There Be Dragons: A film that shows that forgiveness can change the future
April 17, 2011
….Why the fascination with There Be Dragons? Because a self-proclaimed ‘wobbly’ agnostic and two-time Oscar nominee, Roland Joffe, (The Killing Fields and The Mission) writes and directs a movie that focuses our attention on faith of all things and the “turning points...
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“Forgive us our trespasses”: The complexity of forgiveness
April 17, 2011
While the first part of Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate focuses mostly on personal interactions, the second segment pulls back the lens to include forgiveness on the national and international level. The viewer watches German Chancellor Willy Brandt fall to his knees at the...
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Could you forgive this? Liz Securro’s road to forgiveness
April 17, 2011
….Not only was Liz raped, but she was blindsided. One spring day, 21 years after the assault, she received a letter in her mailbox from her rapist. He was making amends as part of a 12-step program for alcoholism, and he was asking her for forgiveness. Her initial thought was that she...
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We must not forgive too easily, says Archbishop of Canterbury
April 17, 2011
He told Radio Times: ‘I think the 20th century saw such a level of atrocity that it has focused our minds very, very hard on the dangers of forgiving too easily … because if forgiveness is easy it is as if the suffering doesn’t really matter.’ The Archbishop...
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An alarming Supreme Court ruling against an innocent man
April 4, 2011
The Court does not seem to deny that this grave misconduct happened. But somehow the attorneys for Thompson had to prove that the hiding of the evidence showed “deliberate indifference ” by the district attorney’s office, by showing, for example that this was no...
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Campbelltown Primary School’s justice for all sees grades rise and behaviour improve
April 3, 2011
Mr Shugg said the school, one of three eastern-subrubs schools considered to be disadvantaged, had complex issues to deal with. “Some of our families come from very low socio-economic backgrounds. We have a lot of non-English speaking background families and they (all) bring with them a...
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Justice program rooted in community, not courts
April 3, 2011
….One of the biggest misconceptions about Restorative Justice is that it doesn’t hold people accountable, Horner said. “It’s accountability in it’s truest form,” Horner said. Paying fines, taking a class or going to jail are pretty easy ways to compensate...
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The hardest kind of justice
April 3, 2011
In the US, one major problem is the breakdown between the victim and the American criminal justice system. Dr. Howard Zehr, known as the grandfather of restorative justice, has worked within the traditional US justice system as well as on restorative justice projects throughout the world. In...
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Self defense and restorative justice
April 3, 2011
Then I showed a longer segment from a news program in Australia which included interviews with both children (and the alleged bully’s parents). The news program did a nice job of making it clear that the situation is not so clear. The younger boy claims that the older (and...
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Restorative justice in the spotlight
April 3, 2011
….Examples where there was often a good result were in cases such as careless use of a motor vehicle causing injury or death. “And other similar cases where the criminality is not high but the harm is and the effect is devastating. You have a defendant who wants to make amends and...
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Storytelling: Simple but profound
April 3, 2011
For this one mother, storytelling was an essential way of communicating. She needed to be able to describe the horror of learning that her son had been in an accident, of going to the hospital to identify the body, and the burden of all the decisions that followed. Most importantly, being able...
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Church vandals apologise to congregation
April 3, 2011
“What I didn’t want, and what the church didn’t want, was for them to get any form of police record. Our hearts went out to the parents. There was considerable sympathy for them. “We are not talking about hardened criminals here.†He added far from condemning,...
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Can we create purely non-punitive restorative programs?
April 3, 2011
Some restorative school programs offer restorative interventions in the form of various circle processes when conflict occurs. Someone somewhere in the hierarchy of the school determines which cases will be referred to RJ facilitators and which ones will be handled in the traditional punitive...
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The Salvation Army and restorative justice
March 31, 2011
….“Just the other day I was asked to assist with a ‘Restorative Conference’ at a school where The Salvation Army serves,†says Matt Delaney, restorative justice facilitator for The Salvation Army in Richmond Hill. “My role was to be a...
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Monetizing restorative justice services
March 25, 2011
Contract with a government agency Another option is for a restorative justice service provider to contract with a correctional institution or other public agency and to be paid by the city, county or state in which the agency is located. The organization then provides restorative justice...
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