Youth justice – RJ World

The Transformational Power of Youth RJ – 30 speakers share

Historically, young offenders have been processed and treated in a comparable manner to adult offenders. However, with the rise of the RJ philosophy and methodology, young people were some of the first to be trailed in this new and innovative paradigm. Over thirty years later, RJ has increasingly built a good name and continues to play a powerful role in youth justice. Around the world, due to RJ approaches and practices, many young people have been diverted and discouraged from pursuing careers of crime.

“The concept of restorative justice is always applicable, that is we ask: What are the harms that have happened? What are the needs that have resulted? Whose obligations are they? How do we engage people in the process? To what extent can we engage people in the process? Those questions are always valid.”
Professor Howard Zehr

For many young offenders, crime does not occur in a vacuum, separate from the rest of life, but rather is aggravated by other circumstances or problems that exist. For example, there are parents, teachers, peers, and a whole range of other social, or relational, features and elements involved.

Visit the RJ World Youth Justice Channel

In a retributive system, however, many young offenders are processed and sentenced without physical, emotional, and spiritual needs being sufficiently appraised and addressed. Once a victim gets to prison, or some other sentencing result, these needs are often only exacerbated and can detrimentally affect their health and prospect of healing.

Research suggests that RJ practices with youth offenders have led to many promising outcomes, through programs like conferencing, victim-offender mediation, and circle sentencing. In Australia, where indigenous youth over-representation is a considerable concern, these diversionary programs for young people can lead to life-changing beneficial impacts for the offenders and their families. Especially in youth RJ, it is considered important to involve the peers and role models that surround both the offender and victim. This vividly reminds all involved that crime is not isolated, but involves relationships and the community that surrounds these people. And it is often only the RJ approach that helpfully acknowledges this reality.

RJ is based on the recognition that each party involved in the offense – offender, victim, and community – has needs and possibly trauma, and healing must take place.

As many key professionals have suggested, it must be recognised that RJ and the traditional criminal justice system do not need to be mutually exclusive. Each brings a different perspective and, with those different perspectives, different goals and results. When we consider the reality of youth crime, it can be appreciated that RJ can have great results for youth offenders, diverting them from a cyclic and recurring recidivism reality.

During RJ World 2020, we will hear from presenters on the topic of youth RJ. Youth present unique needs and obligations according to a RJ paradigm, which must be genuinely recognised and met with appropraite and sensitive practice.

20 speakers explore RJ in youth justice

RJ in Schools

Throughout RJ World 2020, we are proud to have many speakers from around the world showcasing their RJ innovations, programs, research, and work. A key reminder, which will be illustrated over the course of the econference, is the reality that RJ has influence and credibility worldwide and in every stage of the criminal justice system, including before crime itself even occurs. This extends to every stage of the criminalisation process. As such, RJ as a philosophy for addressing deviant behaviour can be incorporated into key facets of society, such as the schooling system. RJ goes beyond just addressing what is perceived as crime, and can influence and shape even things like student behavioural management methods.

During RJ World key presenters – including teachers, principals, and coordinators – will share their experiences and practices around RJ in the schools around the world. A key priority of RJ is the recognition and respect for human relationship and the power of storytelling. Just like adult offenders, children engaging in antisocial behaviour and various levels of crime need the emotional and relational support and direction that a RJ vision can bring.

“Restorative processes include victim-offender mediation, conferencing and circles; restorative outcomes include apology, amends to the victim and amends to the community.”
Daniel Van Ness, 2005

Presenters speaking on the topic of RJ in schools will include (but not be limited to):

Adam Voigt (AU), Michelle Stowe (IRE), Laura Mooiman (NL), Margaret Thorseborne (AU), David Vinegrad (AU), Mark Goodwin (UK), Eric Rainey (USA), Lee Rush (USA), Lamika Wilson (USA), Gail Quigley (AU), Dr Maija Gellin (Finland), Dr Belinda Hopkins (UK), Monica Alberti (UK), Anna Gregory (UK), Terence Bevington (UK), Dr Angela Monell (USA), Moana Emett (NZ), Talma Shultz (USA)

Visit the youth justice stream…

RJ World Youth Justice

The voice of the victim – especially that of a child – is often suppressed, or ignored, in the typical criminal justice system. However, as we begin the second decade of the twentieth century, there is reason and cause to conclude that RJ will increasingly feature in justice responses, especially in areas like child and youth offending. Tune in and hear these speakers, as they discuss what that looks like in the local and international context!

