Restorative Justice and Trauma

Trauma and Restorative Justice

• Trauma is a core experience for both victims and offenders, and violence may be a reenactment of unresolved trauma.
• Society's response to trauma often perpetuates more trauma, such as imprisonment, rather than addressing the underlying causes.

Restorative Justice Principles

• Focus on the harms and needs of victims, communities, and offenders.
• Address the obligations resulting from those harms.
• Use inclusive, collaborative processes.
• Involve those with a legitimate stake in the situation, including victims, offenders, community members, and society.
• Seek to put right the wrongs.

Underlying Values

• Recognition of interconnectedness and the impact of disrupted relationships.
• Emphasis on explicit values to apply restorative justice principles in a true and spirit.

Family Group Conferences (FGC)

• A system of justice and a mode of encounter in New Zealand.
• Facilitated by paid social services personnel, called Youth Justice Coordinators.
• Goal is to be culturally appropriate and inclusive.
• Family caucus is a common element, where the offender and their family retire to discuss and develop a proposal.

Restorative Justice Approaches

• Circles à Circle approaches emerged from First Nation communities in Canada.
• Peacemaking Circles, a term coined by Judge Barry Stuart.
• Victim assistance is an important component of restorative justice, even in cases where offenders are not apprehended or unwilling to take responsibility.

Offender Treatment and Rehabilitation

• Can be seen as part of prevention and has some kinship with restorative justice.
• Can function restoratively by organizing treatment around offenders understanding and taking responsibility for harm.
• Giving attention to victims' needs is also essential.

Police Officers and Restorative Justice

• Can informally incorporate restorative justice principles into their decision-making.
• Can be involved in restorative processes, such as circle sentencing, with a limited role.

Variation in Restorative Justice Programs

• Considerable variation in formality, operation, and level of involvement from various parties.
• Programs operated by public sector organizations, court-based programs, police-based programs, and community-based programs.
• Trained volunteers from the community often participate in community-based programs.

Victim-Offender Mediation

• Takes place before sentencing, and the outcome is usually brought back to the attention of the prosecution or judge.
• Can be used successfully during the offender's incarceration as part of rehabilitation.
• Victims and offenders meet face-to-face, express their feelings, and develop a new understanding.
• Facilitators meet with both parties in advance to ensure a safe and productive encounter.
• Indirect mediation processes are also used when direct contact is not possible.

The Egoistic Maxim and the Categorical Imperative Test

• The egoistic maxim is "I will not help others."
• Universalizing the maxim creates a universal law: "No one ever helps anyone else."
• Imagine trying to will this maxim in a world where it is universally followed: "What would the world be like if no one ever helped anyone else?"
• The contradiction step involves asking if there is a contradiction when imagining trying to will the maxim in a world where it is universally followed.

The Categorical Imperative Test

• Kant's conclusion on the duty of beneficence: "To be beneficent, that is to promote according to one's means the happiness of others in need, without hoping for something in return, is every man's duty."
• It is a duty that everyone should follow.
• According to Kant, being egoistic is "impossible" from an ideological perspective.

Kantian Beneficence

• Maxim of beneficence: "Don't use others as mere means, but develop or promote others' ends and, in particular, foster others' capacities to pursue ends, to be autonomous beings."
• This means that instead of just helping others temporarily, we should help them develop their own capacities to achieve their goals.
• The Chinese proverb "if you feed a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you are feeding him for a lifetime" illustrates this concept.

O'Neill vs Singer

• For Singer, benevolence as a duty derives its rightness from the consequences involved with it.
• O'Neill's concept of benevolence focuses on promoting others' capacities to pursue their own ends.

Global Ethics and Restorative Justice

• Global Ethics is a distinct area of study and academic discipline that recognizes the complicated issues that arise from global interconnection and commonality.
• Global Ethics involves issues such as international relations, foreign aid, humanitarian intervention, human rights, war, terrorism, and torture, climate change, extreme poverty, and other global inequalities.

Characteristics of Global Ethics

• It aims to satisfy basic human needs.
• It recognizes the importance of self-fulfillment and happiness.
• It is impartial and considers all human beings as morally important.

Nationalism

• Definition: Nationalism is generally used to describe two phenomena: (i) the attitude that members of a nation have when they care about their national identity, and (ii) the action that members of a nation take when seeking to achieve or sustain self-determination.
• It is the direct opposite of cosmopolitism.
• Nationalism is often associated with self-determination, and the idea that people have the right to freely determine their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.

Nationalism and Self-Determination

• Nationalistic claim: "All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development."
• Self-determination is prone to being abused.
• The extent to which national interests should be pursued is a subject of debate.
• National partiality is often compared to "familial" partiality or racial partiality.

Nationalism and FGM: The Case of Kenya

• Jomo Kenyatta's argument: The defense of female genital mutilation (FGM) lies not in the defense of the general surgical operation or its details, but in the understanding of a very important fact in the tribal psychology of the Kikuyu, namely that this operation is still regarded as the essence of an institution that has enormous educational, social, moral, and religious implications.