Restorative justice

Grazie. It is a great pleasure and honour to be in Brescia. I have not been here before and I would certainly like to come back. This is a short visit. And if what I have to say is of any interest, I would love to come back and enter more discussions with the professional community in Brescia. I am going to take a very informal approach to this. I want to tell you a little bit of the law in my country on restorative justice. And then talk a little bit about what has already been mentioned, the distinctions between the English speaking countries in restorative justice and the European countries where the focus is on mediation.

So, I’ve come to Italy, which is a country that I love to visit. I come here very often professionally, but also for holidays and I have many experiences which have been beautiful in Italy. So I’m always open to invitations to Italy. I love the countryside and I like the people, I like the food, I particularly like the wine. So it is a great pleasure to be here. I come from Northern Ireland. Yesterday I was in Bergamo and Lecco and the sun was shining and it was warm. In Ireland at this time of year, the sky is grey and we get a lot of rain. The only thing is that Ireland is very green because of the rain. We have nice scenery, we have good produce. We do not cook as well as Italians, but we have good produce.

I come from a beautiful country, I grew up and worked during a very violent political conflict in Northern Ireland. In 1998 we had a Peace Settlement. So we have the absence of violence now , but I learnt that the absence of violence is not the same as peace. We are still struggling. to find a good way to live together in a polarised society. I was talking to my friend from Italy and who has visited Belfast and she was noting that in Belfast there are still very large walls that separate the communities, which is terrible. The two communities cannot live together at peace yet. We still have a lot to do to be at peace.

Just a little bit about myself, as I said that I grew up in Belfast and I went to university in England to study law. I completed law degree, but then I decided that I did not want to become a lawyer. I wanted to be more socially involved. So I then did a masters degree in social work and became a probation officer. My job was to supervise and rehabilitate perpetrators of crimes, which I enjoyed very much. I liked to work in the most violent areas. They were the most interesting. The most militant areas where there was a lot of a political violence as well, as crime. And I learned so much about criminology, about why people commit crime and the consequences of crime for communities.

Then after maybe 20 years working with criminals and prisons and the community I discovered restorative justice. And this for me was the missing part of the jigsaw puzzle because it introduced me to the victim. It is terrible to say that I worked with offenders for 20 years and I never really met their victims. I never thought about their victims except in an abstract way, not as human beings. I suddenly realised that one of the problems with the formal justice system is that the victim is very much on the margins of the system. They do not have a central role in justice.

I left the probation service and trained as a mediator. Most of my mediation was within communities – disputes between neighbors or conflicts within businesses.

I think the population on both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland were exhausted by the conflict and by violence. Thousands of people died in Northern Ireland because of the conflict over 30 years and people realised that violence was not going to solve the political problems in the country and so we commenced a peace process. And from that peace process restorative justice began to emerge.

Much of the violence during that time had revolved around the justice system. During our conflict many judges were murdered, many police officers, many people working in the prisons were murdered. And so part of the reform was to reform the justice system to try and reformulate justice for a new society. A law on restorative justice was passed for young people under the age of 18, who admitted to a criminal offence.

Probably because of the exhaustion after so much violence, there was a window of opportunity to think in a fresh way, in a radical way. I think our law was very radical. I do not think even the people who drafted the law realised how radical the law was because it stated that any young person must be offered the opportunity to meet their victim if the victim consents. So let me be clear. It is not the judge who decides. It is not the prosecutor who decides. It’s not the social worker or the psychologist, or the probation officer who decides. The judge or prosecutor must say to the young person. “Do you wish to meet your victim? “ And if that person says, yes, it will happen. If the victim agrees.

Only the most serious offenses were excluded. Murder because in Irish and British law there is a mandatory sentence for murder. Terrorism was excluded. Every other case was open for this approach from very low level crime to attempted murder and rape. 90% of young people in conflict with the law agreed to do this. The other thing that was radical is, if they offended again, they would still be offered restorative justice. The Judge did not say; this is not working in this case. we need to do something different. The judge must still say, do you wish to meet the victim? So this, at the time, was a very controversial law.

Many judges did not like their discretion being limited. They had to offer it. So there was a lot of resistance from the professionals. I didn’t realize at the time, but restorative justice, if it is to be fully embraced, transfers power to a certain extent from the professionals to ordinary citizens. And that is a significant issue within restorative justice, that the professional must let go a little of their power in order that citizens can more actively participate in the justice system.

