In this session, I'll be focusing on how Nonviolent Communication can support our social change efforts. In previous sessions, I've shown how social change can be used to communicate with ourselves. We've also looked at how it can be used to communicate with others and our family relationships and our work relationships.
Let's take a look at social change, which for me, to a large extent, shows how to use Nonviolent Communication when we are communicating with gangs. Now some gangs call themselves gangs, street gangs. I'm not so worried about these gangs and the damage that they might be doing. But I am concerned about some other gangs. These other gangs, don't call themselves gangs. These other gangs that I'm worried about, some of them call themselves governments. Some of the gangs that I'm worried about, call themselves corporations. What I mean by these gangs that I'm worried about our organizations of people that have a big impact over our lives, and who are doing some things that I think contribute to great violence on the planet and great suffering.
Nonviolent Communication 8 Marshall Rosenberg
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In this session, I'll be focusing on how Nonviolent Communication can support our social change efforts.
In previous sessions, I've shown how social change can be used to communicate with ourselves. We've also looked at how it can be used to communicate with others and our family relationships and our work relationships.
Let's take a look at social change, which for me, to a large extent, shows how to use Nonviolent Communication when we are communicating with gangs. Some gangs call themselves gangs, street gangs. I'm not so worried about these gangs and the damage that they might be doing. But I am concerned about some other gangs.
These other gangs, don't call themselves gangs. These other gangs that I'm worried about, some of them call themselves governments. Some of the gangs that I'm worried about, call themselves corporations.
What I mean, by these gangs that I'm worried about, are organizations of people that have a big impact over our lives, and who are doing some things that, I think, contribute to great violence on the planet and great suffering.
So how can each of us develop our own power, become conscious of our power and use it to transform these structures, these organizations so that they serve life rather than threaten life.
Now, this can be quite a challenge because the spirituality, language, and means of influence that these gangs that I'm worried about perpetuate, make it very hard for us to become conscious of our power and to use it.
The gangs that I'm worried about control, through punishment and reward, and try to get their own interest met, at the cost sometimes of the environment, sometimes through exploitive labor practices, sometimes through the use of violence, to get employees to do as they would like.
The organizations that are doing the most damage on our planet can be quite a task for us to think of how, we as individuals, can change them. We are often overwhelmed just with our own personal lives, and trying to get our needs of our family met.
It seems beyond what we can do to try to deal with these organizations that are creating a lot of pain on our planet.
I wrote a song, one night, that tells about what can make it hard for us to get involved in social change.
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Where the hell does the energy come, to care for humanity?
When it's more than I can cope with, just taking care of me?
My government sells weapons, when peace is what we need.
And our compassionate nature, is hidden beneath our greed.
With divine energy within us, how tragic we breed such fear.
And let violence and starvation, kill millions of us each year.
I see people on the streets not getting enough.
But how can I help them, when making it myself is rough?
Our prisons are a disgrace. Our mental hospitals too.
But burying my head in the sand is...easy to do.
I get sicker everyday from all the oppression I see.
But worryin' about losin' what I've got makes a coward out of me.
Where the hell does the energy come to care for humanity?
When it's more than I can cope with... takin' care of me.
5:34
I wrote the song one night in despair after a year long effort in a social change project. This project was to get a son of a friend of mine out of prison. My friend was a woman of color, very poor. Her son had been committed to prison for life for a crime, we were convinced he didn't commit.
He was convicted by an all white jury. He did not have the kind of lawyer we would have liked. He had a public lawyer that we didn't feel had the skills to really deal with his situation, but his mother didn't have the money to hire a lawyer we would have liked to have had.
So my social change project for that year was to help my friend get her son out of prison. This involved many meetings, gathering up a group of citizens, who would work together toward this end. We tried to raise funds to get a different lawyer for him, and we had several other tasks that took a lot of time for our group.
After a Year of hard work organizing people asking for money, we did get the funds. And we did hire the lawyer of our choice. And we did get another trial for her son. However, he was convicted again, and he was still committed to prison. A whole year of work, and we weren't successful. And that song came out of a despair that I felt that night.
I was in despair, because I said to myself, What if we had gotten him out of prison? He's just one of many, many, people who are being committed to prison unfairly because of our judicial system, which I didn't see treating people of all income levels equally.
I was also in despair, because even if we have gotten him out of prison, even if we spent our whole lives getting all of the others out of prison who have been treated unfairly, that wouldn't be changing the structures that are creating the unfairness.
