Shame Therapy
The idea of bringing troublemakers
face to face with their victims finds a new home in Australian
schools
By
DANIEL WILLIAMS Canberra
It's wednesday
lunchtime, and the scene in the library at Canberra's Caroline
Chisholm High School is familiar. A few swots are reading,
some chess fiends are bent over their boards, and a punctilious
librarian is attending to duties. But a passerby the previous
evening would have stumbled on a most unusual sight: some
20 people-teachers, parents and students-seated in a circle,
several teens crying as they relived their role in a big night
gone wrong.
The school
disco had been held in the school's gymnasium on March 15.
For many pupils, the prospect of this event, staged in the
heady atmosphere of night, was exhilarating. But for five
Year 10 girls the thrill led to strife: all drank vodka before
arriving at the disco, where one girl, "Emma," collapsed in
the girls' bathroom. She was found by art teacher Kate Waite,
who feared the girl might die before the ambulance arrived.
Emma recovered in hospital; her drinking partners went home
in disgrace.
At most
Australian schools, Emma and her friends could have expected
a week's suspension and a lecture from their principal. But
that's not how things are done at Caroline Chisholm. The 720-student
school has embraced a disciplinary system called restorative
justice, which brings together in conference all those affected
by a wrongdoing. During a cathartic discussion, offenders
face their victims and are shamed into acknowledging the pain
they've caused. In the case of the five girls-whose "victims"
were teachers, like Waite, who had been distressed by their
behavior-the school deemed the conference sufficient penalty.
"It gave them a powerful, dreadful experience," says principal
Allen Brooke, "not because it was punitive but because it
was emotionally draining."
Some supporters
of the approach-which can be used in cases as diverse as teasing
and gang fighting-say its benefits go far beyond nudging normally
well-behaved students like Emma's group back on course. They
claim it could prevent some of today's school recalcitrants
from becoming tomorrow's criminals. But critics argue it's
soft and misguided justice. Says Steven Kugel, a Sydney father
of three school-age boys: "Some kids will need 10 seconds
to work out that, so long as they can fake remorse, they'll
get away with almost anything."
In the late
1990s, while restorative justice was petering out as an experimental
tool in the New South Wales juvenile justice system, it crept
into public schools in Sydney, where trials in several districts
include children as young as eight. The practice has now spread
to Canberra, where Caroline Chisholm has made up for lost
time with a training blitz: by the end of this month a quarter
of its 60 teachers will have learned the restorative approach.
This requires teachers to replace finger-wagging with questions:
What were you thinking about at the time? Who do you think
has been affected by your actions? Conferences aren't designed
to establish guilt or innocence. Reserved for serious incidents
such as racial taunting or violence, they're arranged when
a student admits his or her wrongdoing and chooses a conference
over standard punishment. Principal Brooke hopes conferences
are "the future for school discipline." George Green, assistant
director-general of student services in the N.S.W. Department
of Education and Training, is also enthusiastic: "School community
forums have been highly successful in resolving issues to
the benefit of all involved."
Supporters
of restorative justice stress its healing quality, but is
it a naïve option? Some two decades after caning was outlawed
in Australian schools, suspension figures suggest that student
misbehavior is rising or teachers' tolerance is declining
-or both. In Australian Capital Territory public schools in
the four years to 1997, suspensions rose from 770 to 1,963.
In 1999, in his first year as principal at Caroline Chisholm,
Brooke ordered some 120 suspensions, twice the school's yearly
average. He did so, he says, without satisfaction; indeed,
the experience led him to consider alternatives. Suspensions
at the school fell to 60 last year-a shift that Brooke hopes
is a sign his school's culture is changing: more pupils "are
learning to get on with people they don't know or don't understand."
To some
students, restorative justice seems toothless. For Eve Mulkearns,
a Year 10 pupil at a Catholic school on Sydney's North Shore,
the ultimate deterrent from misbehavior is a three-hour Saturday
detention,
which entails menial labor like scrubbing pots; a conference,
by comparison, "doesn't sound too bad." Or effective, adds
her friend Kate Flood: "Kids will just put on the sorrow for
the benefit of the teachers." (Advocates of the approach say
children overestimate teachers' gullibility.) But a Year 11
boy from the same area says he can see how conferencing might
disrupt a teen's life: "The way it is now, your business doesn't
really come home-this brings it straight to your parents,"
he says. "I see that as harsher than picking up rubbish for
15 minutes."
Principal
Brooke's goal is school harmony, but other supporters of restorative
justice are eyeing a bigger picture. Peta Blood is a former
N.S.W. policewoman who quit the force in frustration two years
ago as restorative justice fizzled as a policing practice.
A co-founder of Circle Speak, which trains teachers in restorative
methods, Blood says that for school troublemakers, there's
"a clear pathway to theft and drug-related crime." When the
problem is bullying, argues Brenda Morrison, of the Australian
National University's Research School of Social Sciences,
there can be dire consequences for offenders as well as victims.
According to Morrison, Australian and American research suggests
that bullies enter a cycle that "can lead to lives of crime
and violence." Restorative justice can break that cycle by
"building communities of care around individuals while not
condoning harmful behavior," she says.
But Kerrie
Powell, a clinical psychologist who in 30 years' practice
has analyzed people at every stage of deviancy-from misbehaving
kids to murderers-believes conferencing would have little
effect on students with conditions like attention deficit
disorder, which can repress conscience and self-control. "It's
a wonderful idea," says Powell, "but I see it working in very
few cases." For many trouble-prone kids, "confronting their
victim wouldn't affect them. Some kids are cruel ... the idea
that they've harmed someone may actually please them."
Caroline
Chisholm executive teacher Kay Wulf concurs: "Conferences
don't work with the hardcore kids." Wulf wants the school
to continue holding conferences, but other staff, such as
Heidi Quibell, have seen enough. The English and social science
teacher attended one conference involving a pupil, "Lloyd,"
who had thrown a chair at a girl during a sport lesson. The
boy was unresponsive and the facilitator kept rifling through
her script for ideas about what to say next. The girl's parents,
meanwhile, fumed. "As a member of staff, I was embarrassed,"
says Quibell, who believes Lloyd needed an iron-fisted response.
"Having a girl say, 'I'm upset because he threw a chair at
me' wasn't working."
Ex-cop Blood
seems saddened by the attitude that some children are beyond
help: "Hard-core kids do respond, just not as dramatically."
The disco girls-"good girls" by all reports-certainly responded.
Flippant at the start of their conference, they turned "ashen-faced,"
says Brooke, during the "life-changing" ordeal. The father
of one of the girls says his daughter now views teachers differently-as
people instead of cold authoritarians. Restorative justice
helps some kids, some of the time. And in the post-cane era,
many teachers will find that reason enough to keep it in their
disciplinary kit bag.
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May 14, 2001 | No. 19
COVER
STORIES
The
Nuns' Stories
Hundreds of Roman Catholic sisters have opened up their lives, their memories
and (when they die) even their brains to researcher David Snowdon so that
all of us can better understand what causes Alzheimer's disease and what
can be done to prevent it
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOCIETY
BEHAVIOR: The Talking Cure...
Australian schools try shaming troublemakers onto the right path
THE
ARTS
CINEMA: Goodbye, Mrs. Tom Cruise. Hello, Nicole
Kidman, star of a bold new movie... Moulin Rouge awakens the dormant
musical
Samantha Lang, a cinematic connoisseur
of sex
MUSIC: Nick Cave, the gloom rocker, blooms
BOOKS: A slim prayer with sales that are
divine
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