CRIME, SHAME , AND COMMUNITY:
MEDIATION AGAINST VIOLENCEWELLNESS FOUNDATION
DISTINGUISHED LECTUREThomas J. Scheff
Professor Emeritus of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara.Part 7:
THE HIDDEN SHAME IN INDIGNATION
ENCOURAGING THE EXPRESSION OF PAINFUL EMOTIONS
CONCLUSION: EDUCATION AND MEDIATION
WELLNESS LECTURE SERIES VOLUME VI
October 1996.
THE HIDDEN SHAME IN INDIGNATION
In a case of school vandalism, the moral indignation of one of the victims was so indirect as to be difficult to detect and manage unless the facilitator were highly skillful. It is worth looking at this instance in some detail, since it illustrates the way in which the shame that underlies indignation can be hidden not only from others but from oneself. The victim, Fred Johnson (a pseudonym), was a middle-aged teacher at the school that was vandalized. The vandalism consisted of defamatory statements about the teachers spray-painted on the walls of the school. Johnson was the principal victim, since he was the subject of three insults, each of the other teachers having been the subject of only one. To make clear the nature of these insults, it is necessary to quote the actual defamations:
Johnson is an old folgie [fogey?].,br> Mr. Johnson sucks dick with Mr. Smith [another teacher].
Mr. Johnson is a bald-headed cocksucker.The author(s) of these particular defamations was unknown. The offender admitted to spray-painting only one statement, intimating a homosexual relationship between two students. Under repeated questioning, the offender maintained that he had no knowledge of who had spray-painted the graffiti about the teachers.
From the beginning of the conference, the pattern of Mr. Johnson’s behavior suggested unacknowledged shame. When she introduced him, the facilitator was puzzled by his presence, since she had understood that he was to attend only if the principal couldn’t be there to represent the school. Mr. Johnson explained that he had decided to attend along with the principal because he wanted to comment also.
When his turn to speak as a victim came, Mr. Johnson first denied injury to himself. He explained that having taught as long as he had, "this kind of slander was water off a duck’s back." He further denied injury by explaining, somewhat defiantly, that contrary to what students think, teachers stick together; one of his fellow teachers had phoned him about the defamations so that he wouldn’t be surprised by them. Like his presence at the conference, these comments were somewhat gratuitous: they seemed unnecessary, and they were carefully addressed to the air rather than to any particular person.
Having denied injury, Mr. Johnson then launched into an indirect verbal assault on the offender. He stated that when he counsels students, he tells them that such slander is cowardly. Johnson was insulting the offender but only indirectly, since he was calling him a coward only by implication. He repeated this insinuation three more times, saying that students who resort to such actions are cowards, underhanded, and have no guts. When it was her turn, the offender’s mother felt called on to refute the charge of cowardice by saying that her son couldn’t be a coward because he played rugby!
Mr. Johnson’s words and manner suggest a shame-rage spiral. He seems to have been humiliated by the defamations, but he could not acknowledge this feeling even to himself. A statement such as "I was upset and offended by the graffiti" would have been a step toward the acknowledgment of shame. Instead, rather than express his shame and anger, he denied injury and attacked his putative attacker with an indirect verbal assault on the offender.
The basic problem with indignation, which is a kind of impotent anger (a shame-anger loop), is that if it is repeated enough it can damage the potential bond between the victim and the offender. The torrent of criticism and disrespect from the victim or other indignant participant almost surely gives rise to defensiveness in the offender; this is the very opposite of what is needed for symbolic reparation, namely, that the offender open himself to be able to express true remorse. Moreover, since the offender usually displays his "cool" from the beginning, his behavior unfortunately triggers defensive anger in the participants, and therefore sets up a vicious circle. This cycle of insult and counterinsult is counterproductive; it is the basis for destructive and unending conflict.
Perhaps the basic job of the facilitator is to ask questions that cut through the defensive stance of the participants. In this way a successful conference maintains a balance between anger toward and respect for the offender, between shaming and reintegration. Patient, respectful questioning by the facilitator could have helped Mr. Johnson acknowledge some of his feelings of being ridiculed and insulted, and thereby might have eased the attack on the offender.
Another way of helping an offender to acknowledge her responsibility would be to enlarge upon the formula used in Canberra when separating the offense from the offender. For example, if the air is thick with indignation, after condemning the offense, the offender’s supporters might be asked to name some of the offender’s good traits. The facilitator could then summarize their positive comments to bring the distinction between the bad offense and the good offender into high relief. This tactic would need to be handled with some skill and discretion to avoid antagonizing the victim’s camp.
Such initial support might make it possible for the offender to remain emotionally open in the face of moral indignation. Perhaps if a space of this kind were created initially for the offender, she would become less defensive whatever the participants’ emotional responses.