This law was passed in 2002 so it has been in operation for 23 years. The population in Northern Ireland is 1.8 million. There have been over 60,000 direct meetings between a young offender and their victim. It has become normal. It was controversial to start off but now everybody accepts it even though it is not perfect.

There have been no major scandals, no terrible risks have been involved. Youth crime is much lower now than it used to be. Far fewer young people are going to court and what was not anticipated that far fewer young people have been sent to custodial institutions or to prisons. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have statistics, only one young person was sentenced to custody. When I was a probation officer, we might have had a hundred young people in custody. Last year, just one.

And I think it is because victims have a voice, victims have a good experience. 85% of the victims are very satisfied. Facilitators write in the report for the judge; the victim is very satisfied with the conclusions of this restorative conference. The judge then feels that, if the victim is happy, then I do not need to punish further. And so it is been an amazing experience and we are now extending restorative justice to adult offenders. That will be the next development. The government and the public now feel confident that restorative justice can be at the centre of a justice system.

The first point I want to make; it is not a competition. Restorative justice is not an alternative to the formal system. It enhances the experience of justice for citizens. The law and the formal system focus on crime, breaches of the law, crimes against the state. Judges assessthe severity of the crime and punish according to the severity of that crime. Mediation focuses, as I was trained, on conflict and tries to resolve conflict between people. Now some crime involves conflict. Crimes within families perhaps, crimes within communities, But a lot of crime is not conflict. A lot of crime is harmful, cruel behaviour, that is unjust and certainly not welcomed by the victim. Restorative justice does not focus on conflict. It focuses on harm, the harm that a criminal act causes to another person. It is interested in what that victim has to say about the harm. When we were designing the programme for Northern Ireland, we looked at New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the USA, and England. English speaking countries tend to talk about restorative justice. It is interesting to me that in the Italian language there is not a similar word to restorative. So you tend to say giustizia riparativa, which is close but not quite the same. So the other thing that I find vaguely amusing as an English speaker, we talk a lot in restorative justice about using the word accountability and as far as I know there is no Italian word for accountability. I jokingly say that explains a lot about Italian culture. But I know that is not fair.

So these systems are not in competition, restorative justice and the formal system of justice. There are many things that the formal system of justice does that restorative justice cannot do. We need both systems. There are things, I believe, that restorative justice can do that the formal system neglects to do. For instance, listen to the voice of the victim, and allow the victim to have some active participation in the process of justice so that ordinary citizens feel that they have had a good quality experience of justice experience. And this is why I support restorative justice.

I want to finish with a couple of examples. I have been doing research into victims because I’ve worked in the criminal justice system all of my life, and I was very focused on offender and their rehabilitation and resocialisation. But i was thinking about the offender’s needs, the offender’s experience, not the victim’s. So in the last 5 years I’ve been conducting research into the victim’s experience of crime, and the victim’s experience of restorative justice. And that’s had a huge influence on my thinking both in terms of the law, but also in terms of restorative justice. Restorative justice as implemented in Italy should not just be thought of as a service for offenders. Because it’s very easy to think that way, if you have been working in the system. We are so focused on the criminal.

We need to realise that justice needs to be balanced between the victim’s needs and the offender’s needs and the community’s needs. The community has an interest in crime and wants to see that justice is well done. One of the first cases that I looked at in detail was of a young woman who was cruelly raped. This is a controversial area within restorative justice because of the imbalance of power between men and women and in this case this person had a knife. Most rapes, as I understand it, occur between people who know each other. But this was the classic late at night on a dark street. This man approached this young woman, pulled her into a field. And then he just tortured her. It was very late. Two young man happened to be coming the other way after a night out. They said: “You look distressed are you okay?” The rapist ran away. The men chased after and caught him, and gave him a beating. The police arrested him and eventually he was brought to court and he was given a lengthy prison sentence. Now the victim had no problem with the prison sentence. She thought it was right, for what she had suffered. What she said to me was that the prison sentence did not solve all her problems. It does not meet her needs for justice. She knew nothing about restorative justice. Yet she said to her friends and to her family, I need to talk to this person who raped me. I need to understand why he did it. What was he thinking of, what gave him the right to do that? And what does he think now about what he did to me? She couldn’t get these questions out of her mind. Of course, everybody said, he’s in prison, he’s a monster forget about it. But for her it was not over. She got therapy, which helped. She would say to the therapist. I need to talk to this person. The therapist would put an empty chair in front of her and said; “Imagine he is in this chair. what would you want to say?” And she found that helpful. She was able to articulate what she wanted to say and the questions she wanted to ask. But of course the chair didn’t answer the questions, the chair was silent. And then a coincidence happened and this is a recurring theme in my research. That the victims find their way to restorative justice by coincidence. There is no system that says to a victim “You know you have a right if you want to meet the person who has harmed you.” And in fact, when they are asked, often people say no, we don’t do that. And particularly not for rape.

