Monday, February 04, 2008
restorative justice and bullyingCategories: Anthropology Alchemy Conflict management
I was talking to a friend about restorative justice (rj) stuff in schools recently and she had an interesting take on it. She has a legal background and a firmly post-modern viewpoint, and she was a bit concerned about how an ‘offender’ becomes defined, how sticky that label is, and about how children are targeted for intervention. All of which are very interesting points and very worthwhile considering.
I argued that children were pretty much self-selecting, they were the ones playing up, they were the ones standing around the Principal’s door waiting for attention in any case, but she wasn’t quite buying it, and at the time that annoyed me, but it seems pretty reasonable to me now. I mean, the ‘bad kid’ label is pretty sticky.
But still, I wanted her to see that rj was more than tool for picking kids out, labelling them and intervening in some way, so I started telling her about Undercover Teams. You can read the whole thing here on Bill Hubbard’s site, or if you prefer I can give you a quick run down:
So basically, one kid is being bullied, talks to the rj-practitioner (who is hopefully also the counsellor) about it, they decide to set up an Undercover Team. The team consists of a couple of the bullies, a couple of assertive non-bullies and a couple of supporters of the ‘victim’. After hearing about how much of a hard time the victim is having at the moment (no names), this team is invited to become a secret support group who will help out and defend this kid for a set time period (say a couple of weeks). The kids are told they have been chosen for this responsibility because the ‘victim’ believes that they are classmates “who others listen to”. The kids kinda promise to do a few random acts of kindness over the next few weeks and the dynamics change and reset in the classroom/playground and yeah, its all supervised and a bit more coordinated than I’m making it sound, and there times to try it and times not to—- go read it, its pretty interesting!
It’s not exactly restorative justice but it comes from the same principles, which are engagement and re-integration rather than separation, providing an opportunity to learn to do things better rather than trying to teach through punishing, emphasising contextualised harm and supporting and engaging the people involved on both sides of the equation.
It’s not exactly rj; perhaps if i knew more about it I would say that it is heading into Narrative Therapy territory (can anyone help me out here?). I very much like the aspects of play and secret club, tho at the same time I’m uncomfortable with the deception. But mostly what I like about it is that the labeling aspect is almost eliminated, the new role is clearly defined and supported, and it plays a lot on reputation and the external positive regard of others as a stepping-stone to internally generated positive regard.
The aim is to use the current circumstances as an excuse to address some of the underlying factors in the hope that with some of the obstacles removed, people will learn to move in the direction of more positive outcomes. Children are the target because we believe that the scripts that we use to regulate our behaviours are much less firmly set in childhood than in adulthood, but finding ways for them to maintain their autonomy is paramount. It’s all about leading the horses to the water and then letting them decide whether to drink or not. I know of two schools where Undercover Teams are used, one is the aforementioned Bill Hubbard’s school and the other is a school here in Adelaide. Both of them have found them to be effective. I’m sure there are other schools out there doing it tho. My friend was certainly interested to hear about it. I’m interested to see what she comes back with next time!
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