I say this, because Nonviolent Communication helps us to differentiate between objectives which are to undo the damage created by the systems, but to recognize how different that is than changing the systems, that create the problem.
Nonviolent communication helps us to get clear what our social change objective is.
Do we want to heal some of the problems created by present structures, economic structures, judicial structures, and others that create great pain on the planet?
Do we want to just heal the people hurt by these structures? Or do we want to radically transform the structures?
This is quite a difficult choice to make, quite a difficult choice. Where do we want to invest our energies. I like how this was put in an image that I read once.
It's an image that shows a man walking down by the river, and he sees a baby floating down the river, the baby is still alive. The man jumps in the water pulls the baby out. Almost as soon as he gets the baby out, he looks back and sees another baby and he jumps in and pulls this baby out.
And then oh my goodness, he looks there's two babies in the water. He sees another adult walking by the river and he calls "Come on help" and the two of them jump in and pull the two babies out.
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But they look back. And now there's two more.
Well, the story goes this way. When do we stop pulling the babies out? And when do we go upstream and see who is throwing them in? and what structures are supporting these people to throw them in?
We are confronted with many such situations today. Structures are creating enormous pain, from economic structures, to digital structures, governmental structures. The pain created by these structures is immense.
So we can use Nonviolent Communication to heal the people hurt by these structures.
Or we can use Nonviolent Communication to go upstream and to connect with the people who are creating and supporting the structures that do the violence, and use Nonviolent Communication to show these people other ways of serving other than those which are oppressing people.
One way that Nonviolent Communication support us, is to help us to look inside and see how do I want to meet this important need of mine, to serve life.
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To be conscious that we have power to serve life at many levels, healing the people who are oppressed by present circumstances, or we can go upstream, as the story identifies. Upstream being the structures that are creating the pain, and we can use our Nonviolent Communication, consciousness and skills to conduct With the people creating the damage and positively compassionately influencing them to transform the structure so that they serve life for all rather than oppress people.
Now, one important aspect of social change, that's used in almost any social change event, is how to make requests in a powerful way. How to ask in a way that helps us to create the social change we are interested in.
For example, almost any social change is going to involve a certain critical mass of people changing what they are doing.
That's why I like living under a king. When you live under a king, the critical mass that's necessary for social change can be one person, the king. All you have to do is get a meeting with the king, and show the king a more compassionate, effective way of doing business.
If the king agrees with you, you've created social change, one person has been changed and this can affect how many people are treated. Well, we have created much more complicated structures than we used to have under the king. Very often now, our social change efforts might involve getting 51% of the population in a certain areas to vote differently.
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It might be to getting a critical mass of people on a committee to vote in favor of something that we want, and this committee might be within a government. This committee has great power within that government to do something we want them to do.
If maybe four out of the seven members of the committee are changed in favor of what we want, we can bring about great social change.
Whether it's 51% of the population that we might want to influence, just one person who has great power, or a committee, social change involves the transformation of consciousness, people seeing other ways of doing things that they choose to do.
That's if we want to bring about social change nonviolently, we want the change to occur because a critical mass of people willingly shift what they're doing, from one position to another.
Of course, violent social change basically tries to get rid of those people in power and replace them with other people.
Now to exercise our social change power using Nonviolent Communication to influence key people requires that we can get access to these people.
Getting access is often a good use of our social change ability, to get access to people in power that we may want to communicate with, we may need to influence people who have power to get us that access to do so. It may be that we're going to need a pretty good team, a large team to work with us to get all the transformations of consciousness necessary that we're looking for.
An example of how Nonviolent Communication can support social change efforts occurred in a project I was involved in. We wanted to get a school created in one city, a school where we wanted to demonstrate we could educate those students who were being kicked out of school or pushed out of school.
We wanted to show that if we understood the students, and understood their needs, how we could create a school structure in which they could learn, as well as any other students, and they could do so with less violence than was seen in many public schools. However, this school required a lot of cooperation for us to create it. We had to first of all, enlist people to work with us on this project. We had to find some people who would be willing to be teachers in the school, and then we had to train them.
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We need to find the building where we could have the school, we needed to find people who knew how to research the effectiveness of the school, because part of our social change project would then be to show the public school, in that area, how schools like this could be created. We wanted to use this as a model school, and we would need people to research it and show how the academic achievement could be lifted, and measures of violence would be reduced.
