DE-COLONISING RESTORATIVE JUSTICE PRACTICES
Challenges for Rights-Based Restorative Praxis in
Canadian Schools
Dr. Shannon Moore & Dr. Richard Mitchell
Brock University, Canada
SUII Seminar June 23, 2014
Children's Rights, Social Justice and Intersectionality:
Challenges, Methods & Research
Authors’ Standpoint
Dr. Richard Mitchell
Associate Professor, Child and Youth Studies
Dr. Shannon Moore,
Director of Women’s and Gender Studies,
Associate Professor of Child and Youth Studies
Brock University, Canada
• Scholars & Practitioners
• Combined +30 years of practice with young people in justice,
community, education, psychiatric, child welfare contexts
• Development of grassroots programs implementing RJ and CRC in
direct relationships with young people in Canada
Aims of Paper Presentation
1. Present: Rights-Based Restorative Practices
• From justice to education contexts for young people
2. Establish: Transdisciplinary Framework
• Intersectionality
• Methodology
3. Introduce: De-colonising Discourse
• Restorative Justice Practices in Canadian Schools
• (Re)production of racist systems
Contemporary emergence of
Restorative Justice Practices
• Social movements responded to increasing dissatisfaction
retributive justice and the Informal Justice Movement of 1970’s
emerged along with restorative justice (Nyp, 2004)
• Return to ancient roots of conflict resolution now found the world
over in more than 100 countries (Van Ness, 2005)
• 2004 Scottish executive pilot project bringing restorative
approaches to Scottish schools in 3 local authorities (See Kane et
al, 2009; McCluskey et al, 2008 ; McCluskey, 2014)
UN Basic Principles of RJ*
• Offender/victim clearly identified, participation voluntary
• Victim/offender agree on basic facts prior to participation
• Power imbalances, cultural differences addressed
• Safety paramount throughout all restorative processes
• Where RJ not suitable or possible, case should be referred
• Offenders encouraged to take responsibility
• Reintegration of the victim and the offender into the
community
*See Basic Principles on the Use of RJ programmes in Criminal Matters,
UNESCO, 2002
UN Handbook
on Restorative Justice Programs
• RJ includes victim, offender & community
affected by crime active resolution often
w/facilitator
• RJ is evolving concept giving rise to different
interpretations in different cultures
• See UN Office of Drugs and Crime, 2006: 6
Lauren Abramson (2014)
Collective Change
Executive Director of Community
Conferencing Center (CCC) in
Baltimore, Maryland, pt-time assistant
professor of child psychiatry at Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine
Abramson’s 3 part structure to
restorative conferencing adapts Maori
principles…
• Hearing what happened,
• Voicing how everyone was affected
• Repair, Resolution, Prevention
emerges as group process
See Moore (2003; Moore & Mitchell, 2007)
JUSTICE
EPISTOMOLOGY
ONTOLOGY
PROCESS
FOCUS
VICTIM’S ROLE
OFFENDER’S ROLE
RETRIBUTIVE
RESTORATIVE
individualistic
communitarian
punitive
capacity building
adversarial
decreases antagonism
single act
disharmonies in relationships
not meaningfully
involved in the solution
central to the solution
alienated & isolated
opportunity to be accountable
UN Basic Principles of Restorative Justice
• Holds authority for UN member states and provides important
standards of practice but not legally binding…
• By adopting UN Basic Principles, issues facing RJ programmes
will not evaporate. Finding resolution in a system that is
fundamentally punitive will continue to challenge policy
makers and practitioners ~ (Cormier, 2002)
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
• UNCRC is legally binding where treaty ratified reflected in domestic law in many states but not all
i.e. Canada
• Article 44 reporting process holds governments
accountable to “principles and provisions” (Art. 42)
• Principles Articles 2, 3, 6, 12
• Provisions (Education) Articles 28 & 29
• Provisions (Justice) Articles 37 & 40
• Provisions (Evaluation) Articles 42 & 44
UNCRC integrated with RJ
(Moore, 2003; Mitchell, 2005)
• Based on doctoral findings from 2 studies - Rights-based restorative
justice developed as a tool for implementing/evaluating
international commitments in professional settings
• Rights-based approach to restorative justice supports young people
in community and education
• RBRJ Principles based on UN Frameworks
1. Non-discrimination, Equality & Mutuality
2. Best Interests, Well-Being & Restoration
3. Survival, Development & Safety
4. Participation, voice & Volunteerism
(see Moore, 2007; Moore, 2008; Moore & Mitchell, 2007a,b, 2009, 2012)
Rights-Based Restorative
Justice Practices:
Canadian School-Based
Case Study 2012-14
Principles of Rights Based Restorative Praxis
in Ontario Schools
1. Non-discrimination and Equity
Intersections of identity based upon age, gender, ability, culture,
sexual orientations, poverty, race, religion
