Criminology as Peacemaking--"Empathy works, obedience doesn't"
Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 11:37:02 -0500 (EST)
From: "harold e. pepinsky"
Subject: Could you put this on the web page? Many thanks--hal
Draft for forthcoming book, edited by Dennis Sullivan and
Larry Tifft, of work presented at the conference on
restorative justice and peacemaking held in Albany New York,
June 1997. Comments and suggestions are most welcome. Many
thanks to Dennis and to Bill DuBois for helpful comments thus
far.
EMPATHY WORKS, OBEDIENCE DOESN'T
Hal Pepinsky
Criminal Justice, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405
USA
pepinsky@indiana.edu
1998
CRIMINOLOGY AS PEACEMAKING
It has been just over a decade since I turned explicitly to
studying how to make peace instead of making war on crime and
violence. Criminology and criminal justice are essentially
negative enterprises, about what not to do, about why we do
what we should not, about how to stop us from doing wrong.
In studying peacemaking I sought to understand how we get the
kind of human relations we DO want. Essentially, I seek to
understand how we become safer in the face of violence. I
want to find out what safety is and how we get more of it
with one another. There are many other words we use for the
opposite of being enmeshed in violence--security, community,
compassion...I like "safety" because it is such a plain,
blunt word.
I began my explicit inquiry into peacemaking by stating a
theory that peace supplanted violence whenever interaction
became "responsive" (Pepinsky 1988; expanded in Pepinsky
1991). While violence and the fear and pain it engenders
came from people pursuing their own independent agendas and
objectives regardless of how others were affected,
responsiveness was interaction in which actors' personal
agendas shifted constantly to accommodate others' feelings
and needs. Responsiveness was how people acted in
participatory democracy, which Paul Jesilow and I had earlier
proposed as the way to "make people behave" instead of
punishing criminality (Pepinsky and Jesilow 1992 [1984]: 127-
38). Thus enterprise would become safer and more honest if
tax incentives and other subsidies supported worker/client-
democratically-owned-and-operated businesses; prisons would
become safer if democratically governed as Tom Murton (1968)-
-who became "Brubaker" in a movie--did in the mid-sixties in
Arkansas; and responses to crime and violence like Victim
Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORPS) built safety by
encouraging victims and offenders to have community support
in creating their own ways into secure community life--as
Christie (1977) had put it, to own their own disputes. In
all our proposals, democratization was the path to peace.
In Montreal in 1987 at the Third International Conference on
Penal Abolition (ICOPA III), I was also made aware of three
parallel streams of thought in action: radical feminism as
Kay Harris had propounded it at ICOPA II in 1985 (revised
statement in Harris 1991), "abolitionism" as propounded by
Knopp et al. in 1976 as represented in her Safer Society
Program for victims of sexual violence and for offenders
(Knopp 1991), and "restorative justice" beginning under
Mennonite auspices with establishment of VORPs first in
Kitchener, Ontario, in 1974, and in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1977
(Zehr 1990). At about this time, aboriginal alternatives to
prosecution and punishment were beginning to gain
recognition; in 1989, New Zealand adopted Maori ways,
offering "family group councils" to all young people
petitioned into juvenile court for delinquency--circles
including family and friends of victims and offenders,
sitting in a circle with officials and lawyers, convened by a
social worker (Consedine 1995). All these strands focused on
the harm done by crime and violence in tearing both victims
and offenders from reciprocally trustworthy relations with
others, on trying to repair the damage caused by violence
rather than focusing on identifying, isolating, separating,
and punishing the offender. This body of work has been
summarized in a special issue on "The Phenomenon of
Restorative Justice," inaugurating the journal Contemporary
Justice Review (Sullivan 1998).
Richard Quinney, I, and our contributors began drawing these
strands of thought and action together into a field we
labeled Criminology as Peacemaking (Pepinsky and Quinney
1991). I have since tried to gain understanding of basic
mundane elements by which people make peace in place of
violence.
I have found one set of accounts of how to make peace in
place of violence which to me precisely describe the basic
structural elements of peacemaking. These accounts describe
the Navajo world view in which "peacemaking courts" have been
constituted by the Navajo Supreme Court. Navajo Supreme
Court Chief Justice Robert Yazzie (1998) has been joined by
Zion (1985) and Gross (1996) in describing how the court
functions. The peacemaker, recognized by community members
as "someone who thinks well, speaks well, thinks well, and
shows by his or her behavior that the person's conduct is
grounded in spirituality" (Yazzie 1998: 125), follows a
mediation process which culminates in a circle, joined by
individuals aggrieved and their clans, and individuals who
have aggrieved and their clans. The peacemaker begins a
conversation about violence which simply moves around the
circle, each individual free either to speak or to pass the
floor to her or his left. Each time the conversation returns
to the peacemaker, s/he summarizes what has been said, and
may and in all probability will continue round the circle
again and again. At any time the peacemaker may pass the
floor to a particular member of the circle, who may then pass
as asked. To the Navajo, violence is a matter of imbalances
of power in interaction. All human interaction is viewed as
a conversation. When any person or group in interaction
monopolizes the conversation, the conversation--in Navajo
terms--becomes imbalanced. Peace is restored by balancing
the conversation henceforth. Everyone leaves a truly
balanced conversation free to choose what s/he does next. To
the Navajo as to me, it is a contradiction in terms to make
someone responsible; rather, a peacemaking process liberates
one's heart to be in tune with others and to continue taking
turns in interaction. Participating in a balanced
conversation stimulates one's assumption of responsibility.