This required a lot of asking a lot of talking with people telling them the project, seeing if we could influence them positively to join us.
One of the key ingredients in this social change project was to get enough money to do all of this work, and we were having trouble doing it. I was in partnership in this social change project with members of a street gang that I was working with, a group called the Zulu 1200. The warlord of this group was a gentleman named Al Chappelle. One day he and I were talking about this social change effort and how we were discouraged because we needed $50,000 to fund this project. We certainly didn't have that money. We were rather desperate for funds just to maintain our own families at the time.
And so the leader of the gang said to me, "Hey, don't you know somebody down at this place that gives money away?"
He was referring to a foundation, and he knew that I had done some training with the managers of this foundation. I said, Yes, I have worked with that foundation.
He said, Good, let's go down and get the money.
I said, don't I wish it was that easy to get money from that foundation. You have to write a proposal and you need to know how to write the proposal, and I'm not sure we have the resources to do that right now. It also takes a lot of time, and I happen to know that their openness to funding is closed right now for this quarter. It won't open again for two months.
He said, yeah, that's your way of doing it. Can you get an appointment with him?
I said, Yeah, I can get an appointment with him.
He said, Fine. Let's go down there and get the money. I said, Oh, come on. It isn't that easy.
He said, you get the appointment. Let me handle the rest.
I said, Well, what would you do if I get the appointment?
He said, let me handle it.
So I called the foundation and the secretary who answered my call recognized me from the time I had been there doing some training for the people in the organization.
I asked for a meeting with the director, and she said, Oh, Dr. Rosenberg, you know how busy he is. I'll ask him if he can find time for you, and I'll call you back. And she called me back about an hour later and said, he does have 20 minutes in between sessions later today. He said he'd be willing to see you. I said, Thank you very much.
So I said to my colleague, Al Chappelle, I said, I got the meeting with him. We've got 20 minute meeting, but what are you going to do? What are you going to say in that time? He said, Let me handle it. We drove down, and we were escorted into his office and I politely introduced the two of them.
I said, Dr. Gene Schwelp, President of the foundation, I'd like you to meet my colleague, Al Chappelle. Al Chappelle, This is Dr. Schwelp.
I was so upset and embarrassed.
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I didn't know what to do at that point, and neither did the head of any foundation. This is usually not the way that people greet him by saying, where's the money, brother?
He kind of smiled and was very polite, and he said, "what money?"
And now Chappelle said money for the fun school. Fun school was the name of the school that we were trying to create.
President of the foundation said, Well, what is fun school?
Chappelle said, it's a school in which we want to show the kids that are kicked out of school or pushed out of school can learn if they're taught differently.
The President of the foundation said, How is this school different than other schools? and Chappelle started to explain it.
Notice what Chappelle had done there. Instead of going in and filling our precious 20 minutes with a lot of talk, trying to show the person all the advantages of the school we wanted to create, and why we liked it and wanted to do it. Chappelle introduced the dialogue, in just a few words, where's the money? Then this gave the other person a chance to ask for what he needed to know, to decide whether he wanted to give us what we came for. We walked out with $50,000.
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How to be very clear very quickly, about what we want, so as to stimulate a dialogue in which the other side can find out what they need to know to determine whether they want to support us or not.
Using precious time in that way, increases the likelihood that we will connect in a way and get what we would like for our social change efforts. Even if we don't, by using the time in that way, we can even learn, from a no, what kept the person from wanting to support our project, and this can help us in subsequent efforts.
Nonviolent communication can be very helpful to us, because Nonviolent Communication helps us to be very clear very quickly, about what our present request is of people, instead of just talking at them and trying to sell them.
Nonviolent communication helps us to quickly create a dialogue in which people get a chance to ask for what they need to know, to decide whether they want to give us what we came for.
Sometimes in our social change efforts, force may be necessary to protect ourselves from the we see organizations are doing. Of course, using Nonviolent Communication, whether we use force with our children, or with organizations, we want to be sure that it's the protective use of force and not the punitive use of force.
In other sessions I've pointed out that protective use of force, with children, might be using some force to stop them from doing something that's harmful to themselves or others. But we do this stopping, not with punitive efforts, to punish them, but just to stop a behavior that we are concerned about, until we can communicate with the child to find a more effective way of meeting their need and our need.