ENCOURAGING THE EXPRESSION OF PAINFUL EMOTIONS
A complement to the reframing of moral indignation is the tactic of encouraging the expression of painful emotions. This idea was developed by Terry O’Connell, a police sergeant whose work in a predominately Aborigine community was instrumental in bringing conferencing to Australia. The offender may express genuine shame and remorse, even if she has defended herself against moral indignation, under certain conditions. If the victim or supporters of the victim clearly express painful emotions (such as grief) that were caused by the offender’s crime, the offender may be caught off guard and identify with that pain, to the point that her defenses are breached. Under these conditions, she will then show the shame and remorse that are necessary to generate the beginning of forgiveness in the victim. In a case already mentioned above, the victim was highly indignant during the whole formal conference. Yet, afterward, when the offender offered her a tearful apology, she patted him on the shoulder, indicating identification and a step toward forgiveness. This entire episode took less than a minute, yet it was probably the most important event in the entire conference. O’Connell gives emotionality pride of place in the conference process. The chief focus of the facilitator in organizing and presiding should be setting the conditions that will allow painful emotions to be felt, expressed, and shared by the victim, the offender, and other participants. However, it is important to realize that the kinds of emotions that O’Connell is referring to are primarily the painful emotions, such as grief and shame, and not the aggressive ones, such as rage and anger. The goal of the facilitator is to encourage the former and rechannel the latter. As already indicated, if aggressive emotions are interrupted and reframed, they may give rise to the expression of the painful emotions that are needed to trigger the core sequence.
The skills needed to facilitate a conference successfully involve detecting and negotiating emotional and relational states, a far cry from the traditional concerns in police recruitment and training. In fact, these skills are unusual in our Western society as a whole. Even in the training of psychotherapists and mediators, behavioral and cognitive skills are emphasized, to the detriment of emotional and relational skills. To the extent that police officers and other facilitators develop the understanding and skill needed for managing conferences, to that extent will they also begin to transform prevailing police attitudes and the relationship between law enforcement and the community. This transformation and the building and empowering of the community are the three great goals of the conferencing movement. Therefore, the use of conferences and the training of facilitators for them could represent a powerful force for reducing crime and changing our society.
CONCLUSION: EDUCATION AND MEDIATION
I have urged that community conferences be tried as an alternative to courts and prisons in those cases in which offenders have confessed (with the exception of capital crimes). This approach promises to be a more effective, and certainly a less expensive, way of managing these types of cases, which easily account for the majority of offenses. This approach may also have many desirable side effects, such as helping to rebuild community and transform police attitudes.
However, community conferencing is only an indirect approach to crime prevention. To attack the problem close to its roots, it would also be desirable to introduce mediation and conferencing into elementary and secondary schools and colleges. The first step would be to develop classes based on mediation ideas and skills. The direct effect of such classes would be to give students skills in negotiation and peacemaking. These skills would serve students their entire lives, enabling them to communicate and negotiate their needs and settle their differences peacefully, avoiding subterfuge and violent confrontation.
When taught properly, mediation courses are highly dramatic and would probably be popular. Through the use of role- playing, students could exchange roles, alternately playing the parts of the victim, offender, and facilitator. In this way, they would learn to view disputes from different viewpoints, not only their own. This experience, of understanding the world from others’ points of view, is an important building block of community.
The idea of mediation might be too sophisticated for elementary and junior high school students. But similar ideas could be introduced in a course dealing with family and peer relationships: the skills of negotiation, communication, and compromise with one’s parents, siblings, and schoolmates. These classes could begin early in elementary school, perhaps in the fourth or fifth grade. In such classes, students would learn valuable lessons: that talking has many advantages over fighting, and that most human relationships can be enhanced by negotiation and compromise.
A parallel step in education would be to use family and community conferences for responding to student offenses and misdemeanors. In this way, many offenses could be handled by the schools themselves, without calling in police. Using conferences in educational institutions could provide an avenue for strengthening those institutions by enabling them to handle offenses in their own domain. Schools in Australia, New Zealand, and England have already had considerable experience with this procedure.19 Participation in conferences of this kind would also give students mediation experience with real offenses, and so would supplement their course work in mediation classes.
In all likelihood, the use of conferencing to mediate settlements in criminal offenses and the establishment of conferencing and mediation classes in schools would helpfully reinforce each other. Students who have learned mediation skills, for example, might be less likely to resort to crime. And if they have been involved in a community conference, either as offender or as victim, they would also have learned how to participate more effectively in one. The spreading of conferencing and mediation skills throughout our society could direct us away from excessive coercion and punishment and lead us toward a more cooperative society.
As I have already indicated, a large-scale study comparing the effectiveness and cost of community conferences with traditional court practices is in progress in three sites: Canberra, Australia; Philadelphia; and London, England. A similar trial is needed to investigate the effectiveness and cost of the new procedure in the California setting. Using techniques similar to those of the current study, a two-year trial should be conducted in several cities of different sizes, including perhaps a large city like Los Angeles, a middle-sized city like Sacramento, and a small city like Santa Barbara or Santa Maria. Funds would be needed to make awards to the police departments to free up the requisite personnel, to bring trainers from Australia, and to provide a research budget for the accompanying study. For an investment of approximately $300,000, a study of this kind might lead to saving millions of dollars yearly in the administration of justice, and might increase the effectiveness of that administration as well.
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