Forensic Psychology For Dummies (77 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Victims offer the following reasons for requesting a restorative justice procedure:
To find out from the offender why he committed the crime in that way with that particular victim.
The restorative justice process can employ many different formats, such as small group meetings, more formal conferences and mediation through a third party. These formats can include support from legal or psychotherapeutic professionals or even ex-offenders. In general, restorative justice follows the process of:
Bringing together all those on whom the crime has impacted to talk about the crime and its consequences.
Exploring how the offender can help to repair the harm caused, including clear indications of remorse, apology and acceptance of the impact of the offence.
Setting in motion the restoration of victims and offenders as full, positive members of society.
Ensuring that all those for whom the crime has particular relevance participate in the actions agreed.
Restorative justice isn’t a soft option for criminals. Many of them refuse to accept responsibility for their crimes, drawing on the justifications that I discuss in Chapter 2. They also don’t want to face their victims or set in motion anything that would redress the damage they have done. In many cases, offenders have preferred to go to prison instead of participating in restorative justice. This problem reveals the central weakness of what’s otherwise a good idea: it requires the offender’s full and open participation.
When the victim is a whole nation
Forensic psychologists tend to deal with individuals, but unfortunately situations also exist in which large groups of people, possibly even whole nations, suffer crimes. In those cases the principles of forensic psychology are just as relevant for these large numbers of people as they would be for one person. In such tragedies, many thousands, often millions, of victims exist, and each individual may suffer the consequences that I discuss throughout this chapter. In most cases, the poor and dispossessed are the ones that suffer, along with those with limited or no resources for coping. This suffering can readily set in motion the cycle of criminality that I discuss earlier in this chapter in the section ‘Breaking the cycle: Criminals becoming victims and victims becoming criminals’. So when countries come through these traumas they sometimes work with forensic psychologists and those who draw on forensic psychology to help heal the nation.
Unsurprisingly, given its traumatic history when generations had their families torn apart by apartheid, South Africa is an example of such problems. Young men and women were born into families in which the father was forced away from home and in which the police and legal system focused on depriving those with the least resources of their rights. Such daily traumas may have predicted that many of them would be unable to relate to others and see criminality as a natural form of existence. The miracle of South Africa as it moved into multi-racial democracy is that it didn’t explode into a criminal blood-bath. This achievement is due, at least in part, to the social and political processes of reconciliation used to reconstruct the social fabric of that society.
In a form of restorative justice, people from the different sides of the earlier conflict were brought together and an attempt made to balance remorse with forgiveness (the danger being that victims were left feeling as if their suffering wasn’t taken seriously).
One interesting finding in this area is that religious institutions play a powerfully positive role, perhaps because they provide individuals with the possibility of reconstructing themselves as members of an ethical, even magnanimous, community guided by civilising principles. They can think of themselves as builders of a new world, rather than sufferers from the misdeeds of others. In other words, they can re-invent their personal narratives so that they do not see themselves as victims who seek revenge but as pioneers creating a born-again country. Like a rape victim who refuses to continue to suffer from fear, individuals in post-conflict societies can use the fundamental forensic psychology idea of the value of taking control of their lives and make the future work for them.