So, by coincidence, the victim’s sister was doing a course at university. She had a lecture from a colleague of mine on sexual violence and restorative justice. So to cut a long story short she made contact with a facilitator. But two weeks before the meeting, the facilitator reported to her that he had a conversation with the rapist, and the rapist was happy to hear her story. and would answer all the questions but he did not regret raping her he had no remorse, and he would not apologise.

If I had been the mediator I would have said to that young woman “Don’t go ahead. If he’s not going to take responsibility for the harm, it will only hurt you more”. This woman said to me; “I do not want an apology from him.” I suddenly realized I was looking at it from my point of view not from hers. What she wanted to do was to tell him that he did not destroy her, he tried to humiliate her through this rape, tried to destroy her confidence. She wanted to take her power back. I did not understand that. She said; “If I say, no I will not meet you because you won’t apologise, who has the power? The man still holds the power”. Now as a man I did not understand that until she explained it to me. I did not understand her reality and this is what is important about restorative justice. We enter into somebody else’s reality. So they had the meeting and it was very powerful. If you’re interested in this story there is a film made of it. It’s a professional film. You can Google “The Meeting” and it’s 5€ to watch. The victim plays herself.

He explained he had seen the victim in a pub in Dublin, she was very attractive and was very popular with her friends. He explained that he just hated her because she represented everything that he was not and he did want to destroy her. Later he did apologise. I said to her: “ how did you feel at the end” and she said, she felt elated. I said “elated?” You felt very happy, “how come?” She said something that I, as an old man, didn’t fully understand. She said, I changed the memory card. I said, what do you mean by that? She said, before the meeting with the rapist, when I thought of being raped, I saw myself in a field, dirty, naked, being tortured. Now, when I think about it, I see myself facing him, looking him in the eyes and said, saying, you did not succeed in destroying me. I remember myself as a powerful person and also a compassionate person because at the end I said, I feel sorry for you, I wish you well. A form of forgiveness that gave her the power.

Victims of very oppressive crimes regularly say that they feel more powerful at the end of the restorative meeting. Those, whom they have considered a monster, sort of shrink in power. This is what I think restorative justice can do. It isn’t alternative to punishment. It can happen as well as punishment. This is it. But you have to address perpetrators’ needs in the future as well to get them to sort out their lives so they do not harm anybody else.

Thank you very much.

Avv. Cominotti:

Sì, grazie. Diciamo che abbiamo percorso una storia e siamo arrivati fino a noi. Tim Chapman ha chiesto, mi ha chiesto se ci sono domande, se c’è tempo per domande, ho chiesto se lui avesse tempo per domande. E ha detto, ecco, insomma, è qua con noi. Le suggestioni credo siano tante dal punto di vista anche dell’esperienza che Tim Chapman ha avuto. Se qualcuno, senza farsi troppi problemi, vuole fare domande. Prego, se c’è una suggestione, vogliamo dire anche il nome così ci conosciamo anche un po’.

Not every victim wants to meet the perpetrator and I think this can be improved. When I go to different jurisdictions I always ask how many victims want to meet and usually it’s as little as 15 – 20%. I think that’s because we don’t know how to speak with victims.

You know I felt comfortable speaking with terrorists, murderers, sex offenders but when I met a victim I wasn’t sure how to do it. And one victim told me “Tim I understand what you are trying to do but what you really want me to do to is come to the meeting for the benefit of the perpetrator. And, this is the person who hurt me. Why would I want to benefit them?” So I have developed a process which is about trying to understand the reality of the victim and speaking in a way that the victim understands. There will still be victims who do not want to do it but it brings it up from 20 to 50 percent of victims will agree.

I think the perpetrator benefits from meeting a victim, if they can. They begin to understand. If you punish perpetrators you send them to prison, they sit in their cell feeling sorry for themselves “Poor me! I’m not with my family, I’m not going out with my friends, I’m stuck” so they feel sorry for themselves. I don’t want them to feel sorry for themselves I want them to feel sorry for what they’ve done, and to feel sorry for the victim.