There may be times when an organization is doing things that we believe is causing great damage to people in that region. We may have hoped that if we could communicate with the people who have the power to change, if we could get meetings with them, we could get them to see the damage that's being created. We could help them to see other ways of meeting their needs and our needs, but they may not be willing to give us access to communicating with them. That might be a situation where we would use a protective use of force.
The protective use of force differs from the punitive use of force in our thinking, and then the intent of our strategies. The difference in our thinking is this when we use the protective use of force, we don't see the other person as evil or bad and deserving of punishment. Our focus is on how we can stop what is creating the damage without being violent in the process of creating the stopping of the damage. Our thinking is not how bad people are who are doing the damage.
This means that our intent is not to punish the people who are engaged in doing what we are fearful of. Our intent is simply to prevent it from continuing until we can have access enough with the people so that we can resolve our differences with them and in which changes can be willingly made that meets everybody's needs.
For example, I was working with some parents in a school in one city. These were minority parents, who were very concerned about some ways in which their children were being treated in the school. They felt this was very harmful.
Some of them used these words. They're destroying the spirit of our children with some of the policies and they told me what some of these policies were in the school.
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They asked me to help them in bringing about change in the school so that their children's needs would be better fulfilled.
I suggested a way they might be able to talk to the principal of the school, who they saw making rules that created the problems that concern them. When I talked about communicating with him, they said, he won't talk to us.
He told us, it's his school, he'll do what he wants and he doesn't need us telling him how to run the school.
These might be conditions under which we sometimes have to use force. We see an organization in this case a school, doing things that we might see is not meeting our needs as to how we would like our children to be treated.
We might be confident if we could talk to the people who are contributing to the damage that we are concerned about. That if we could talk with them that we could find a way of getting everybody's needs met.
If they are unwilling to communicate, as this principal of the school was, he just told the parents that he would not talk to them. These are the conditions under which we might sometimes apply the protective use of force in our social change efforts.
The parents were concerned about damage being done to their children. Their focus was on that, not on the badness or the evil of the administrator. their intent was not to punish this person. Their intent was to protect their children.
So we met and looked at what actions could we take that would protect the children and help us create the connection with those who are doing the damage, so that we could have a dialogue with them, and come out with a way that would meet everybody's needs.
After much discussion, we decided to organize a strike, and take the children out of school. By doing that they would be protecting the children from a continuation of the damage they saw happening in the school. Their purpose in doing this was not to punish anybody, purely to protect their children until they could have a discussion with the people in the school, that they hoped would end with changing some of the procedures in the school that they felt were doing damage to the children.
That was a Nonviolent Communication, social change project, to protect the children from policies that they saw destroying the spirit of their children.
To do this without any enemy image of the people doing this, and where the purpose of the social change action using protective use of force was just that to protect the children, but without punishing the people who are contributing to the problem.
So we organized this strike, the parents took the children out of school. They marched outside the school with signs communicating their intent. I had to help them change some of the signs because at first, some of the parents had some signs in which they were saying things that implied wrongness on the part of the people running the school. I showed them that I thought it would be more effective if we created signs that purely communicated our needs and our intent, but in no way implied that we saw the people at the school as evil or bad.
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The project was successful in helping that parents finally getting the communication with the authorities that they needed, to get their needs understood, and to find a way of changing policies so that they felt that their children are better protected.
To go about social change of this variety, where we don't see people as evil who are doing the actions that we see interfering with our needs being fulfilled, to go about social change out of that energy requires, at times doing some despair work.
Despair work as defined by Joanna Macy. This kind of despair work helps us to deal with the pain that we're feeling as a result of what is happening, out of our feeling of powerlessness to do anything about it.
When we do the kind of despair work that Joanna Macy talks about, we transform our feeling of powerlessness and despair. It helps us to come out with a transformative spirituality. That's a term that Ken Wilber terms, to use the kind of consciousness, the kind of spirituality that supports our social change effort.
It's a spirituality in which we are energized by our consciousness of how life can be better served in another way, and we come out with joy and pleasure at the image of how it can be, rather than be motivated by anger and bitterness toward the people who are presently creating the structures that are.
When we have this transformative spirituality, we need to integrate it with political consciousness.
We need to really understand how the structures are working, that are oppressing us.
We have to watch out for the kind of spirituality that simply gets us trying to get the right attitude within ourselves that helps us to live happily and spiritually within a world where there's a lot of violence, out of the hope that if we can just transform ourselves, the energy radiating from us, will contribute to change. I'm convinced that we need more than that kind of spirituality.
