Restorative Practices in Schools

This post, originally published Sunday, June 3 was updated June 8 for clarity.

I was excited to see the article “Twice a week, these Texas students circle up and talk about their feelings. It’s lowering suspensions and preventing violence” published by the Texas Tribune, because I am keenly interested in the way Restorative Practices are being implemented in schools. As a child, I was sexually molested by an offender freed through the intervention of Restorative Justice in the Criminal Justice system. Lynette Hanthorn, a facilitator and the first employee of the Committee on Criminal Justice, now known as the Center for Creative Justice in Ames, Iowa, worked to develop the Community and Restorative Justice center, and reached out to Mark Umbreit of the University of Minnesota for mentorship in launching Victim Offender Mediation, today one of the primary forms of “circles” used throughout the US and around the world.

Restorative Justice and Restorative Practices are a fraught territory. Around the world, these practices are regulated, with, for example, mandated governmental training modules in New Zealand preparing facilitators to identify and quash minimization of harm by offenders. In Canada, regulations designate what types of cases are allowed, limiting RJ in domestic abuse cases to examples where the survivor has no permanent physical injury. The UK has a largely centralized process for the integration and implementation of these practices, but in the US, so long as a non-profit can embed itself within a school or courtroom work-group, it can do what it wants, and bless its activities under the umbrella of “restorative justice.”

In fact, according to the National Association of Restorative and Community Justice, in the US it’s OK for a 19 year old to shoot his girlfriend in the face with a shotgun and for the victims’ family to forgive him after their daughter dies in a “restorative” pre-trial Victim/Offender Mediation to minimize the killer’s sentence, despite the United Nations injunction against using any pre-trial meetings to influence sentencing. (See 3.9.1 at the linked UN publication).

In the Texas Times article, author Aliyya Swaby writes that this modality “encourages students and teachers to talk through their problems and build stronger relationships in order to prevent conflict and violence before it happens.”

Questions have arisen about Restorative Justice in Florida following the Parkland shooting. Isabelle Robinson describes in her New York Times op ed how she endured physical assault, sexual harassment and bullying by Nikolas Cruz, which went unaddressed by the administration. Then, as a good kid who was willing to volunteer to tutor troubled kids, she was matched with Cruz and had to endure further harassment despite her repeated efforts to befriend him. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/opinion/nikolas-cruz-shooting-florida.html

Restorative Justice and Restorative Practices play a double game with these programs. On one hand, they treat “Restoration” as a set of embodied principles – a person who holds the right frame of mind is a “restorer.” On the other hand, they treat RJ and RP as a series of practices – talking circles, Victim/Offender Mediation, Family Group Conferences and the like. On one day, a program is “restorative.” If something goes wrong, the next day, mysteriously, it’s not!

My approach is to say, “if it maintains the ideology, it’s part of this movement, no matter how good or bad the outcomes.” So, I consider all of these manipulations of children to preemptively solve future violence as part of this ideological frame.

When we look at it like this, we are able to ask ourselves a fundamental question about this movement: is it right for us to put the onus on children to resolve future violence in school? What are the mechanisms that might make that happen? What if it goes wrong?

In the article, Marilyn Armour states, “When done correctly, restorative justice can change a school’s culture, building trust and deepening the relationships students have with teachers, administrators and one another.”

“When done poorly, ‘it’s going to go belly up.’”

In the article, Armour is siding with the “practices over principles” side of the so-called “restorative” movement.

The article fails to ask a second pivotal question: What do they mean when they say “RJ was done well or done poorly?”

Restorative Justice and Restorative Practices are at their foundation, social engineering. They instill a process of emotional “preparation” to develop a set of levers that can be manipulated to minimize the perceived harm of offenses by victims and to encourage victims to accept and make friends with offenders. The upside, is they encourage people to slow down and experience their feelings, which may or may not work on people who tend to externalize their feelings. A person with neurotic tendencies, who already internalizes and processes their experience by focusing on modifying their own actions is at extreme risk in these scenarios. This person already is unlikely to cast blame or lash out.

