What I learned about repair

I recently attended a seminar in restorative practice, delivered by accredited practitioners from Northern Ireland Alternatives and leading towards accreditation with the Restorative Justice Council. I was invited into the room by Gosia at Ballymoney Community Resource Centre, and I said yes before I had any idea how much I would take away from it.

I want to share what I learned, because I think a lot of people have heard the words restorative justice and have only a vague sense of what they mean. I was one of those people.

What it is, in plain words

Restorative practice is about restoring peace to a situation. It uses actions that make things right, without leaning so heavily on punishment.

It recognises three parties in any harm. The person who was harmed. The person responsible. And everyone else affected, which is nearly always a wider circle than the two people at the centre.

Here is the illustration that made it click for me. Imagine somebody breaks their neighbour's window. The police are called, there is a court date, there is a fine. Justice has been done in the way the state measures it. And the two of them still live next door to each other, still uneasy about meeting on the street, with the broken thing between them completely untouched.

The court dealt with an offence against the state. Nobody dealt with the harm between two human beings.

That is the gap restorative practice fills. It does not replace the justice system. It works alongside it and does the part the system was never built to do.

It is mostly about what happens before

This surprised me most. I had assumed restorative practice was something you reach for after something goes wrong. It turns out repair is the smallest part of it.

The model is a pyramid with three layers. The base, and by far the widest, is building relationships. Above that, strengthening community. Only at the very top, the narrow part, is repairing harm.

In other words, most of the work is done long before anybody needs repairing. If the relationships are strong and the community is strong, there is far less to put right. I found that genuinely clarifying, because it is exactly where my own work sits.

Doing things with people

The idea I will carry furthest is a simple square divided into four, with how much you expect of people running up one side and how much you support them running along the other.

Expect a lot and support nothing, and you are doing things to people. That is the punitive corner.

Expect nothing and support nothing, and you are doing nothing at all. That is the neglectful corner, and it is more common than we admit.

Support a lot and expect nothing, and you are doing things for people. It feels kind in the moment. It can quietly tell somebody you do not believe they are capable.

Expect a lot and support a lot, and you are doing things with people. That is the restorative corner, and it is the one worth aiming at.

I learned a good test for it. If somebody is struggling and you tell them there is help available and then walk away, you have expected something of them and given them nothing. If you go with them to the first appointment, that is doing it with them. Same information, completely different outcome.

And I learned that this is a model you apply to yourself first, before you ever apply it to anyone else.

Responsibility is the engine

Punishment on its own tends to leave resentment behind, and resentment makes the next incident more likely rather than less. What changes things is the person taking responsibility for what they did, because that is what makes repair possible, and repair is what allows somebody to come back into the room rather than stay outside it.

That cannot be forced. It takes patience and it takes a relationship. It also works, which is the point.

Circles, and a brave space

I learned how to sit in a restorative circle. There is a talking piece, and only the person holding it speaks. Everyone else listens.

You are told there is no need to prepare your answer, because if you are composing your reply you have stopped listening. You may always pass.

The questions start very light and get deeper by degrees, and the lightness at the start is what makes the depth possible later on. I watched a room of people who barely knew each other arrive somewhere I would not have believed if I had not been sitting in it.

One phrase from that session has already changed how I open my own workshops. We were told this is a brave space, because what is being asked of people is courage.

Community means three different things

I also learned that the word community carries three meanings at once: identity, place, and interest. When identity and place get tangled together, which happens here more than most places, people end up defending ground.

Communities of interest work differently. People find each other through a shared love of something, and where everybody came from stops being the organising question.

I see this every time I work with a room of children. The moment they discover they all love the same thing, the flags come down on their own.

What this means for Humanitas

Everything we do, lives almost entirely in the first two layers of that pyramid. Building relationships. Strengthening community. The preventative end, long before anybody needs repair.

I have been doing restorative work for years without knowing it had a name, a model and a body of practice standing behind it. I have the language now, and the language matters, because it is how this work gets recognised and taken seriously.

My thanks to Brian and Carly for their teaching, and to Gosia and BCRC for bringing me into the room.

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