Unhealthy Victim-offender connections: Responding to trauma

A great number of our speakers will touch on the topic of trauma and its role in restorative approaches. Let me introduce six of the presenters from four different countries, who promise to explicitly and extensively discuss this matter.

Kerri Quinn (with two different presentations in her backpockets) , Lamika Wilson and Leaf Seligman are our pioneers from the US – But learn more about their work here:

Kerri Quinn, from the US, studied extensively the dynamics of interpersonal conflict and the impact of language and trauma in restorative practices. Furthermore, she is an extraordinarily experienced practitioner with over 1000 cases!

Kerri Quinn (picture taken from her website “Restorative Way“

And now listen up… Kerri prepared TWO different WORKSHOPS for us!

If you tune into her first workshop, you will leave the conference equipped with trauma-responsive skills, a sharpened understanding of the dynamics of conflict, and specific language tools facilitators can use to de-escalate tension, encourage accountability and enhance listening.

If you come to her second workshop, you will be part of an in-depth exploration of the different stages of trauma experienced by both victims and offenders. Little disclaimer: In this presentation, she will share stories from high risk victim offender dialogues, like murder and vehicular homicide cases, that successfully broke this bond and allowed for restoration and healing.

Kerri is particularly interested in applying the lens of trauma to the undwanted bond created between victim and offender. This bond contributes to anxiety, trauma and impacts other relationships and possibilities for healing… If left unaddressed… On the other hand, this relationship holds great potency. Namely, the possibility for healing and growth – for both parties: VICTIM AND OFFENDER. Althought, achieving this end requires best practice. The kind of practice that leads to SUCCESSFUL cases, and how convenient that Kerri comes with many, many success stories!

And that’s not all: She also brings lots of valuable experience to this conference that lays the grounds for here talks. She is not only the co-creator of the Victim Offender Dialogue Program in Colorado, but she is also currently lecturing at the University of Colorado and the Creighton University Law School. But learn more about Kerri on here: “Restorative Way”!

Two other popular speakers from the US are Leaf Seligman and Lamika Wilson. (You might know Lamika already from our blog post on Restorative Cities “From Restorative Communities … to Restorative Cities … to Restorative States? “) Lamika describes herself as an “advocate for our most vulnerable population and high priority citizens.” Driven by her own experience as someone who has been victimized, her vision is to localize an “office that is accessible for the community”. This office should provide “direct services such as counselling, financial assistance timely and other supplemental resources needed to overcome trauma.” More about Leaf and her work, you can read in our other blog post, here: “Trauma and Restorative Justice: 8 specialists to learn from”

Restorative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in India

Mission: “Advance restorative justice for children harmed by sexual harm and violence in India.”

CSJ (Counsel to Secure Justice) is an Indian organisation, with Nimisha Srivastava as the active Program Director. Urvashi, Kshipra and Arti are part of this organisation and will be speaking at our RJ WORLD conference!

CSJ implemented a project with UNICEF and the Department of Child Rights, Rajasthan. The aim of the project is to train a local pool of people to conduct circle processes in observation homes (detention centre) for children, who are in conflict with law.

Their vision is to: “repair harm, empower the vulnerable, and reconcile broken relationships.” The key in achieving this agenda lies in keeping each survivor’s needs central to the process. CSJ is especially concerned with educating a local pool of trainers so they can facilitate circles themselves in a sustainable way.

