judgemental, caring and helpful people. Imagine them guiding everyone in the room along and through a process towards healing. This idea is one that when I envision it I see a big community hug; an embrace that at its most primal and basic level is tremendously powerful. It is positive human connection, something we all seek and need in our lives.

There are of course parameters set up in order to ensure these gatherings are successful but if both parties, the victim and the offender are open to what the program has to offer then the outcome can be life-long changes including a decrease in individual shame and self-deprication.

This post was inspired by a wonderful presentation I attended with my young son. It was given in a high school gymnasium with approximately 400+ students. I took my son out of school to attend this event as I felt it was a strong message that he hear at his vulnerable age of 12 years. Please check out the power of foregiveness and healing by Katy Hutchinson. This is her story:

My take home from the presentation was invaluable but with the work I do the thing that warmed my heart the most was that Ryan, the individual whom Katy was able to forgive has moved on with his life. Katy shared with us in the audience that they no longer work together and that Ryan has recently married and is moving forward with his life. Katy expressed that this is right and this is how it has to be. I see Katy as playing a role in this young man's happiness even through her difficult loss. The experience is tragic and the story will never be forgotten but it is what it is and through acceptance she too has been able to move on with her life. We humans have the power to heal one another. 

Happy Restorative Justice Week ! To find out more informatiom about Restorative Justice please go to Correctional Services Canada website at http://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/text/rj/crg-eng.shtml

@BoysNeedtoFeel

 

Sources


http://www.crcna.org/site_uploads/columns/link818_5.jpg
http://www.commjustice.org/ 
http://www.westcoastmen.org/sites/default/files/restorative_justice-handshake.jpg

Kids In School: Developing Beings and Why We Must Guard the Emotional Vulnerability

By: Julie Clarke, BCYC, CYC (Cert.)
Child & Youth Care Practitioner

A lot of the work I do with children and youth involves working in partnership with schools. It is not uncommon due to the number of hours our kids spend in the school environment; typically 5-7 hours each day five days a week. That is almost the equivalent of a full time job! Needless to say school is a large bio-ecosystem in a child's life and adults in the life of a child must be actively involved in the child's academic career.

According to Bronfenbrenner's (1994) Bioecological Theory of Human Development it describes the classroom as being is within the Microsystem of a child's life (the school board is within the Exosystem). You may click on the link to get a good visual of what I am talking about here. Basically when one views a child's life in this perspective we are able to gain a better understanding, a glimpse of the potential impacts on children; we can see how the child develops outside the nucleus of their immediate family. Together in this perspective plus the fact children attend school as adults would attend a full-time job we can begin to understand school and the enormous impact it has on any child or youth's day to day life. It is huge!

It is my hope through this blog story that I can create a snapshot of the importance of being involved in your child's academic career from junior kindergarten right through to high school and beyond. Please realize your child's academic career is at minimum 12-15 years long! Why should you be involved? So you can guide your child through their vulnerable years and ensure emotional health at the end of it. Something else to consider is the possibility that your child could develop a mental illness throughout these years, we can still ensure emotional health by being there for them. Our children are developing beings and are emotionally vulnerable. They grow at their own ideal pace. We have to guard this maturation process.

Parents/guardians/significant positive adult role models are imperative in the life of a developing child. We need to be there to interject wisdom, create safe and quiet spaces for them to talk and just 'be'; we need to listen and not respond with our biased opinions and life experiences (this is a hard one for most to do!).

A school system is not designed to focus on your child's emotional needs. In fact emotional needs of a child is not a number one priority for the education system. Have you ever considered this before? That schools are not designed to focus on the emotional needs of a child? Have you ever made a statement like - Why can't the school just… or How come they never noticed… or Why are they not doing anything about…Schools are not therapeutic environments. This reality is not a bad thing necessarily (although I do wish it were different but that is a whole other blog topic) because there are professionals who can better treat kids therapeutically than one who is trained as an educator. This includes parents/guardians and significant others. 

A school is a system that is designed to teach curriculum, it is designed to educate children on practical global skills to ensure their success in the adult world. It is designed with an economic foundation ensuring that our little ones can grow up and make a lot of money, not just for themselves  but for the economy. This is the reality of our global world.

