Youth Development Circles

Restorative justice circles or conferences have shown considerable promise in the criminal justice system as a more decent and effective way of dealing with youthful law breaking than punishment. The social movement for restorative justice has a distinctive analysis of the crisis of community and the possibility of community in late modernity. This paper raises the question of whether this approach might fruitfully be applied to the holistic development of the learning potential of the young and the whole range of problems young people encounter—drug abuse, unemployment, homelessness, suicide, among others—in the transition from school to work. THE LATE MODERN STRUCTURAL DILEMMA OF HUMAN AND SOCIAL CAPITAL In the new information economy, it is clear that human capital (the skills of people) and social capital (social skills for interacting with others including dispositions such as trust and trustworthiness) are becoming progressively more important to economic development than physical capital (Dowrick, 1993; Fukuyama, 1995; Latham, 1998). Young people whose human and social capital remains undeveloped are destined for unemployment. Mostly families with high endowments of human and social capital pass those on to their children. There is a strong correlation between parental involvement in the education of their children and academic performance (Finn Report, 1991, p. 151). For children whose families lack endowments of human and social capital, we rely on state-funded education systems to compensate. Yet we quickly run up against the limits of the capabilities of formal education bureaucracies to make up for deŽ cits which are profoundly informal (especially on the social capital side) [1]. Our objective in this essay is to come up with a new policy solution to this limitation [2]. At the same time, we want to help solve the problem of children from families with high endowments, but where human and social capital development is interrupted by problems like drug addiction, bullying by peers, sexual abuse, depression and suicide. Our hypothesis is that both the low family endowments problem and the interrupted transmission problem need a more informal yet more systematic solution than the formal education system can provide. Mentoring programmes like ‘Big Brothers’ and ‘Big Sisters’ head in the right direction (reducing drug abuse and violence in one eight-site evaluation (Elliott, 1998, p. xviii)). But they are insufŽ ciently social, communal and plural to deal with the kinds of deŽ cits at issue with reducing youth unemployment, drug addiction, delinquency and suicide. In terms of social structure, we see the problem as one of a late modernity where: ISSN 0305-4985 print; ISSN 1465-3915 online/01/020239-14 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/3054980120051930 240 Oxford Review of Education (a) nuclear families are isolated from extended families which used to compensate for deŽ cits of nuclear families; and (b) formal education bureaucracies are too formal to compensate for the social aspects of the deŽ cits that thereby arise—for example, in teaching trust, love, respectfulness. This structural dilemma of late modernity has crept up on us over the past century. Social historians have shown that early in the 20th century parents much more commonly than today shared child-rearing obligations with extended families, churches and other community networks (Lasch, 1977; Zelizer, 1985). Single parents, who in Western societies are more likely to be black and poor (LaFree, 1998, pp. 147–148), are particularly likely to become ‘solo practitioners’ of child rearing. Mothers struggling alone to educate their children without support from the village therefore worsen inequalities of race and sex. Remedial policies to spread burdens of informal education and support for children are thus imperative to tackling the inequalities arising from our dual structural dilemma of modernity. HOW THE EDUCATION SYSTEM CAN LEARN FROM THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM The direction for a solution to this dual structural problem is captured by the African proverb that it takes a whole village to raise a child. But this of course begs the question raised by the structural problem; we do not live in villages in the West. Recent experience with restorative justice innovation in the criminal justice system has come up with an interesting solution to a similar structural dilemma of crime control. Criminologists know that crime is a result of failures of informal community ordering (Sampson & Laub, 1993; Sampson & Raudenbush, 1999) and of social support for young people (Cullen, 1994). Unfortunately, however, most remedial programmes fail because of the structural impossibility of building village solutions in the city or suburb. Neighbourhood Watch seems like a good idea, but the evidence is that it is not very effective in reducing crime (Sherman et al., 1997). One reason is that most of us do not care enough about our community or are just too busy to turn up to Neighbourhood Watch meetings. They work somewhat better in highly organised middle-class communities— where they are least needed in terms of crime. A recent innovation that has been quite successful in solving this problem has been the restorative justice or family group conference (as they are called in the Southern hemisphere) or healing circle (as they are more often called in North America). Actually, it is an innovation that picks up ancient village traditions of justice and adapts them to the metropolis. When a young person is arrested, they are asked who are the people they most respect, trust, love. The most common answers are mum and dad, brothers and sisters and grandparents. But often with children who are homeless because they have been sexually abused by parents, parents will not be on the list. Members of a ‘street family’ (Hagan & McCarthy, 1997) may be on the list here. But there still may be an aunt, brother, or grandparent who is loved by the homeless child. That child may have been stigmatised by most of the teachers at his or her school, but there may be just one staff member who he or she believes has treated her decently. That member of