Wagner-Pacifici (1993) has analyzed transcripts of
negotiations between MOVE and the City of Philadelphia,
confirming the hypothesis that violence escalated and
eventually erupted as MOVE members' voices and concerns were
taken out of officials' conversations in the negotiation
process. As Fisher et al. (1992) depict peacemaking in
international diplomacy, "getting to yes" entails "moving
from position to interest." The quarrel over position is, to
borrow Anglo legal terminology, over whether a party has
"standing to be heard." Parties are able to move to
inventing ways to accommodate one another's concerns once
they take for granted that everyone's interests equally
deserve airing and hearing. Again, balanced participation in
conversations among those who live with the consequences is
the essence of making peace.
My recent published work has been directed toward describing
how balancing conversations in response to personal violence
makes us safer and more secure, in everyday life (Pepinsky
1998a), in criminological research (Pepinsky 1998b), and
where legal protection against personal violence fails
(Pepinsky 1995). In this work, I focus on the basic
substance of peacemaking--to what it is that happens as our
conversations become more balanced, to what safe results are.
Here I discuss what safety IS.
I propose that safety is essentially the enjoyment of
empathy of others, while from a warmaking point of view
safety is essentially a state of perfect obedience. I am not
a prophet, and so I don't propose whether at any moment we
will do what makes us safer rather than threatening us with
greater violence. I do propose what safe relations are when
we manage to build them, that is, as we make peace. My
thesis about what reduces the threat of violence and yields
safety in its place is simply this: empathy works, obedience
doesn't.
REMORSE AND EMPATHY
We are born with the capacity to ask for help, and the
capacity to offer a loving gaze or embrace. That much is
undisputed. To the degree we regard childrearing as a
warrior's duty to command a child's obedience, parental duty
lies in suppressing inappropriate or intolerable expressions
of feeling and commitment. We justify parental war on
children on grounds that adults know better than children
what children should feel, say, and do.
In my home culture parents speak with fear of handling
"terrible twos" and adolescence. And from a warrior's point
of view, in both cases, it is vital that the parent establish
that s/he is in charge. Good children do as they are told.
When children do bad, they need--in the current local cliche-
-to be "given consequences," as though hurting someone isn't
consequence enough in itself to deal with. And when we are
thus "disciplining" our children, what sign of having become
trustworthy do we look for first and foremost? Remorse.
"I'm sorry. I know it was stupid. I'll never do it again,
promise."
Remorse is the widely known best chance of talking one's way
out of a speeding ticket. Remorse is the primary objective
of criminal prosecution. When, shortly after the death of
Mao Zedong, criminal codes were enacted in China in 1978,
Chinese legislators were berated by colleagues of mine in the
U.S. for virtually requiring criminal defendants to confess
guilt at trial or face dire consequences. I noted at the
time how we in the U.S. do the same; woe to the criminal
defendant who demands to go to trial and (as most do) loses
(Pepinsky 1980).
I suffer watching defendants plead guilty in local courts.
It is such a humiliating experience, assuring the judge count
by count that yes, your honor, I have done it and know it was
wrong and have no excuse for my behavior...Thus the judge
leaves a clean record that the plea is "free and voluntary."
We put a premium on obedience. We do so to our peril, I
believe.
Alice Miller (1990 [1983]) calls commanding obedience
"poisonous pedagogy." It is poisonous pedagogy, as her book
title suggests, to make a child feel or do something for his
or her own good. "Stop whining, you know this is good for
you!" You learn that to please the parents you spontaneously
love and want to please, to say nothing of to avoid pain and
rejection, you smile when you are supposed to, you say the
right thing, no matter how tempted you are to protest or show
fear or pain. You learn, in other words, to lie. The poison
in this pedagogy is that we teach ourselves as children to
lie, to dissociate from our own feelings and inclinations, to
bury them, to reject our own true selves.
Nothing is more fundamental to safe social relations than
honesty. Insofar as we manage to bury our true feelings and
respond--mechanically--as instructed, we are essentially what
psychiatrists in my culture these days call sociopathic. We
are essentially expedient. We are, as Miller argues using
Hitler and a serial sadistic killer as case studies, in the
dissociated frame of mind in which Milgram's (1973)
demonstrated enough "obedience to authority" to try to give
lethal shock to stooges who begged for their lives.
Short of being murdered or severely disabled, vaginal or
anal rape is a fair candidate for being the form of criminal
personal violence we fear most. Those who have raped who
talk about it characteristically express surprise that those
they have raped are complaining, thinking, "They asked for
it," or, "They deserved it." While those being raped fear
that their attacker is so out of control that "he could kill
me!" those who are raping are oblivious to the pain and fear
they cause. They simply dissociate from their companion's
pain and terror. That dissociation is the mechanism by which
violence continues and repeats itself.