The reality of what the school system is has been an evolving process for me. I have been actively involved in my kids academic lives since their first year of school.  A number of years ago I was asked to attend a parent symposium in Toronto, ON at the Ontario Minister of Education's office. When the former Minister of Education Leona Dombrowsky spoke to us in the audience (parents from all over Ontario, Canada) she referenced [the now former] Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty who had piggybacked a statement made by U.S. President Barack Obama just prior to her speech with us. The statement was something about schools and the importance of the younger generation being innovators, leaders and better than every other country; that being strong economically is the country that remains on top (Google Obama's views on education and you will know what I am talking about) in the world. After Ms. Dombrowsky's statement I recall thinking - Wow,  that is tremendous pressure for our young people. 

This story creates a picture of our political system (the Exosystem and yet another system…are we seeing a pattern here?) is setting kids up for failure. The standards are very high, so much so the schools will often brag about their progress on standardized testing but I will leave that for a future blog post too (I am realizing I have a lot to say on this topic!).

Back to the emotional piece and schools and why parents/guardians/significant positive adult role models must stay closely involved.

I have established and stated my views on schools not putting students' emotional needs at the top of their priority list and why that is, let me state another reason. It is important for schools to have policies and procedures. The policies and procedures are not just for academics or teaching or volunteering or fundraising or employment issues or….(it goes on and on the amount of policies and procedures). Schools are large institutions. There must be policies and procedures, there has to be some kind of organized structure in order to accommodate large numbers of people in a learning environment.

Beyond the simple day-today policies and procedures in schools there are similar documents that dictate  student conduct and behaviour. This is where the mental health piece comes into it for me and an area that I believe can use some major improvements. I reside in Ontario and one of the policies and procedures that govern schools is the Safe Schools Act, this Act became law in 2001. This Act introduced zero-tolerance practice and detailed how conduct and behaviour were to be addressed in schools. Listen closely.

Zero tolerance on any level and in any environment where there is a mass population of developing children and youth is the epitome of failure. Why? Because a developing child particularly youth/adolescents likely do not have the brain maturity to respond to situations that arise within the school environment. Conduct and behaviour aside their brains have not matured. What a concept. Stay with me here, sometimes those who are so behaviour focused will bypass this perspective because this is when it gets complicated and this is when we as adult's in the life of a child need to step in. Yeap, there is work to do not just a a finger to wave but work to do.

The school 'system' is a weak link in a child life; because of hard and fast rules related to behaviour and conduct this weak link is leaving some children/youth emotionally vulnerable. How can it not? They spend almost the equivalent of a full-time job every week! This is the power and interconnectedness of Bronfenbrenner's (1994) Bioecological Theory of Human Development.

Separating child development and emotional needs in favour of behaviour and conduct in a zero tolerance program is setting kids up for failure. This is why parents/guardians/significant positive adult role models must be actively involved in their child's academic career. There is no combating or overcoming the system for what it is. Get involved and be a part of the solution, advocate for your kids helping to guide them along towards their optimal potential in life.

You may wonder, did I not just state how important it was to have policies and procedure in the school environment and now I am talking about these same policies and procedures as a weak link. Yes I did. Look again at the Bioecological Theory of Human Development diagram and take another look at the interconnections of the various systems. There is no understanding one part without the other. The systems can not be separated but we can be aware of their existence and how the interrelate with our views and perceptions in life. Do you know someone who has never attended a school function/meeting/fundraiser/banquet/book sale etc.? There are lots of people out there who figure leave school at school. This perception is dangerous to the kid's in their lives. We can make a difference in the life of a young person who without us walk around with their head's down, hoodies up and hair in their faces. They are being lead down potentially dangerous paths of feeling unheard and misunderstood but mostly unsupported. We must ensure these kids are not labelled because of a lapse in judgement or a poor choice that they simply were not able to comprehend. These paths and labels perpetuate the emotional vulnerability, a sort of 'grey area' that is sometimes referred to as saying someone 'fell through the cracks'. The policies and procedures are ineffective because they are literally black text on a white page with little to no deviation, human emotions in the developing child especially are far more complex than this. 
 
With the onset of terms like bullying and cyber-bullying and the concepts surrounding this new phenomenon we must be mindful of our interactions with our young people and remember their emotional vulnerability. Policies and procedures and the Safe Schools Act play an important role in the hierarchy of our society but they do not have to play a role that overlooks important primal needs of young people growing into adulthood. We have to be advocates for our young people. @BoysNeedtoFeel




Credits

First Photo: http://i.livescience.com/images/i/19509/iFF/sad-girl.jpg?1314712592

Second Photo: http://thecolourworks.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/emotion-at-work/


Bronfrenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. In International Encyclopedia of Education, Vol. 3, 2nd. Ed. Oxford: Elsevier. Reprinted in: Gauvin, M. & Cole, M. (Eds.), Readings on the development of children, 2nd Ed. (1993, pp 37-43). NY: Freeman

 

Amanda Todd Did Not Commit Anything, She Completed Something

In the news recently there is a story about a young teen from British Columbia who has completed suicide. Amanda Todd did not commit anything, she completed something.