We need a spirituality that not only helps us to transcend our bitterness and our anger, but that is integrated with a real consciousness of what is happening that's creating the violence. That mobilizes us to create change, not just to hope that by purifying ourselves the energy coming from us will create the change.
One of my social change objectives for the last several years has been to do what I can do to contribute to transforming our judicial system from one based on the concept of retributive justice to one based on restorative justice.
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Our present judicial system, retributive justice, comes out of a spirituality that I'm very concerned about, that I feel does great violence on our planet.
I talked about this in previous sessions. I'm talking about the kind of spirituality, that is based on the concept that there are superiors who know what is right, and who on the basis of their judgments have the right to punish or reward people.
If people are judged as bad, then these people who call themselves superiors have a right to give these people what they deserve. This concept of deserve is central to the concept of retributive justice. If the superior judges people as good, then they reward them.
Our judicial system is based on this way of thinking that there are people who know what's right and what's wrong, and who therefore have the right to punish people when they deserve it.
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Within cultures that have this system, people in positions of authority use that concept of justice.
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Parents believe that since they are superior to children, they have the right to punish or reward them, when they judge the child is deserving those treatments.
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Unfortunately, many teachers use the same form of spirituality based on these judgments by superiors.
The concept that I'm interested in supporting is restorative justice, which is based on an entirely different way of thinking and leads to entirely different ways of exercising justice.
Restorative justice has as its purpose, to find ways of getting everyone's needs met so that peace and harmony can be retrieved when pain and conflict exists between parties.
This kind of spirituality that looks for ways of getting everybody's needs met, that doesn't judge people as evil and deserving of punishment.
It looks at a three fold situation.
There's three parties that have to be dealt with whenever somebody needs have not been met, through a crime of some sort.
There's the person who's been affected by the crime. We want to end in a way that this person is brought back to healing and in which their needs are fulfilled.
A second party in this kind of justice is the person who acted in a way that created pain for others.
We want to restore the situation by replacing whatever education led to this person behaving as they did is now replaced with an education that supports their contributing to people's well being, rather than doing things which create suffering for people.
The third party involved in restorative justice is the community that provided the education that contributed to the person's crime.
We need to look at why is it that some people get their needs met by robbing, raping, and doing other things that cause great suffering.
The old spirituality says this is because such people are evil and deserving to be punished and suffer for their actions.
The spirituality of restorative justice says that these people are meeting their needs in the way they have been educated to meet their needs.
We need to have the surrounding community look at how are we providing education for people?
How have we failed in this situation and what do we need to do to support this person learning a different way, and to look at how we are educating people, and to make sure we are educating people to see that our well being is one of the same that we can never meet our own needs at other people's expense.
Now, this concept of restorative justice is not a new one.
There are many cultures throughout the world that have historically always use restorative justice and still do.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu, have studied these cultures and describe how different is their spirituality and how different is their way of dealing with people who act in a way that creates pain and disharmony.
I'd like to now talk about what restorative justice looks like in these cultures that go about seeing justice in a radically different way, whose spirituality does not believe that people are evil, or good. It believes that we all, when we're functioning in harmony with our nature, enjoy more than anything else, contributing to one another's well being.
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And therefore, when they see people doing things that contribute to pain on the part of others that violate the rights of others, they do not interpret these people as evil or bad.
They believe that people must have forgot the power they have to enrich life and how good it is to contribute to people's well being. Therefore, they surround them with people who know them, and they have a circle in which these people around them remind them of all of the things that they have done that has enriched their lives, because their spirituality doesn't imply that this person did what they did because they're evil and deserved to be punished.
They believe that a person would only act that way if something has disconnected them, has made them forget, that the good life is how we contribute to one another's well being.
I'd like to describe now some work that I do in restorative justice, and show how you can restore peace and harmony between warring parties.
When we start with a different spirituality, one that implies that we all enjoy contributing to one another's well being, unless something disconnects us. What we need to do, to restore peace and harmony is reconnect people with what they need to be conscious of, that will help them naturally enjoy contributing to people's well being, rather than to act in ways that are harmful to people.
For example, if I'm working with a father, who has sexually molested his daughter, and unfortunately, I have the opportunity to do this restorative justice on several occasions because this unfortunately happens quite a bit.
Where fathers get disconnected from their selves in a way that they do things that can be very harmful to even the people they care for the most. What I do in restorative justice of this kind is similar to what I described in the healing work that I talked about in previous session.