2. Well-Being & Restoration
Student well-being central to creating safe, caring school
communities; individual directly involved collectively find solutions
3. Safety & Caring
Context of vulnerabilities due to identity & equity sustain safe
school community spaces to learn & grow & play
4. Voice & Participation Best Interests, Well-Being & Restoration
Everyone impacted has support to fully participate be heard
(see Moore, 2014; Moore & Mitchell, in press)
Rights-Based Restorative Praxis
AIMS OF THE RESEARCH
•
To ascertain leading practices for successful implementation
of restorative practices with congruently, accurately, and
systematically
•
To ascertain barriers to implementing restorative practices
congruently, accurately, and systematically
•
To disseminate these findings in support of effective
implementation of restorative practices province-wide
Dataset comprised systematic review of statutory and policy
documents, qualitative results contributed by 300 participants from 60
schools in 14 rural and urban districts near Toronto, Ontario
S.A. Moore, (2014) Final Report “Leading Restorative Practices in Ontario Schools: Findings
& Recommendations”, Safe and Accepting Schools Branch, Submitted to Ontario Ministry
of Education, Canada pp. 1-51. See http://restorativeworks.net/2014/02/schools-acrossontario-join-forces-build-restorative-practices-movement/
Rights-Based Restorative Praxis
METHODOLOGY & METHODS
• Exploratory, mixed methodology and iterative process utilising
modified Delphi methods for data collection (Hsu & Sandford, 2007)
• Congruence with principles of restorative justice practices
• Delphi = Consensus building method amongst transdisciplinary team
of stakeholders
(ie: governmental, administrative, teaching and student
participants, and research team)
Rights-Based Restorative Praxis
Data Analysis & Findings
Grounded theory analysis through constant comparison data to
data, data to policy and legal texts, and data to new academic
literature reveals potential for:
1. Whole School Implementation: Linked to Time, Training,
Preparation
2.
Paradigm Shift from Punitive Approaches to Relationships
3.
Safe and Caring Schools include Engaged Young Citizens
Negotiations for Phase II:
Rights-Based Restorative Praxis in Ontario Schools
Moore & Mitchell Conceptual Framework
• Rights-Based Restorative Justice
• Transdisciplinarity & Critical Pedagogy
• Decolonising Framework
Ontario Ministry of Education
• Offered +++funding for Longitudinal Study based on
established dominant research paradigms into bullying from
psychology
Educators and Restorative Justice Trainers
• +++Resistance to integration of UNCRC and critical
approaches
Freirean critical pedagogues Giroux & SearlsGiroux (2004:102)
• Take Back Higher Education: educators may be forced to
work within academic disciplines they can develop
transdisciplinary tools
• TD operates at frontier of knowledge production prompting
pedagogues, students and teachers “to develop new models
of analysis”
• Educators can use TD tools to challenge and contest the
economic, political, cultural conditions reproducing inequities
in society
Moore & Mitchell in Youth Justice (2009:28-30)
• Argue that the UNCRC presents such a TD tool
• Justice, other professionals, academic disciplines understand
and conduct relations w/young people from vastly different
perspectives, frequently seeking power not justice
• As a result youth justice systems often a “tower of babble”
young people fall through the cracks due to “disciplinary
myopia”
• Thus - we’ve argued for RBRJ, transdisciplinary approaches are
necessary for effective application of these frameworks
Australians Albrecht Freeman & Higginbotham
(1998:57)
• Transdisciplinarity (TD) adopted in health, social & traditional
sciences, feminist, climate change research
• Reflects complexity, allows interplay across multiple disciplines,
multi-level explanations of problems
• Methodologically TD difficult, includes non-academic
partnerships, inherently critical, inductive, iterative, participatory
• Epistemologically TD is open to complexity theory and diverse
theories of knowledge including holistic, Indigenous frameworks
and the emergent properties of systems
• Ontologically all worldviews included
Essentials of Transdisciplinary Research by US
sociologist Patricia Leavy (2011: Intro)
TD is issue-driven, addressing contemporary social
questions through range of critical theoretical
perspectives unhampered by the theoretical and
methodological restrictions of traditional disciplinary
boundaries
Critical race feminist Pratt-Clark (2012: 84) also argues
methodologically there is “a great need for
transdisciplinarity”
• Storytelling, narrative, voice, auto-ethnography, and
phenomenology are critical theoretical and methodological
concepts in Critical Race Feminism (CRF) and Black Feminist
traditions
• TD could connect multiple disciplines, areas of study...