Like Isabelle Robinson, these victims are likely to look to themselves – what am I doing wrong that Nicholas Cruz won’t like me? They falsely position the offender’s assaults as caused by their own inability to engage the offender meaningfully. “Restorers” seem to relish their power in coercing victims into this subjugated position.

The Texas Tribune article describes this social engineering component of Restorative Practices: “Instead of thinking about when to send a student to the principal, teachers have to think, ‘How can I get kids to understand their behavior in a way that they decide to change it?’ Burley said.”

In many parts of the US, Europe and Brazil Restorative Justice has been blended with a system called “Nonviolent Communication” (NVC). Joe Brummer and Dominic Barter are two trainers that utilize the Nonviolent Communication model within their Restirative Justice and Restorative Practices training http://www.joebrummer.com/about-me/

Morten Tolboll writes about the problems with NVC in his essay “Nonviolent Communication is an instrument of psychic terror.” https://mortentolboll.weebly.com/nonviolent-communication-is-an-instrument-of-psychic-terror.html

He writes, “NVC holds that most conflicts between individuals or groups arise from miscommunication about their human needs, due to coercive or manipulative language that aims to induce fear, guilt, shame, etc. These “violent” modes of communication, when used during a conflict, divert the attention of the participants away from clarifying their needs, their feelings, their perceptions, and their requests, thus perpetuating the conflict.”

The model implements four steps: Making neutral observations, expressing feelings without justification or interpretation, expressing needs and making clear, concrete requests. Sounds good, right?

“NVC has also been interpreted as a spiritual practice, a set of values, a parenting technique, an educational method and a worldview.”

In doing so, it becomes a model for goodness. If you disregard the model, you must be rejecting goodness. It quickly devolves into passive aggressive moralism, affirming participants who comply with the model, and ostracizing or removing input from those who don’t.

As Tolboll points out in his essay, “as in many other New Age directions, NVC tries to create easy solutions, and as we shall see, with only one result: dangerous delusions.”

Restorative Justice tries to counter the “hook” that people must participate or they are not participating in the good (i.e. through a mode of withholding, they are bad) by reiterating that consensual participation is necessary as a foundational principle. Any instance where people are compelled to participate is outside the bounds of Restorative Justice.

According to the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, “A restorative justice facilitator shall conduct a restorative justice practice based on the principle of voluntary participation for all participants.” http://restorativejustice.org/rj-library/voluntary-participation-in-restorative-practices/12061/#sthash.7G1OVcaz.dpbs

Howard Zehr, called the “grandfather” of Restorative Justice, in his “The Little Book of Restorative Justice” calls for voluntariness on the part of offenders, writing “Voluntary participation by offenders is maximized. However, offenders may be required to accept their obligations if they do not do so voluntarily” (Zehr, p. 65). In his model, there is no similar injunction in support of victims.

Zehr also highlights how “Restorative” justice is foundationally inconsistent. A “signpost” of a restorative system, according to Zehr, is to “work toward the restoration of victims, empowering them and responding to their needs as they see them” (Zehr, p. 40).

Like Nonviolent Communication, Restorative Justice rests on the premise that each individual is capable of authentic expression and equal self-advocacy, given the same opportunity. The result of such a system is wildly unequal, as I have explored in much of my work on the topic. https://www.academia.edu/29008323/Power_Race_Class_and_Restoration_What_is_Justice_Amongst_Clashing_Paradigms

As described in the Texas Tribune article, Restorative Practices in Schools have no injunction on voluntariness for anyone in the community. The Circle is treated as a mandatory, just as is participation in state sponsored education.

“In late April, Bammel social studies teacher Antondria Davis passed the wooden ‘talking piece’ around the circle, prompting each of her sixth-grade students to participate in a conversation about how they should best engage with social media. ‘Nobody can pass. Everyone has to give some kind of input,’ she warned, starting counterclockwise.”

“Forced to express her feelings twice a week to classmates she didn’t know well, Ford said the circles helped her communicate better outside of the classroom.”