the school staff, the street family and the few members of the extended family who are still respected are then brought together in a conference. The conference sits in a circle with victims of the crime (and supporters of the victim) to discuss the Youth Development Circles 241 consequences of the crime and what needs to be done to right the wrongs that have been done and to get the young offender’s and the victim’s lives back on track. With a homeless child, it might be agreed that the young offender will go and live in the home of his uncle or his older brother, who will undertake to help him get back into school. The diversity of supporters for young people in conferences or circles is considerable. There can be elders from an indigenous community, football coaches, ballet teachers, neighbours, or friends who share a hobby. It is this diversity which makes the circle modern and urban. Human beings are social animals. There are almost always other human beings they enjoy interacting with. It is simply not true that most homeless children are alone in the world; they have ‘street families’ whose company they enjoy. Hagan and McCarthy (1997) found that a majority of their youth living on the streets of Toronto and Vancouver actually referred to their intimates as their ‘street family’. Second, human beings Ž nd meaning from social identity; there always exist people we identify with or respect. We train circle coordinators who report back that a young offender who is totally isolated should try again, to work harder to discover people she likes or respects, even if it means bringing in the one sibling or uncle who is respected from another city. The late modern sense of community is fragmented across space, but it exists. What the restorative justice circle does is bring that community of care together for the Ž rst time in one room. In the quintessentially late modern case, one of the participants may be a friend from cyberspace who the young offender physically meets for the Ž rst time. It is wrong to say that these faceless friendships are always artiŽ cial and meaningless. Community in the metropolis is in some ways more meaningful than community in the village because it can be based on casting a wide net among a very large group of people to Ž nd a few who have very similar interests to our own, such as an interest in the history of Reggae music which would be hard to share in a small English village. Early evidence is only preliminary, but it is encouraging that these conferences mostly work well in various ways, though we still have much to learn about contexts where they backŽ re (Braithwaite, 1999). The fact from this literature we want to emphasise here is that when supporters are invited to attend these conferences, they generally come. I do not go to Neighbourhood Watch Meetings, even though I think that would be a public spirited thing to do. But if a young neighbour singled me out as someone they would like to be their supporter at a conference after they had got into trouble with the police, I would attend. Why? The answer is that in the conference case I am honoured to have been nominated by a human being as someone they respect. Second, I am personally touched by their predicament. They are in trouble and they have made a personal appeal to me, so I feel it would be callous to be unwilling to give up my evening for the conference. In short, community fails with Neighbourhood Watch but works with the restorative justice conference because it is an individual-centred communitarianism. This individual-centred communitarianism tugs at the sense of obligation that works in the late modern world of community based on geographically dispersed ties of respect and identiŽ cation. To date, the evaluation research evidence is consistent with this conclusion. More than a dozen studies have found participant satisfaction (among offenders, victims and their families) running at over 90% (Braithwaite, 1999, pp. 20–27). Both participant satisfaction and participant perceptions of procedural fairness, effectiveness, respect for rights and equality before the law are higher in conference than in court (Braithwaite, 1999, p. 26). It is premature to conclude whether restorative justice conferences are in fact effective in reducing crime. A number of studies show markedly lower reoffending 242 Oxford Review of Education rates among young offenders who go to conferences compared to those who go to court (Forsythe, 1995; Chan, 1996). Large parts of such differences are likely to be selection effects—less serious cases going to conferences—in studies with inadequate controls. Burford and Pennell’s (1998) study of adult family violence conferences has more impressive controls and found substantial reductions for conference compared to control families in 31 problem behaviours ranging from alcohol abuse to violence against wives or children. Most notably, abuse/neglect incidents halved in the year after the family group decision making conference. Other early studies of victim–offender mediation with more adequate controls (or randomisation) and with positive effects on reoffending were conducted by Schneider (1986), Pate (1990), Nugent & Paddock (1995) and Wynne (1996). Umbreit et al. (1994) found results that favoured victim–offender mediation, but which did not reach statistical signiŽ cance. McCold & Wachtel’s (1998) Ž ndings were mixed at best, discouraging at worst, Ž ndings that are hard to interpret because of unsatisfactory assurance that the randomly assigned treatment was delivered. The Restorative Justice Group at the Australian National University is Ž nalising the largest randomised controlled trial of conferences compared to court for juvenile and adult offenders under the leadership of Lawrence Sherman and Heather Strang. An update of the Braithwaite (1999) review has been completed as this article goes to press (Braithwaite, forthcoming). It reports a surge of new studies suggesting that restorative justice does contribute to crime reduction. Now we will seek to translate to education as an institution our analysis from the sociology of crime about what mobilises community. In doing so, we will also attempt to solve one of the problems of restorative