Circles. An extremely useful way to address such traumatizing experiences in a safe way is through circle processes. Let me share with you some insights in the form of short stories and the training of local trainers, starting with one of the numerous astonishing and touching circles done with children in Rajasthan. To protect people’s privacy, all names are replaced by pseudonyms. Harm had been created. This harm was felt by every present soul. It was almost like an elephant in the room, which needed to be addressed.

Feeling safe. Right in the beginning of the session, everyone could immediately feel the safe space created by the circle. The non-judgemental and humane environment enabled by both facilitators and participants allowed participants to sit with their emotions and disappointments while being connected with others, instead of feeling isolated. One boy in the circle from Rajasthan said, ‘ “I am sad and confused since I have not received court order, but here (in the circle) I feel I am safe.”

The crucial moment. One of the most powerful, and healing moments of the session was when Chandan (the person who had harmed) said sorry. What lit up the whole room was the biggest smile everyone had seen on peoples faces who had been close to tears until a second ago. What happened was forgiveness. Now, all the participants were connected by a huge and peaceful smile – a smile of acceptance. Simultaneously, a sense of relief was visible for all. Previous tension had vanished and was replaced by human connection.

Zivesh looked the person harmed in the eyes and said, “I am sorry”.
The person harmed smiled and said, “It’s okay”.

Training. Sometimes, the only thing needed for healing to occur is a genuine apology, a look in the eyes and forgiveness. However, if reconciliation would be that easy to achieve, there would hardly be any need for training. In many cases, a restorative process involves many conversations between different stakeholders. The picture above is from the training done in Rajasthan, aiming to bring the values of CSJ closer to prospective local facilitators.

Personalized talking piece by Ishan’s sister

Going with the flow and personalized talking pieces. One of the important attributes a Restorative Justice facilitator must have is some degree of flexibility throughout the process. For example, there was a conversation scheduled between Ishan and his father. Just before the meeting, and since the whole family had come, they all wanted to meet him. Ishan gave his permission to speak about the facts in front of everyone. As a result, at the last minute, the facilitator of this session decided to let the process flow organically. This decision enabled the whole family to be part in the circle, in which a talking piece hand-made by Ishan’s sister was used (picture above). This way, the whole family could take part in the healing conversation and re-connect.

This is a talking piece created by one of the trainers trained in Rajasthan for the UNICEF project.

Taking Responsibility. One of the requirements before entering a restorative process is that the person who has harmed accepts the responsibility for the harm done. Sometimes many individual meetings are needed to help the person who has harmed own up to their actions. However, when this is achieved, a big step towards establishing justice and healing is taken. “If that person accepts his mistake, then there is no bigger justice than that,” one woman from the ABHAS (“Action Beyond Help and Support”) community group circle processes stated. She found that what is needed most is, “Saying sorry and realizing [the harm] would be enough for me, nothing else.” Circle processes are conducted over three months with women from the community. These sessions were closely examined and published in the study conducted by CSJ on Restorative Justice and Child Sexual abuse in India “Perspectives of Justice”.

…If you want to hear more exciting insight-stories from our three speakers who are part of the organisation CSJ…

Urvashi Tilak: Director, Restorative Justice
Kshipra Marathe: Counsellor, Restorative Justice,
Arti Mohan: Program Officer, Restorative Justice

…we would strongly recommend you sign up to our RJ WORLD CONFERENCE 2020!

Europe leads the way in restorative cities

Get to know the EFRJ “Restorative Cities” Working Group

What… actually … does the concept of “Restorative Cities” mean? To get some clarity on this, I visited the Website of the European Forum For Restorative Justice (EFRJ), where I stumbled across the following explanation:

“Restorative Cities aim at disseminating restorative values (inclusion, participation, respect, responsibility, solidarity, truth seeking, etc.) in different settings where conflict may occur, such as families, schools, neighbourhoods, sport organisations, work places, intercultural communities, etc. The final goal is to strengthen relationships, encourage active citizenship and look at conflict as an opportunity for change, rather than a threat.”