enabling us to consider ‘complex social problems with a
strategy that will increase the likelihood of successful social
justice activism’
• Recognizing importance of intertwined identities,
including race and gender; commitment to social justice
activism and social movements
Also arguing from feminist/critical race
perspective Hudson (2006: 29)
• English law professor Hudson (2006: 29) looks at race, gender
and justice and suggests restorative justice practice in some
ways reflects important principles
• In order to overcome dominant character of white man’s
justice in late modern liberal societies RJ must consciously
incorporate principles of discursiveness, relationalism and
reflectiveness
However, Canadian colonialist narratives
mean history simply not being taught
• Neegan (2005) points out Aboriginal, First Nations, Indigenous
and Metis peoples deprived of land, cultural traditions,
languages, spiritual practices, ways of life as ‘savage’
• Children then removed from families to residential schools –
many sexually, physically abused - thousands died with welldocumented inter-generational effects to present day
• Societal prejudices, discrimination create additional
challenges
• Historic inequities left First Nations children, youth, families
without supports, services
Known history includes “Story of a National Crime:
Record of the Health Conditions of Indians of Canada
from 1904 to 1921”
• Health Officer Dr. Peter Bryce (1909)hired by Indian Affairs
Department to report health of residential school students
• Claimed thousands of children being systematically,
deliberately killed with average mortality rates of between
30 % to 60 %
• Alleged staff, church officials withholding/falsifying records so
mass graves still being uncovered today as survivors recall
burying peers/siblings.
So why De-Colonise RBRJ in Canada?
Overrepresentation of First Nations, Black & Minoritised young
people expelled from school, in out of home care [or ‘looked
after’], and in secure custody
• Out of Home Care (in one urban Ontario municipality 65% children in
care are Black while only 8% of total population; across Canada 3040% children in care are Aboriginal while only 5% of the total
population (Pon, Gosine, Philips, 2011: 386)
• X3 More Indigenous children in care than at the height of residential
schools (Blackstock, 2013)
• ‘Crossover kids—care to custody’ (Finlay, 2003)
• ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’ (Fenny & Rose, 2007)
Youth crime is only one of many historical
outcomes…
• Aboriginal youth significantly over-represented in Canadian
justice system – incarceration rates 6-8 times higher than
national average
• Stats from Correctional Service Canada show Aboriginal
people represent only 4% of the population, but account for
18% of federal inmates
• In some Prairie institutions, 50% of adult prisoners are from
FN/Aboriginal backgrounds
• Suicide rates 8-11 times non-Aboriginal populations
Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education &
Society, Vol. 1: 1-40
• US scholars Tuck and Yang (2012) argue that disruption of
Indigenous relationships to the land represents a profound
epistemic, ontological, cosmological violence
• Settler colonialism is different from other forms of colonialism
and relying solely on postcolonial literatures will not help to
envision the shape that decolonisation must take
Challenges to Decolonising Rights-Based
Restorative Justice Practices
• We’ve observed how RJ can be deployed as a tool to reify
hegemony of Judeo-Christian settler teachings (i.e. Ontario
schools)
• This reflects a “suffocating” social control network on the inside
and exclusivism towards those outside (Walgrave, 2011: 73)
• Routinized, atomized fast-food Intervention (Umbreit, 1999, in
Walgrave, 2011: 73)
• This appropriation belies the web of complexities, intersectional
identities, and relations of power within our communities,
systems