But you also raised the reality that many crimes do not have a human victim. Possession of drugs is an example, sometimes destruction of public buildings, sometimes public disorder. Then I think you need to think creatively so to give you some examples: when a young person was arrested for possession of drugs, there is no obvious victim except really the young person is the victim. They are victimising themselves. We people who used to be drug addicts but were now cured. They would come to the meeting and say when I was 16 I was the same as you. Taking drugs, thinking it is great. I will tell you what your future is, if you continue to do this because I experienced it. They can tell a story that I cannot tell. The degradation of being an addict, how hard it is to come off the drugs, and how it has ruined relationships.

Because of our civil conflict, we would have a lot of riots in Belfast. And this was as we were becoming more peaceful and there were tourists wanting to visit. So, in one meeting we had the Northern Irish Tourist Board as a victim. They said there will not be any customers coming from different countries because they think this is a dangerous country. I think that we can be creative in benefitting perpetrators by saying you need to take responsibility because there will be less jobs and your life will not be good if you keep doing what you’re doing.

There is a short story I want to tell you that I think shows how restorative justice benefits the criminal, and it has nothing to do with restorative justice. I do not know if there’s anybody here who still listens to jazz music, I like jazz. And I don’t know if anybody here likes Miles Davis. To me he is a genius. He was not a particular good man, he abused women, he was a drug addict. He was holding an important concert in New York. And he had a great band. His pianist is another genius, Herbie Hancock. And in the middle of one of the tunes the pianist hits the wrong note. Now Miles Davis is a very violent man. And the pianist is literally thinking: “ Miles could kill me for doing that because he is a perfectionist.” So as soon as the concert is over the pianist goes to Miles Davis and said “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I know I hit the wrong note. This will never happen again, please forgive me Miles.” And Miles Davis said to him:” When someone hits the wrong note, it’s the next note I listen for and actually you Herbie improvised from your mistake and took that tune somewhere we’d never been. And it was amazing”.

Now I don’t know if you connect that with restorative justice but if a young person or an adult does something wrong do not just judge them on what they did wrong . Judge them for what they are going to do about it. What is their next step? And support them to do the right thing . And then they can earn respect. Do not just condemn them. Everybody makes mistakes.

Judge us by what we do next. Restorative justice says “What are you going to do about it? How are you going to make it right with the person you have hurt? How are you going to make it right with your family? How are you going to make it right with yourself? So you have a better life, and so people are safer. That’s what restorative justice is about. So I think that is the big benefit for the perpetrator. Here is a chance to make something bad good.

What is the role of the community in restorative justice?

In our law, the law states that obviously the perpetrator of the crime, the victim of the crime, must be present with the mediator, but they can also bring their family to support them, their friend to support them. It also says in the law where appropriate, representatives of the community can come. Now, some examples of that are, I remember a young man committed a hate crime against a homosexual man. And he brought people from the gay community to his meeting to support him. The young man, when he understood that what he did was not funny, it was harmful, apologised.

And the people from the gay community were so impressed with this that they said, well, part of your reparation, “Can you come to our counselling service and speak to the counsellors and maybe speak to some of the gay people and understand how much homophobia can hurt?” and the young man agreed to do that. So that’s as an example. The community may be concerned about young men drinking or playing live music, and you can have a restorative meeting where residents of the street come and meet the young people and say, here is our point of view. “We are trying to sleep at night and you’re outside having a party. Could you find another place to enjoy yourself and you know let us renegotiate our relationship?” So there are many instances where it’s appropriate to bring people from the community into a restorative meeting because the community has a stake in it. The community can, you know, can disapprove, but also can support the perpetrators to improve their behavior.

Domestica buse

My understanding of the Istanbul Convention is that a judge cannot order a victim into mediation. It doesn’t say that mediation is never possible in domestic violence. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this (showing a pin with a white ribbon on it) This is a campaign in Britain and Ireland. I don’t know if it has come to Italy that men should wear this white ribbon to show solidarity with women against domestic violence, because in the public imagination, domestic violence is considered a woman’s problem. It’s not. It’s a man’s problem. It is the men who are doing it in most cases, though not in every case, but in most cases. So, this campaign is for men to show solidarity. So, this is an important area for me. I, in my research, have spoken to women who were seriously abused.