Alright, basically a broad scale, (or better city-wide) implementation of restorative values that encompasses all social institutions and cultures. Make sense? If not quite yet, this year’s RJ WORLD 2020 has tons of eloquent speakers, researchers and change-leaders from all over the world to flesh out the idea of Restorative Cities for us!

One of them is Chris Straker from the UK. He is a national and international conference speaker who worked with cities on strategic, city-wide, implementation of restorative values. He is also part of the international Working Group on Restorative Cities hosted by the EFRJ. The agenda of this working group is to “bring together different local experiences which have the intention of creating a cultural change with citizens who are empowered in their conflict resolution skills and decision making.”

In his workshop, Chris will inquire further into the meaning of living together restoratively. Part of his talk focusses on debunking myths behind the concept of restorative cities. To do so, he uses the UK as a backdrop for participants to explore their own ideas on what a restorative city means. Further, he will also introduce some models for restorative cities but he is particularly interested in using the opportunity of the conference to create dialogue.

Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Especially, since Restorative Practice only unfolds its full potential in conversation. The belief in the transformative potential of dialogue is perhaps the connecting element between all our speakers of this year’s RJ WORLD 2020 conference.

Three other presenters who are eager to structure their joint presentation according to this motto are Prof. Grazia Mannozzi & Gian Luigi Lepri & Chiara Perini from Italy. Grazia was the first chair of the EFRJ Working Group on Restorative Cities and Gian Luigi is the current chair of the same group. Their presentation will open a dialogic space in which both former and current chair have a conversation.

In this talk, they will firstly discuss the “conceptual transition from restorative justice theory to the elaboration of the idea of restorative cities” to give insight into potential gap between theory and practice. Secondly, challenges around restorative cities will be explored whilst shedding light on the reasons why this has become a pivotal theme in the action of the EFRJ. Lastly, the speakers will analyse the idea behind restorative cities with regards to their popularity concretely in Europe. But that’s still not all this workshop holds for us: After that, the speakers will apply a “SWOT Analysis” to current restorative cities- projects. This will serve to evaluate the project’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Wow, what a holistic talk this will be…

And hey, why not have a look at our other post on the topic Restorative Cities:
“From Restorative Communities, to Restorative Cities to Restorative States“

Restorative school culture in Finland – Dr Maija Gellin

Finland / Youth justice / Schools

Dr Maija Gellin is the director of the programme for restorative approach in education and schools (VERSO-programme) in Finland. She has also worked as a mediation officer under the victim-offender mediation service. She is giving lectures on restorative approach at Univ Helsinki and Univ Lapland as well as in many institutions in Finland and other countries. She is a board member of Finnish Forum for Mediation and a member of Finnish women peace builder’s group and Nordic mediation researcher’s group.

Co-presenter, Lawyer Pia Slögs is the director of community mediation centre in Finland. She is a restorative trainer and mediator. She has completed her studies on restorative justice at Univ Hull, UK. She has worked earlier at victim-offender mediation services for 15 years. Pia is a co-trainer in VERSO-programme especially in Swedish spoken schools in Finland.

Topic: How to create a restorative school culture Restorative values such as respect, sense of community and participation as well as the rights of the child are more important than ever from the perspective of global health and well-being threats. Implementing the restorative approach in schools and day care is focusing not only giving restorative methods to school staff members but more to change the whole school culture to a restorative one. Based on 20 year experience in Finnish schools and the results of PhD research, this session is opening the key concepts of a restorative school community. Including restorative attitude, restorative participation and restorative mediation as basics for daily work in schools and kindergartens strengthens the positive identity of children as well as the wellbeing of whole school community and families. When the skill of restorative encounter is learned already in a school, this ability provides know-how throughout the life.

RJ model for family law pioneered in Mexico

This innovative model of restorative justice arises from the experience obtained from the family restoration processes carried out in the Justice Department in Mexico (Poder Judicial del Estado de México), which is a pioneer in restorative practices in judicial settings, achieving an integrated model from which aims to resolve the legal dispute, but goes further by addressing and attending the offenses and damages that arise in the family environment.

