Bullying: Justice is better than vengeance

Karl is in Year 10. He is a lanky and broad shouldered and, like many boys of his age, looks as if he has grown so suddenly that he doesn't quite know what to do with his body. One of the things he has been doing is terrorising other boys - particularly the quiet, pallid Jerry whom, over the past year, he has subjected to a regime of pushing, shoving, insults and intimidation.

Repeated tickings-off by teachers did not solve the problem. Jerry would be reassured by his tutor that the matter had been dealt with, only for it to begin again days later. Threats continued outside school, and Jerry spent the Christmas holidays cowering in his house, too scared of Karl to come out on to the streets of Lewisham, south London, where both boys live.

Yet now the bullying has stopped, Karl is no longer throwing his weight around with other pupils, Jerry has found the confidence to stand, and be elected, as a school councillor - and the boys sit opposite one another in school, describing the way their relationship has been healed.

What has brought them together has been their school's use of restorative justice. Originating in methods used by the Maoris, the technique is gaining in popularity in Britain. Cherie Blair recently called for its use to bring criminals to an understanding of the impact of their wrongdoing.

Our traditional western notion of justice is that an offender must be found out and punished by the institution whose rules have been broken. In the restorative model, the emphasis is, rather, on reintegrating the individual back into the community by means of a real understanding of the effect of the wrongdoing.

Karl's bullying of Jerry finally ceased when the school's deputy head, Mick Levens, brought the two boys face to face with one another. Jerry was asked to explain what had been the worst thing about Karl's mistreatment. Karl was appalled by what he heard.

He says: "I thought I'd just been pushing him about, telling him to get out my face, but really I was making the boy frightened. He didn't even want to leave his house all Christmas. I felt awful. After that I thought, I can't do this no more."

Forest Hill Community School, which both boys attend, has been using restorative justice for four years, and was one of the first in the country to do so. All the other schools in Lewisham, as well as other agencies - the Youth Offending Team, school police officers - have since been offered training in its strategies.

The school faces the usual inner-city challenges such as disaffection, deprivation and a high number of children who don't speak English at home. All its pupils are boys and it is big - 1,400 on the roll. Yet it is oversubscribed, and has an excellent pastoral reputation.

As Mick Levens explains, however, its reputation for strictness used to be achieved partly through high levels of punishment. Permanent exclusions ran at a general rate of six a year. Last year there were four and this year, so far, there have been none. Short-term exclusions are down by nearly three quarters and even relatively minor misbehaviour is drastically reduced - the proportion of children being sent out of lessons to the school's "time out" referral room has almost halved.

Proponents of restorative approaches were disappointed that, in Learning Behaviour, Sir Alan Steer's 2005 report on school discipline, restorative justice receives only one brief mention. Sir Alan explains that it can play a part in teaching children the impact of wrongdoing, but he is wary of some aspects, particularly bringing offender and victim face to face.

"You are altering the power boundaries between assailant and victim - can the victim cope with that?" he asks. "Things can look very different to a child who knows the social situation will change when the adult is no longer there and that the assailant might get their own back."

Practitioners emphasise that restorative justice requires careful training and can only succeed where pastoral care is first rate. There are several levels to the approach, involving peer and adult mentors, always with the aim of allowing wrongdoers a chance to take a different path. Yet the encounter, after serious violence or bullying, between perpetrator and sufferer is, they believe, critical, offering the latter a voice in a way that traditional discipline rarely permits, and the former the possibility of genuine new understanding.

Belinda Hopkins, of the National Centre for Restorative Justice in Education, sees the approach as a whole new way of doing things, "The traditional, authoritarian, punitive environment of the school is dangerous to young people," she says. "If you threaten youngsters with the consequences of wrongdoing, what you mean is the consequences to themselves - you are teaching them not to get caught. We want kids to do the right things for the right reasons. We want to teach them empathy."

As Mick Levens at Forest Hill explains, however, it would be a mistake to confuse this aim with permissiveness. Boundaries remain important and troublemakers still sometimes have to go. In one tutor group, problems had been rife for years. As a preliminary step to holding the ritualised group conference that the approach entails, Levens brought all the pupils from this class together under exam conditions, and promising absolute confidentiality, asked each to write his version of what had gone wrong in the group. Almost every boy identified one particular pupil who was masterminding the bullying, extortion of money and forays against the law outside school. That pupil was expelled with little more ado.

Punishment, nevertheless, takes a lower profile than it does in traditional discipline - it is usually resorted to only when opportunities to mend relationships have been repeatedly rejected. During the class conference following this boy's expulsion, the pupils' accounts were read out anonymously. Several boys expressed acute remorse at the part they had taken in the bullying - one even expressed guilt at having stood by passively. The conference ended with an exploration of how matters could be put right.

This shift of emphasis away from punitive action makes the school safer, especially for vulnerable pupils. Jerry was relieved Karl wasn't suspended for bullying him. "I don't think him not coming to school would have been an answer - it was better to work it out there and then than go through the whole thing of you being scared when he comes back," he says.

Other boys agree that a punitive atmosphere can make things worse. "If you both get in a lot of trouble, you end up really angry with one another - often that ends in a fight," said one. Less fear of punishment in the school community, they say, makes them readier to "grass" when they witness bullying - the bully is not so likely to come in vengeful search of them if he is dealt with from a restorative point of view.

Even parents of victims, called in to group conferences after serious incidents, are less intent than might be expected on ensuring their child's suffering is avenged. This is partly because meetings before the conference have allowed them time to simmer down. "But often what they are really after is an apology and an assurance that it won't happen again," says Levens. "We even had one conference where the wrongdoer burst into floods of tears and ended up being comforted by the victim's father."

This kind of big conference is rare - there have been about a dozen in four years - and boys whose offences merit such treatment are, as Levens says "often drinking at the Last Chance Saloon". But in every case, the offender has been reintegrated into the school community - and where bullying was the charge, the boy has always changed his behaviour. Karl puts it vividly: "You're sitting in a room and this boy is sitting the other side of the table from you and he's telling you, 'I want it to stop, I want it to stop.' You get to thinking of all the things you've done to him, and you realise it's just stupid. I've been in a lot less trouble since."

A Maori solution

What is restorative justice?

It's a method of dealing with wrongdoers that originated with the Maoris and that seeks to avoid traditional punishment. Miscreant and victim are brought together in a conference. The victims explain the effect the crime has had on their lives and the conference explores how restitution can be made.

Does it work?

Yes. A recent Youth Justice Board evaluation of Restorative Justice in 26 schools across the country found that in 92 per cent of serious incidents, restorative approaches led to wrongdoers being reintegrated into school. Three months later, 96 per cent of these pupils were still sticking to their behaviour contracts.

How many schools do it?

Fifty out of the UK's 150 local education authorities are offering their schools training in restorative justice.

Why don't all schools do it?

The idea is still relatively new in Britain, though it has been used for the past 30 years in Australia and Canada. It received only a brief mention in Sir Alan Steer's 2005 report on discipline in schools.

How do I find out more about it?

The National Centre for Restorative Justice in Education: www.transformingconflict.org; Margaret Thorsborne has a fascinating website: www.thorsborne.com.au/

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