Second Nature by Erin Clabough

Author:Erin Clabough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

PRACTICE RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Restorative justice is a framework to handle conflict. It’s a way of seeing crime as not just breaking the law, but also as something that causes harm to relationships and communities. Restorative justice focuses on repairing the harm caused, ideally by letting the involved parties decide how to make it better together.

Restorative justice principles are used in a variety of settings, including schools. Effective enough to be explored as an alternative to incarceration, it has been implemented in a large-scale way by the Youth Justice Board for victims and young offenders in England and Wales to target the underlying causes of crime. Research suggests that the victims also benefit from face-to-face restorative justice encounters.13

Joy, a middle school psychologist, recalls a time when a student, Jackson, used a permanent marker to write terrible things about another student on the bathroom wall. Part of his restorative justice resolution was a group circle process, where Jackson was present along with everyone who had been affected by his actions. The student he wrote the terrible thing about was there, the janitor who had to clean it up was there, the principal who had to discipline him was there, and the teacher who dismissed the student from class during the disciplining was there.

Each person in the circle took a turn explaining how Jackson’s action had affected him or her. The janitor, for instance, stated that it had taken him over an hour to scrub off the words. Since it’s impossible to give time back to someone, the facilitator asked Jackson if there was something else he could do. Jackson offered to come twice after school to help the custodian with his work. And from that, a friendship between Jackson and the custodian emerged. Restorative justice freed Jackson from the shame of his actions in all directions, allowed him to forgive himself, whether others did or not, and gave him a clean slate.

Parents need a system in which to actively and consistently weave empathy skills into their family’s lives—a system that unites emotional and cognitive empathy and leaves space for applied empathy to emerge. There’s a deep need here—a gap in social education that desperately needs to be filled. But you can’t just teach this once, like you’d recount a story. You need to weave it into daily life, like retelling a favorite fairy tale every night before bed.

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