And maybe I’ll tell you one story. This woman, who was a very sincere Christian woman, met this man, fell in love. She could see he was a troubled man. He had been taking drugs. And she felt that her Christian love could transform him. But after a while, he became very jealous, very controlling. But she was a strong woman and stood up to him. But then he started to be very aggressive and offensive towards her child. And this she could not put up with so she said : “You’re going to have to leave”. He left but he wanted to come back. He kept contacting her, you know, saying I’m sorry, I’ve changed I want to come back and she says : “ No you’re not coming back“ He said : “Can we meet?“ She said : “Okay we can meet but we will meet in a public place. You cannot come to my house and they met in the car park of the town that they lived in and he pleaded with her : “Please let me come back, I love you I’ll never do this again” and she says : “ No you threatened my child and I cannot forgive you for that, we can never have a relationship” He then went crazy pulled out a knife and stabbed her many times.

The police were called, the ambulance was called, and she was very lucky that the knife just missed her heart. If it had been that closer she would have been dead. The surgeon said it was a miracle. But the strange thing was when she told me this story. She came round from the operation, the life-saving operation, and she was lying in the hospital and the nurse says “Is there anything you need?” The first thing that came to her mind was: “ I need a conversation.”

She, like the other victim, had never heard of restorative justice, didn’t think this was possible. She went to various victims’ organizations and all of them said “You should not meet the perpetrator. It is not appropriate in domestic violence.” But she said ”Why not?” And she said, “well, you probably just want to get back with him and it’ll harm you again”. And she said,” how do you know what I want? You haven’t asked me what I want.” And anyway, she was always pushed back. And she said that she wasn’t sleeping well because of this. And so quite often in the middle of night, she’d get up and she would surf the web. And the question that kept coming back to her was a common victim question “why me? Why did this happen to me? All I wanted to do was show him love why did he want to kill me?” She was in bed and she googled WHY ME. WHY ME is the name of a restorative justice organisation and I am on the management board.

The website said we are interested in serious crime. She said I could not wait until the office opened at nine o’clock and she rang up and said “ Can you help me?“ and they said yes we can help you and eventually she had a meeting in the prison with her ex-partner and, again what she wanted to do was ask why did you do this. Once when they were together the man had said to her “if I ever see you with another man, if we break up, I will kill you”. So she said “Do you still want to kill me because I want to get on with my life I want to have other relationships when you come out of prison if you see me with another man are you going to kill me?” And he said “That was stupid. Of course I will not kill you”. She felt again a sense of relief and power coming back to her that you get on with her life and she said it transformed my life.

Now she is a champion of restorative justice. She is not saying that every woman who suffers domestic violence should have restorative justice but she says it should be a woman’s choice. If they want to have it, we should try to facilitate it. For her that is a definition of feminism, that women’s choices are respected.

Può descrivere un incontro? Le prime parole del mediatore?

Firstly in our law the perpetrator has a right to bring a lawyer .The lawyer must not advocate. The lawyer is there to protect rights. The perpetrator must speak for themselves. Some lawyers do come and they understand that they are there to protect rights not to advocate .

What is a typical meeting? The way I do it, I will invite either the perpetrator or the victim, depending on who wishes to speak first and I will ask them “Please tell us what happened from your point of view,” Then I will ask the perpetrator “Well, what do you think of what you’ve just heard? Do you understand now the consequences of your actions?“ Sometimes the perpetrator speaks first and then I will ask the victim “Have you any questions you want to ask?” So the story is important. One of the things that makes restorative justice work is in a quotation from a writer. She writes novels that I like. She’s a Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And she does a brilliant TED talk. If you are interested, Google “ The danger of the single story “. It is 20 minutes long and she’s a beautiful speaker. She speaks with great warmth and humor. She has this quotation that I use in my teaching “Every story has a truth. The problem is it is not the complete truth.” So the perpetrator knows what he did and why he did it but he needs the victim to tell him what the consequences were of what he did. The victim knows what the consequences are, the pain that she has suffered but she doesn’t know why it happened. She cannot make sense of what was the meaning of this. So she needs the perpetrator’s truth. The process allows people to complete their story. So for the victim of the rapist, she completes her story by asking the rapist,” When you were taking me away after raping me, were you leading me somewhere to kill me?

So questions stay in the mind and keep you awake at night. Victims say; “Once I got the answer to the question, I slept well that night”.

I do not know if this works in Italian. In English To complete means you get the whole story but it also means the victim can finish the story and say I can put that in the past. I can move forward now and not be always thinking about what happened in the past and you hope the perpetrator can say I’m going to desist from harming people and live a decent life in the future.

Grazie mille.