Hope is often not valued or given as much credit as it should. That’s what our process does, it provides hope.
— Mike Hinton
On the night of October 12, 2012, 20 Jewish graves in Auckland’s oldest cemetery were spray-painted with Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic phrases. The impacts of acts like these are often difficult to overcome, inflicting deep, lasting pain on affected communities. When one of the two people responsible volunteered to participate in a restorative justice process, it gained a lot of attention beyond Auckland.
Only 19 years old, one of the young people involved in this act had grown up among multiple homes without much family support. A tinkerer by nature, he had aspired to study engineering at university, but now that was unlikely to happen. The courts required that he perform community service and pay reparations for the damage he had caused. But additionally, he chose to engage with the Jewish Council of New Zealand. During these interactions, one of the senior members of the Jewish community admitted to the boy that, three decades earlier, he himself had desecrated a church—and had been carrying around the weight of that secret ever since. The restorative justice meeting gave this Jewish man the opportunity to admit his wrongdoing.
This restorative conference had many other outcomes, including allowing Auckland’s Jewish community to meet one of the people responsible for the desecration and be seen and heard by him, so healing could begin. But it also resulted in that same community offering mentorship and guidance to the person who had harmed them, once they understood that this was a crime of ignorance rather than of hatred. They invited him to Friday night Shabbat dinners. The elder who admitted to his own act of vandalism 30 years prior even offered financial support for this young person to attend university—a way to atone for his own past while opening up opportunities for someone without access.
This healing process was facilitated by Restorative Practices Aotearoa (RPA), an Aotearoa New Zealand-based network of providers founded in 2005 to facilitate restorative conferences. RPA has providers assigned to every district court in the country. They emphasize flexibility and responsiveness to the needs of all stakeholders in a process, while facilitating discussion and catalyzing community-wide healing. “We are accustomed to putting people into two groups: offenders and victims,” says Mike Hinton, RPA’s general manager. “That’s only about 20 percent of the story. Victims come with families. Families come with communities. Offenders, too, come with families and communities. It’s about engaging all of the people that have been affected by the trauma, the hurt, or the harm.”
Participation in restorative conferences is elective and separate from the court system. “Being completely voluntary is a cornerstone of this practice,” Hinton adds. “If a judge recommends it, then it is not voluntary.”
In another instance, a motorist accidentally killed a child in a road accident. He asked to speak immediately with the child’s family, but was told not to by the police and his lawyer. Later, during the restorative conference facilitated by RPA, the family was able to hear the man express his deep regret and pain about what had happened. He told them, “If it was up to me, I would be at your house the day after the accident because that’s the island way.” Where the formal justice system prevented healing, restorative practices enabled it.
Practitioners at RPA do not limit restorative practices to less serious crimes or young offenders, as often happens in other countries. Communities and organizations also use restorative practices outside the criminal justice system. For instance, Tawa College in Wellington established a tiered set of restorative practices to aid in communicative conflict resolution, resulting in a significant change in the atmosphere on campus and in outcomes across the educational institution. “The reality is that restorative practices are suitable for every case, at every level,” Hinton says. Imagine a world where, no matter the nature of the wrongdoing, the response is a collective effort toward healing.
