Restorative Justice Repairs Relationships and Looks to the Future
An exile herself, Kassabova went back to make sense of the border that ran through her childhood in Communist Bulgaria, and after centuries of warfare, violence and absurd bureaucracy, to grieve for the loss to the region of its ancient communities and cultures.
An aspect of its recent history completely unknown to me was the Greek-Turkish exchange of populations in 1923, which sent Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims back to the seat of their faiths. And although a move towards restorative work through reciprocal visits took place in the 1990s, since many did not speak the language of their forcibly acquired ‘homelands’, it was no surprise that the ‘exchanged’ struggled to integrate into their new communities and many problems associated with the Great Exchange still impact the region.
Reading about the complex story of this area reminded me how rarely restorative practices are offered in the mainstream. Certainly, outside the criminal and Youth Justice sectors where Restorative Justice is a fundamental part of the toolkit, few know this transformative process which brings together ‘harmer’ and ‘harmed’ with the specific goal to repair what is broken and an intended outcome of looking forwards.
As a newly minted Level 2 Restorative Justice Facilitator, I see many ways in which this formal restorative process could be used, particularly its application in schools. Certainly, at a time when children and young people are spending less time with other children and as Ofcom’s recent study on the media lives of children reported, now that ‘cues inviting their attention on social media lean towards drama, controversy or emotion rather than objectivity, nuance or balance’, children and young people are finding it harder to negotiate everyday relationships or repair them when they go wrong.
Already, these patterns of behaviour are being taken into adulthood and are a factor in the rise of workplace grievance. A study by XpertHR reported a 30% increase in internal grievances in 2022-2023, the top three - bullying, harassment and poor interactions with managers and colleagues – all on the theme of relationship breakdown. Strong workplace practices are fundamental to healthy organisations, but managers have less tools to resolve staff grievances in ways that restore rather than patch up broken relationships.
All of us who work in schools know those relationships which never mend. Add the ability to gain further support for your dissatisfaction via WhatsApp groups (parents) or other online platforms (children and young people) and that innocuous falling out plays on repeat until it has a magnitude far beyond the original. Often, animosity is kept alive by parents, sometimes by the arrival of new personalities into a barely healed cohort of children, but just when things go quiet and – magically - the relationship seems to have mended itself, suddenly, we find ourselves once again in the role of referee, but with fresh players in the drama.
Unfortunately, most organisations still wield The Neutral Third Party as the arbitrator of outcomes, in a familiar dialogue of What happened? Who did it? Here’s the consequence., and although a punitive process is not wrong (and organisations must deliver on their behaviour policies or staff codes of conduct), in a case of harm, nothing is done to repair the relationships damaged along the way, including those between ‘harmer’ and ‘harmed’, their colleagues in the workplace; in schools, parents, other staff and friendship groups. The beauty of Restorative Justice is that it sits very comfortably alongside other processes; accountability is vital, but so is the chance for everyone to move beyond harm. For children and young people, in broken relationships, this would be a game-changer.