Layers and Meaning; Crime and Punishment

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When we are perceptive our experiences overlay one another in such a way that new meanings emerge from proximity and context as much as from the content of the isolated events. Now that's a long-winded, pseudo-philosophic statement if I ever heard one! Let's get down to an illustrating case study, which is unfolding for me right now.

It involves three seemingly distinct experiences, which have overlain one another to create a new filter through which I can interpret my world. I'll list the experiences. See if you can figure out their relationships before I get back into my long-windedness:

• I am presently struggling with debilitating pain caused by a groin injury, which I incurred playing the beautiful game - that's soccer for anyone out there who may be entertaining varient visions;
• I recently attended a book launch for a volume called Educating for Peacebuilding, written by Catherine Bargen, BC's Coordinator for Restorative Justice. Catherine has been instrumental in implementing a Restorative Action programs in schools all over the world;
• I am currently reading Romeo Dellaire's agonizing account of how child soldiers are recruited, trained and abused by military regimes in destabilized regions throughout the world.

Take thirty seconds or so to see if you can identify the connecting strand between those disparate streams of consciousness. Then, if you are interested, read on.

The connecting theme is Pain, and how it affects our behaviour.

My injury pales to insignificance when compared to the evidence of physical and mental torture Mr. Dellaire presents in They Fight Like Soldiers; They Die Like Children. Nonetheless dealing with chronic and acute pain has been instructive, although I think I have learned enough now to gratefully end the lessons. Please!

The facts of the matter are, I have ended up using my swivel chair as a walker to get myself up and down the hallway. On Monday, I will begin looking for a less cumbersome, not to mention unorthodox, solution to the shooting pains that plague me whenever I try to walk unassisted. For now I make do with what's available, while awaiting the results of some x-rays that have been taken to determine the nature and extent of my injury.

But here's the point: pain has been a sharp but effective instructor these last few days. It has informed me that my body is injured and I need to move in such a way  as to reduce the stress I am placing on the affected pelvic region. I have responded first with a determination to 'push through', occasioning much gritting of teeth, yelping and frustrated cursing. More recently I have learned to respect the messages my body is sending, and to devise means of moving that reduce the pain, and presumably allow the affected anatomy to recover.

That is a perfectly natural response-sequence of an advanced organism to pain.

During my convalescence I have had plenty of time to push on through the pages of Mr. Dellaire's extremely disturbing book. One of the overarching themes is the willingness of military regimes to use torture as a means of training children to fight in dirty wars the world over. And in case any of us are prone to tsk-tsk the situation in destabilized and have-not regions of the world, Mr. Dellaire makes it clear that gangs in North America, which flourish in areas where poverty and crime are rampant, use similar techniques to keep their members in line.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, the perpetrators of unimaginable abuse against millions of children world-wide base much of their 'training' on the perfectly natural learning sequence of pain and the human organism's response to it. They have successfully perverted a mechanism essential to survival into a tool of subversion and colossal abuse. The scale of this crime goes beyond what is explicable in human terms. To me it is a manifestation of evil loosed upon the world. And again, lest we cast stones, we are all as a world community complicit in this horror.

On January 19 I attended a wonderful event at the Radha Yoga & Eatery in Vancouver. Catherine Bargen was launching her new book Educating for Peacebuilding, which chronicles the implementation of Restorative Justice principles in Langley School District (where I am employed as Communications Manager). Also in attendance was Dan Basham, Coordinator of Restorative Action Programs in Langley schools for the Fraser Valley Community Justice Initiatives Association.

A fundamental premise of Restorative Justice is that punishment is an ineffective and unjust means of addressing the damage wrought by criminal or anti-social behaviour. Rather, a restorative approach, that focuses on what is needed to repair relationships and redress the harm is what's needed in most instances. I hear the keyboards of the right-wing polemicists clattering angrily already. Let me tell you, Catherine and Dan have experienced wrong more deeply and more comprehensively than any of us are likely to do in our lifetimes. Their positions are based on effective ways of dealing with unthinkable tragedies.

Punishment is nothing other than the infliction of either psychological or physical pain to alter undesirable behaviour. Like the pain that has been teaching me to limp in the most efficient and painless manner possible, punishment is intended to teach those who are subjected to it to behave in ways that don't incur more punishment. Essential to the notion of punishment is not only the certainty that it will hurt, but that it will continue hurting until you do what is demanded of you.

My question: Is punishment an instinctive response to misbehaviour? Are humans hard wired to abuse and bully one another when rules are broken? Has, in fact, punishment been the most effective means of teaching our young to survive in a world that can be very dangerous?

In posing this question I lay down a very important disclaimer. Whether the answer is yes, punishment is instinctive, or no, it is learned, makes no difference at all to the social imperative that we discard the knee-jerk application of punishment as a quick fix for all our social ills. The farther up that scale we go, meting out thoughtless forms of injury as a means of getting our victims to behave, the closer we come to being no different from the ruthless generals who torture children as their most effective means of indoctrination. When punishment becomes a tool that is applied without a heartfelt search for some less damaging alternative, it straddles the line between social necessity and outright evil. Period.

The only valid reason for raising the question at all is to get a measure of how hard we as a species will have to work to embrace the ideals of Restorative Justice. My guess, based on past history and interpretations of history by writers like Mr. Dellaire, is we will have to work very hard for a very long time to build the capacity for peacemaking. My hope is pinned on people like him, and Catherine Bargen, and Dan Basham, who continue working against all odds and who are making a difference in our world.