I recall some years ago reading a
newspaper column by Australian social psychologist Hugh McKay, about what matters when
righting wrongs in relationships. What stayed with me from this column was the
importance for the wronged party of being
heard in order for the healing and forgiveness process to begin.
In recent years, this principle of
assisting victims (and indeed perpetrators) to feel heard has been reflected in
the move towards Restorative Justice
Conferencing for young offenders who plead guilty in court to an alleged
offence. The move away from traditional adversarial and punitive approaches to
justice administration is pleasing. Although punishment has good face validity
and broad appeal to the readers of tabloid media, its record in actually
turning around problem behaviour is chequered at best.
In Australia, all states and territories
have enshrined approaches to the processing of young offenders that embed three
core principles:
- adolescents are not “miniature adults” and should therefore be treated in accordance with their developmental needs;
- wherever possible, it is desirable to divert young people away from formal convictions, whether community-based or custodial, and accordingly,
- detention is an option of last resort.
It is notable too, that the principles of
restorative conferencing are also finding their way into schools, both primary
and secondary, in an effort to equip young people with the skills required to
negotiate conflict and interpersonal harm in prosocial and respectful ways. This
is particularly important to young people whose families are unable, for a
variety of reasons to model and teach these skills.
Restorative conferencing sits well
alongside the above principles. It is a process whereby the young offender
comes face-to-face with his /her victim and others who have been affected by
the “tear in the social fabric” created by their wrong-doing, in an effort to
ensure that all parties can tell their story, express their pain, hear and
understand the perspectives of others, and offer and receive an apology.
Before having a closer look at the verbal demands of restorative justice
conferencing, however, let’s have a look at what we know about young people who
wind up in the justice system. Overwhelming, they are from low socio-economic
status (SES) families, often single-parent households characterised by
inter-generational problems such as un/under-employment, unstable housing, mental
health problems, learning difficulties, and erratic and coercive parenting
styles. A very high proportion of young people in the justice system (around
40%) have also passed through the child protection system, due to maltreatment
(abuse and/or neglect) of various forms. Behaviour difficulties and school
exclusion are common in their educational histories, as are patterns of
academic under-achievement. None of these factors bodes well for well-developed
verbal skills. Put several of them together, and it’s reasonable to expect that
expressive and receptive vocabulary, narrative skills, and ability to deal with
figurative language (e.g. idioms, metaphors, analogies) will be compromised, as
will the ability to read and respond to emotional cues.
Research
from Australia, the UK, and the USA has indeed clearly identified young
offenders as a group whose language skills will fall below expected levels,
based on age and IQ. Whether we refer to these young people has having language
disorders, impairments, handicaps,
or simply “problems” is academic in this context. What matters is that around
50% of them perform in a clinical range on a wide variety of expressive and
receptive language tasks, though have rarely been identified as having anything
other than “learning problems” and/or “behaviour problems”. Language problems,
though pervasive, are invisible, and when undiagnosed in young offenders, tend
to masquerade as behaviours such as rudeness, disinterest, and poor motivation.
What
then, does this evidence mean for restorative justice conferencing?
Though we lack hard data with which to
answer this question, it is the subject of speculation in this
2013 paper by Hennessey Hayes (Griffith University) and me. In this paper,
we argue that because restorative conferencing is fundamentally a conversational process, the evidence on
language difficulties needs to be closely considered with respect to conference
planning and convening. It is usual in a restorative conference for the young
person to be asked to listen to and
understand the victim’s account of how the offence affected them, and to
use social cognition skills to process a range of subtle emotions, such as apprehension,
doubt, fear, resentment, and skepticism. In real time, the young person must also formulate their own ideas, thoughts, and
experiences into sentences and narratives that are sufficiently detailed to
be judged as genuine and enable the young person to display authenticity in the
eyes of victims.
Of course, in the hands of a skilled
facilitator, it is to be hoped that sufficient scaffolding is provided to
ensure that communication success is promoted and the conversation that ensues
is one that contributes to healing for victims and new insights for offenders.
However, the lack of research evidence to date that specifically takes account
of the verbal requirements of restorative conferencing means that we currently
lack standard triaging approaches. We also do not know to what extent victim
satisfaction with the conference process is influenced by the young person’s
verbal skills. I have written further about these concerns here.
Because young people in the justice
system embody the notion of developmental vulnerability, every effort needs to
be made to foster the development of prosocial skills and offer opportunities
to be part of the mainstream. Punitive approaches that promote social
alienation and limit opportunities for skill development do not service the
needs of young offenders, nor of the communities of which they are part.
Restorative approaches promote respect
and healing, but are fundamentally verbal
in their transaction, and so pose important questions that cannot be readily answered
at the present time. There is an
important role for speech-language
pathology here - in conducting and collaborating on research to develop
clinical tools that justice and education colleagues can employ to refine the
conference preparation and convening process.
Saying sorry is of course no simple matter, as it requires a flexible and
responsive verbal and social cognition toolkit. However, current evidence
indicates that we should assume that one in two young offenders will struggle
with many of the receptive and/or expressive language demands of these important, and
high-stakes restorative conversations.
(c) Pamela Snow 2014
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(c) Pamela Snow 2014