Suicide is a hot topic in the news currently, especially as it relates to teens and mental health. I cannot help but worry about the bullying buzz word and how this dynamic seems to be at the forefront of a teens who complete suicide. There is a deeper more meaningful understanding of this bullying dynamic that really must be talked about in order to be fully understood. It saddens me that what I am about to talk about is not pursued in the everyday media and one can make assumptions as to why this is. A simple Google search on Amanda Todd's name would be a good start to understanding what I am stating; in death this young girl has an entry in a popular online resource known as Wikipedia. The concept of this is incomprehensible to me. Welcome to 2012 and the world we are raising our kids in.

We are raising our kids in a new world. In the media we hear the term bullied or bullying and we immediately think of the bad kids who are doing this and what needs to be done to further combat future suicides. Right? Isn't this what you automatically think?

There are a couple of things to realize in my statement above. 1.) The media portrays a story that will entice readers, the context of the actual story is lost in the written material and left to be interpreted in any way it will be by the reader; the reader with their own understandings and life experiences. This is discourse 2.) Bullying is not just a bunch of kids acting a particular way. It is a word used to describe the interactions between a dominant personality and a submissive type personality and 3.) Kids are not bad; circumstances can be bad and kids can be the result of circumstances but kids are not bad.

Amanda Todd did not take her own life because of bullying. Amanda Todd completed suicide because she felt alone (and states this in her online youtube video). Amanda Todd like so many others was left unsupported by her surrounding people and her community.

Have you ever heard that old saying "it takes a village to raise a child"? This saying is a metaphor that calls attention to the fact that more than one or two people are needed to raise a child towards their optimal potential. Raising children is hard work! In the village this work is shared amongst many, additionally the village has a natural hierarchy. This hierarchy understands how elders with more lived experience play a very important role in helping to raise a child into adulthood. The elder embraces the young, teaches them tradition and shares with the individual their beliefs and customs. The elder creates a safe space for the young to make mistakes and has the power to teach skills of resilience. Where was Amanda's village? Where were the adults in her village that left her unmistakeably vulnerable? Any person remaining in a vulnerable situation for any length of time would crack, especially a young person. 

The role of the bully comes into play when the village attachments are broken and the individual becomes a sitting duck. The hunters are always out and the sitting duck becomes a perfect target! As I stated earlier, the media discourse cannot focus solely on the individuals who sought out a vulnerable target; a target that is used for their own misguided agendas. To focus only on the bully is to negate all of the perfectly positioned breakdowns that lead to the vulnerability.

We are all a part of an ecosystem (Bronfenbrenner, 1994). In this theoretical perspective we can begin to understand the various ecosystems in each of our lives. We are represented by our families, neighbourhoods, friends, religious/cultural beliefs and where all of these interactions take place and influence one another. Other ecosystems include our local town, the community dynamics, schools and minor and major cultural and economic statuses; the political environment, larger economy, prevalent prejudices and environmental conditions to name a few others. This is a complicated and complex web of systems we live in.These webs are invisible if we focus only on the bully.

When we are open to the possibilities of ecosystems we become aware of relationships and their dynamics including revealing those that were invisible. Bullying is being used as a buzz word that  masks real invisible and sad truths of how our cultural villages are severely lacking and our young people are suffering.

Amanda Todd did not commit anything, she completed something.

Stand up.

Take Notice.

The blood of all young people who complete suicide is on our hands, not the so called bully who hunted down the vulnerable but the village of people who simply did not see the signs and the pleas for help leading up to this unfortunate incident. Amanda says in her own video prior to her death how she "has nobody". I can't help but ask why.

You are a young person's village, be aware and take notice. 

@BoysNeedtoFeel

Credits

First Photo: http://liveunitedyall.org/wp-content/kid-in-tree.jpg

Second Photo: http://365give.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/it-takes-a-village.jpg

Bronfrenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. In International Encyclopedia of Education, Vol. 3, 2^nd. Ed. Oxford: Elsevier. Reprinted in: Gauvin, M. & Cole, M. (Eds.), Readings on the development of children, 2^nd Ed. (1993, pp 37-43). NY: Freeman