We have another striking question that is not sufficiently addressed in the article: Should students be compelled to express their feelings?

Within the frame of NVC, RJ and RP, and based upon the underlying principle that there is an authentic self that can be expressed if everything is stripped down to the right type of conversation, the answer is “of course.”

However, as a crime victim who grew up with the Restorative Justice ideology all around me, I can tell you that this is dangerous and difficult territory. First, child victims of crime may have muted emotional responses. Someone getting hit, screamed at, threatened with a knife, stabbed, kicked out of the house may not be perceived as emotional. These may simply be experienced as things to avoid, like a car that has run a red light. On the other hand, being asked to read a paragraph from a first grade reading primer may result in an emotional meltdown. (I recall trying to tear a book in half three words into my assigned paragraph). The stakes become reversed, and should this child be asked his or her emotions about reading, the result is unlikely to ring as authentic, honest or transparent.

The child of abuse, given a circle and a dialogue about their feelings goes into mental overdrive, attempting to figure out what will be acceptable.

As the article continues:

“‘Everything we do is embedded with circles,’ said Anita Wadhwa, the school’s restorative justice specialist, who is writing a book on restorative justice case studies. She knows it’s working because she has almost universal support from teachers, students and families.”

Anita and I are online acquaintances. Toward the end of her semester in Winter, 2017, she invited me to skype in to discuss my concerns about Restorative Justice with her class. I described my experience of sexual abuse, the minimization of the harms caused by my offender (which ultimately resulted in him regaining his rights after serving time for several felonies, and being treated as a first time offender when he was arrested after the age of 60 for breaking and entering and other crimes), the psychological abuse I experienced for not accepting the RJ movement as a form of justice, and my interactions with the RJ founders which have been defined by their self-justifications, denials and claims of goodness based on their intentions.

A young woman in Anita’s class disclosed sexual abuse for the first time in a group setting. She indicated that as a child, an older child had forced her into unwanted touching, and that when she told adults, they minimized it, saying they were kids and that the offender didn’t know what he was doing. After it was minimized, the offender came back the next day and continued the same behavior. She, like me, wished there had been actual sanctions against the offender. She felt that the minimization and justification of harm was unacceptable.

Whether this disclosure can be attributed to the restorative circle, my opposition to the RJ movement, or the intrinsic readiness of the survivor to disclose, or some other cause is unknown. What is clear is that the RJ process – the notion that community can resolve conflict without government intervention, is incomplete and leads to injustice concealed by a propagandistic frame.

When I look at the overall movement called Restorative Justice and Restorative Practice in Schools, I don’t see the optimistic portrait presented in the Texas Tribune article. I see the questions and gaps that I’ve raised in this response.

My hope is that more people will begin to dig in and examine the underlying biases of this movement. My hope is that we can move away from the notion that Howard Zehr made up – the idea that there is a pure ideology of Restoration built on principles that can be applied over communitarian systems and that will result in an ideal world.

As Zehr sums up his agenda in “The Little Book of Restorative Justice” he writes:

“Restorative justice advocates dream of a day when justice is fully restorative, but whether this is realistic is debatable, at least in the immediate future. More attainable, perhaps, is a time when restorative justice is the norm, while some form of the legal or criminal justice system provides the backup or alternative. Possible, perhaps, is a time when all our approaches to justice will be restoratively oriented.”  (p.59)

From my vantage, the compelled environment created in these schools is the “restorer’s” effort to move society away from reason to create a culture built on emotionally and psychologically coerced false authority. The reality, however, is that there is no safe way to implement coercion. The problem with RJ and RP is the same problem that exists in the criminal justice system – false authority, the empowerment of religious ideology and faith as a foundation for transformation, and a system of granting and withholding rewards controlled by whoever is given power within a given community.

As Restorative Justice and Restorative Practices are a fraught territory founded in an ideological emotionally and psychologically coercive frame, I hope we never see a system defined as Restorative. Please join me in questioning and unpacking the messages of this ideological movement.

Sources:

Zehr, Howard. “The Little Book of Restorative Justice.” Good Books, 2002.