justice circles—that the very act of assembling the community of care on the occasion of a youth being in trouble can stigmatise a young person as a troublemaker. YOUTH DEVELOPMENT CIRCLES—THE IDEA The basic idea is to translate the conference/circle from criminal justice into the arena of educational development. Unlike conferencing in the criminal justice system, the idea presented now has not been subjected to any piloting. The main difference is that the circle would be a permanent feature of the young person’s life rather than an ad hoc group assembled to deal with a criminal offence. Initially, the circle would be constituted to replace parent–teacher interviews in high schools. Twice a year from entry to high school at age 12 through to successful placement in a tertiary course or a job (modal age 18), the Youth Development Facilitator (operating from an ofŽ ce in a high school) would convene a meeting of the young person’s community of care. This meeting would be called a Youth Development Circle. The circle would have Core and Casual Members. Core Members would be asked up front to commit, as an obligation of citizenship and care, to try to attend all circles until the young person is successfully placed in a tertiary course or a job and to continue to be there for him/her should the young person subsequently request a Circle or get in trouble with the police or the courts. Core members would actually sign a contract to keep meeting and helping the young person until that tertiary or job placement was accomplished. Core Members would normally include: · Parents or Guardians · Brothers and sisters Youth Development Circles 243 · One grandparent selected by the young person · One aunt, uncle or cousin selected by the young person · A ‘buddy’, an older child from the school selected by the young person · A pastoral adult carer from the school selected by the young person (normally, but not necessarily, a teacher) · A neighbour, sporting coach, parent of a friend or any other adult member of the community selected by the young person as a mentor Casual Members could include: · Current teachers of the young person · Current girlfriend or boyfriend · Closest mates nominated by the young person · Professionals brought in by the facilitator or parents (e.g. drug counsellor, employer from an industry in which the young person would eventually like to work) · The victim of an act of bullying or delinquency and victim supporters The Circle would commence with the facilitator introducing new members and reading the young person’s six-month and long-term life goals as deŽ ned by him or her at the last meeting (six months ago). The young person would then be invited to summarise how he/she had got on with the six-month objectives and in what ways his/her life goals had changed in that period. In good circles, this would be followed by a series of celebratory speeches around the circle about what had been accomplished and the efforts that had been made. The crucial skill of the facilitator would be to elicit afŽ rmation for accomplishment and offers of help (as opposed to criticism) when there was a failure of accomplishment. Gathering together for the ritual is all the communal signalling needed to show that accomplishment matters; personal criticism on top of this is only likely to foster rejection of the value of accomplishment. Indeed, through the ritual interpretation of poor accomplishment as a communal failure to give a young person the help they need, young people are less likely to interpret poor performance as reason for rejection by those they initially identify with. Rejection of the rejectors and devaluing accomplishment is less likely when there is a community of care who share the burden to build accomplishment come what may—unconditional support. Normally, expert adults relevant to the six-month life goals would then be invited to comment (the mathematics teacher on a mathematics improvement goal; the school counsellor on improving relationships). Members of the Circle who had undertaken to provide agreed help towards those goals would be asked to report on whether they had managed to deliver it (Auntie Pat reporting whether they had managed to get together for an hour a week to help with maths homework). In light of this discussion, the young person would be asked his/her thoughts on goals for the next six months and others would be invited to comment on this topic. The facilitator would then ask the young person Ž rst, then all other participants, if they saw any other challenges in the young person’s life where care and support might be needed. Whether new goals were needed to respond to these challenges would be discussed. If no one else raised it, the facilitator would ask the young person and then his/her peers: ‘Do your friends and other kids at school help you to achieve your goals or do they sometimes tempt you to do the wrong thing?’ Responses to this are discussed by everyone and suggestions for action might be raised. The facilitator then announces a tea break during which relevant sub-groups (e.g. the nucelar family, the young person’s mates) might meet together informally to 244 Oxford Review of Education discuss a plan of action to propose to the Circle. Everyone is asked to think during the break about whether any new objectives or plans should be considered after the break. The Circle reconvenes to discuss these issues and ends with the young person reading out his/her new goals and the names of members who have agreed in some way to provide help or support towards them. An adult member should be nominated as responsible for ensuring speciŽ c and important things be done on time. The facilitator checks that these adult members are happy to take on these obligations. The meeting is closed with thanks to the participants for their care and citizenship. Over the years, the emphasis on the Circle would shift from educational and relationship challenges to the challenge of securing employment. With young people who were not doing well at school, special efforts would be made by the Core Members of the Circle to bring in Casual Members who might be able to offer work experience, advice on skill training and networking for job search.