Architect of this initiative Professor Claudia Villavicencio will be speaking about this initiative at RJ World and joins us today.

RJ World: Thanks for being with us today Claudia! Could you give us a quick overview of this family initiative in your justice department.

Prof. Villavicencio: The Family Restorative Justice project seeks to deal with the damage in an integral way, that is, not only in form, but also in substance, reaching the damages, to look for alternatives that allow for their repair.

This involves the multidisciplinary intervention of a team made up of professionals from different social sciences, such as law, psychology, social work, etc., who together with the family facilitator, who directs the restoration process, accompany families on the road to dealing with offenses and repairing damages in the family relationship. Multidisciplinarity allows an integral mapping of the conflict from the experience of different professions, which allows identifying the damages and seeking effective alternatives that allow them to be repaired in an integral way.

Restorative justice, when applied to family law cases, allows addressing the entire spectrum of restorative practices from informal to formal practices, not only reactively, but also preventively, which allows families to strengthen healthy emotional and social ties.

The design of programs with a total, moderately or partially restorative approach, is also part of this integrative approach to heal the damage in family relationships, according to the needs of the participants.

Presentation summary: “The importance of the implementation of restorative justice in family conflicts, for the adequate and necessary care of the damage caused in said environment by the family conflict itself, in accordance with the philosophy, principles and methodologies of the practices restorative. The application of family restorative justice is necessary for those conflicts where the damage causes asymmetric conditions between people and this does not allow them to be addressed from a mediation approach, but under the accompaniment that is possible with family restorative justice with appropriate multidisciplinary intervention.”

RJ World: That’s a very comprehensive approach. How does this work in relation to courts and legal proceedings?

Prof. Villavicencio: In judicial settings where there is already a trial, formal restorative practices have been carried out in the Mexican Judiciary Power (Poder Judicial Mexiquense), such as “circles of restorative sentencing in family matter” (“círculos de sentencia restaurativos en materia familiar”) where with the collaborative approach and democratic restorative justice, judges, magistrates, lawyers, parents, children, community members, and the multidisciplinary team that facilitates and accompanies families, attend to damages, and seek to repair them, and with the agreements that emerged from the Restorative process and of the circle said, the corresponding sentence is issued in family matter, without a doubt having facilitated the first circle of this type, it encourage my interest in strengthening and building a model.

RJ World: Thanks for speaking with us today Claudia. We’re looking forward to hearing all about it in August!

Prof. Villavicencio: Thank you.

Find out more at the Kartartizo website:
https://katartizo.com.mx

Spanish version of article: https://katartizo.com.mx/modelo-de-justicia-restaurativa-aplicado-a-los-conflictos-familiares/

Restorative school culture in Finland – Dr Maija Gellin

Dr Lindsey Pointer: games for teaching RJ

United States / Adult justice, Schools, Youth justice, Academic

Dr. Lindsey Pointer is an internationally recognized expert in restorative practices education and implementation. She has a PhD in Restorative Justice from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where she designed and implemented the Restorative University initiative. She is a former Fulbright Fellow and Rotary Global Grant recipient and has completed extensive research on restorative justice best practices. Author of The Little Book of Restorative Teaching Tools. She is passionate about building more connected and caring communities. She currently lives in Colorado.

Grounded in an understanding of restorative pedagogy, a paradigm of teaching in alignment with restorative values and principles, this presentation will share games and activities for teaching restorative practices. Games and activities provide a way for learners to experience and more deeply understand restorative practices while building relationships and skills. These games can be used in facilitator or community trainings, with youth in schools, or in the classroom to develop and encourage skills and principles related to restorative practices. In addition to being fun and decreasing resistance to new ideas, game-based learning allows a safe environment to test out new skills, make mistakes, or create a microcosm of a larger social issue. Teaching in a restorative way also redistributes power and truly honors learners’ voices, experiences and perspectives. This presentation will introduce participants to games and activities to take back to their organizations, classrooms, or trainings.