Challenges to Decolonising
• Understanding the overrepresentation of minoritised, Black &
Aboriginal young people must be in the context of the
“White Supremacy” that is foundational to “Canada’s Post
War Welfare State” (Pon, Gosine, Philiips, 2011: 385)
• There is a seeping influence of what some researchers have
called “white noise” (Nishad Khanna, 2011: Abstract) to refer
to the ubiquity of whiteness and dominant Western
ideologies
Challenges to Decolonising RBRJ
• Symbolic commitments to diversity become “non-performaties
that do not bring about what they name” (Ahmed, 2012: 113)
• Individuals embodying diversity frequently excluded from
participation due to dominance of Judeo-Christian frameworks
reflecting institutional ‘whiteness’ - i.e. docs cited in Moore
(2014)
• Child Rights, CRC, UN 1989
• Principles of Restorative Justice, UNESCO 2002
• Accepting Schools Act, Ontario, 2012
• Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy, Ontario, 2009
• Ontario’s Comprehensive Mental Health & Additions Strategy, 2011
• Progressive Discipline and Promoting Positive School Behaviour, 2012
Tuck & Yang’s (2012) approach to Indigenous
Frameworks reveals decolonisation “is not a
metaphor”
• Easy adoption of “decolonizing discourse” by education
advocates and scholarship is evidenced by increasing
number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use
“decolonizing methods,” or to “decolonize student thinking”
• This discourse turns decolonization into a metaphor (2012:1)
• Decolonization (a noun) cannot be easily grafted onto preexisting discourses/frameworks, even if they are critical, even
if they are anti-racist, even if they are social justice
frameworks
• Easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization
is yet another form of “settler appropriation” (ibid. p. 3)
This work of decolonising [RBRJ for example]
assumes a notion of incommensurability
• Attending to what is irreconcilable within ‘settler
colonial relations’ and what is incommensurable
between decolonizing projects and other social
justice projects helps reduce frustration of attempts
at solidarity
• Decolonization is hard, unsettling work (Tuck &
Yang, 2012: 4)
• Little evidence of this work as yet in RJ or rightsbased discourses
SELECTED REFERENCES
•
Albrecht, G., Freeman, S. & Higginbotham, N. (1998). ‘Complexity and human health: The case
for a transdisciplinary paradigm’. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 22(1): 55–92.
•
Giroux, H. A., & Searls Giroux, S. (2004). Take Back Higher Education: Race, youth and the crisis
of democracy in the post-civil rights era. New York: PalgraveMacmillan.
•
Hudson, B. (2006) ‘Beyond white man’s justice - Race, gender and justice in late modernity’,
Theoretical Criminology, 10(1): 29-47.
•
Mitchell, R.C. & Moore, S.A. (Eds. 2012) Politics, Participation, & Power Relations: Transdisciplinary
Approaches to Critical Citizenship in the Classroom and Community. Rotterdam, Boston and
Taipei: Sense Publishers .
•
Moore, S. A. & Mitchell, R. C. (Eds. 2008) Power, Pedagogy and Praxis: Social Justice in the
Globalized Classroom. Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei: Sense Publishers.
•
Moore, S. A. & Mitchell, R.C. (2009) Rights-based restorative justice: Evaluating compliance with
international standards. Youth Justice, 9(1), 27–43
•
Neegan, E. (2005) ‘Excuse me: who are the first peoples of Canada? A historical analysis of
Aboriginal education in Canada then and now”. International Journal of Inclusive Education,
9(1), 3-15.
•
Pratt-Clarke, M. (2012) ‘A Black Woman’s Search for the Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice
Model: Encounters with Critical Race Feminism, Black Feminism, and Africana Studies’. The
Journal of Pan African Studies, 5(1): 83-102.
•
Tuck, E & Yang, K. Wayne (2012) ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’. Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.