I get the person who has been wounded, in this case the daughter, together with the father and I try to engage in creating the connection that will help restore peace and harmony between the two parties.
Now I start by asking the daughter who has been harmed and injured by this behavior to express to the father, how her life has been affected by this. Very often the daughter doesn't have a language of Nonviolent Communication. All the daughter can do is tell the father, how could you do it? And the child may blame or criticize the father for this.
I use Nonviolent Communication and supporting the daughter to express clearly to father what feelings and needs of hers were violated by the action.
So that might turn into when she asked father, how could you do it, you destroyed my life? I may help her translate that, so what she's really trying to say is I need you to understand the years of pain that I've been experiencing, since you did this to me.
I need empathy, I need understanding of how much suffering I have gone through. I helped the daughter to reveal her pain nakedly to the father.
The father, at that point, usually wants to apologize. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
I stop the father because I'm sorry, is a form of the old justice system. It's part of the system of justice that tries to make people penitent for what they've done, blaming them for what they've done and getting them to hate themselves for what they've done. The idea is that if you are sorry enough and are penitent enough, you've suffered enough and you can be forgiven.
We want to replace that concept in restoritive justice, not with apology, but with sincere mourning, that I've described in other sessions.
I help the father to go inside and express how he feels when he hears his daughter, behaving in this way. But before we do that, I make sure that he has really empathically connected with her pain.
So I help him repeat the enormity of suffering she's gone through the needs of hers that weren't met by his behavior.
When she feels fully understood by him, then I support his going inside, and morning what he did. After he has mourned I then support him in making clear what was alive in him, when he did to the daughter that which stimulated so much pain for her.
In Nonviolent Communication language, I helped him to identify what he was feeling when he did that, and what needs of his he was trying to meet.
After I have helped him, get conscious at that level, I help the daughter to empathize with that, to see what was alive in father when he did that. When that connection is there, where the daughter feels fully understood by father, and when what was alive in the father is fully understood by the daughter.
We can then go to another step of restorative justice, to look at what else now needs to be done restore peace and harmony.
In my experience very often just the empathy that took place where the father empathized with the daughters suffering and the daughter empathize with what was going on and father that is most of the healing.
Another restorative justice work. If a person's house was destroyed by someone angry at them, after we have gone through helping each side, hear each other's needs empathically there might be more that needed to be done to restore justice.
The person whose house was destroyed, may request support in rebuilding the house or getting financial support for rebuilding the house. Whatever it is, that is mutually agreed upon, because everyone has the consciousness that what we want to do is restore peace and harmony, not to punish the bad person in a way they deserve to be punished.
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- Joanna Macy
- A spirituality that trasforms, Ken Wilber
- Some Anthropological Considerations Concerning Natural Law, Margaret Mead
In asking what conceptions of human rights are universal to all known cultures, it is, of course, necessary to recognize that we can only ask this question about that assemblage of societies that have been observed and recorded. Inevitably, our universe excludes all cultures that have vanished without leaving any record, and the steadily shrinking number of existing cultures that exist in the present but have not yet been studied. The culturally regulated relationship among persons within a given environment is characterized both by certain persistent regularities, due to the species-specific characteristics of human beings, and a wide variety of forms having historical uniqueness. It is only those areas of human life which are most closely based in our common biological heritage in which we may not expect still to find, among existing cultures, instances which alter existing generalizations.
- Guide to the Ruth Fulton Benedict Papers, 1905-1948
- Child Raising In Non-violent Cultures, Sarah McElroy - Creating a culture that chooses non-violence with intention
- Intro to Restorative Justice by Maurece Graham
Margaret Mead once said “We make our own criminals, and their crimes are congruent with the national culture we all share.” If, then the imbalance that is crime is of our making so too must the re-balancing be from us. This re-balancing is what I call restorative justice. It is a “putting away” of self-serving postures and becoming of service to self and others, and building community through applying: compassion, integrity, and respect to all the “isms” that dominate our lives.
- The Cultural Context of Restorative Justice: JourneysThrough Our Cultural Forests to a Well-Spring of Healing, Jack B. Hamlin, Akira Hokamura
- Shame, shaming and restorative justice - A critical appraisal, Nathan Harris and Shadd Maruna
- Justice in America Episode 19: What Justice Could Look Like (podcast)
Josie and Clint talk to Sonya Shah, an associate professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, about restorative justice.
- Restoritive Justice -NVCWiki