At the other end of the spectrum from those who subordinate
others wantonly to those who conform to our norms, how are
you supposed to trust the yes-person who assures you that
"I'll be there for you"? At one end of the spectrum,
personal violence does not happen unless the assailant
dissociates. At the other, you don't know whether you can
count on anyone who has had to learn to turn her or his true
feelings off and tell you what s/he thinks you want to hear.
This is what Alice Miller tells us that poisonous pedagogy--
doing and feeling as you're told--produces. When the
conformist who tells you "I'll be there for you" feels the
demand to shift allegiance to some other power figure at your
expense, you lose. The promise is not really a promise. The
promise is oriented toward an external set of rewards and
punishments, which may shift with political winds, not toward
your needs. The promise is an act of obedience, not of
empathy. One common promise for obedience sake is to
apologize for one's violence and promise never to do it
again.
It is remarkable that we so venerate remorse. Remorse is in
thorough disrepute among those who work with those victimized
by so-called domestic violence. In the run-of-the-mill cycle
of repeated assaults, each assault is followed by a
"honeymoon period" in which the assailant expresses remorse,
says he's sorry, tries to do anything to make it up. Those
who work with those who most regularly are battered,
including those who are routinely raped, regard remorse as
worthless. Experience tells them so. I find it quite
remarkable that we can find remorse in our subjects, such as
criminal defendants and children, so reassuring.
Conversely, empathy may supplant violence with no remorse
expressed. A friend recently described to me how she had
found safety in the company of a mother who had chronically
emotionally abused her. This friend, who in my view has done
a heroic job of balancing compliance with court orders and
protecting herself and her children from apparent violence,
had stopped calling her mother because her mother would
invariably combine two themes: what is so wrong with you that
all this trouble keeps happening? and you're not showing me
you love me.
My friend's father had told her that her mother has cancer,
and that metastasis had set in. Her mother had started going
shopping with her. One of the faults the mother had
criticized my friend for was for compulsive shopping. That
stopped. They don't talk about Lynnette's problems. They
don't talk about the cancer either. Her mother doesn't
complain to her daughter at all, bent instead on enjoying
time together looking for bargains and such. Her mother's
behavior is what I would call "responsive": she by her action
demonstrates what hurts her daughter and responds instead to
what her daughter enjoys. My friend and I agree that her
mother is demonstrating a reliable commitment to saying
goodbye on good terms. The mother's conduct combines a
hardnosed projection of how the mother herself wants to die
with attentiveness to what truly makes her daughter feel safe
in her mother's company.
Since having supposed that empathy might be a reliable
ground upon which to build trust and become safe in others'
company, I have noticed how hard it is for those who are at
risk of continuing emotional or physical assaults to fake
empathy. Remorseful violators can go on and on about how
terrible THEY feel over how they hurt you, but until they
become honest with themselves and you about getting what they
want, they suffer emotional attention deficit disorder. If
they do get forced to talk about how they think you feel and
what they think you want, it just won't sound like you to
you. I have learned to depend on empathy to decide whether I
can afford to let down my guard with others. Empathy may
come and go, of course, mine included. It is not that the
world can be separated into empathic and sociopathic people.
Rather, empathy indicates that any of us can be depended upon
to be responsive rather than untrustworthy while any of us
shows it. Empathy amounts to letting others' true selves
into our conversations, and when we do so, we are literally
there WITH others, in a frame of mind to notice others' fear
and pain and offer validation and reassurance.
In recent years I have gotten to know a number of children
and parents caught in struggles over evidence that the
children are seriously assaulted by parents, to know large
numbers of those who describe having been raised in
horrendous violence, commonly known as ritual abuse, and to
know a number of those who have treated people for the trauma
such violence leaves behind. I have gotten to know these
people in the context of offering a seminar on children's
rights and safety and another class in which I introduce
peacemaking. I invite a number of them to these classes. I
seldom have money even to cover their travel expenses, but I
do offer my home to those who stay overnight. Among these
guests is a woman who I believe indeed was born in a
prominent cult bloodline, and long after she thought that she
had renounced the occult, still got "triggered" into an
"alter" state to impose "discipline" on member groups in a
multi-state region for twenty years thereafter. I asked my
students how they felt about my inviting her, and several
survivors of like violence whom she has taken in, into my
home. Some were outraged and dismayed that I could do so. I
sent their comments to my friend, who wrote back a long
letter.
The letter, which I have shared with my students and others,
is not long on remorse. My friend says that she herself did
hands-on "sacrificing" of people only until she rose high
enough to let others do it instead, that she did it without
feeling knowing that she would be killed if she did not. She
explicitly distinguishes herself from despicable serial
killers like Ted Bundy.
She also describes going through books of pictures of
missing children, looking to see whether she recognizes any
of her victims. She offers assistance to law enforcement,
including telling them about her past (which is
unprosecutable because bodies would not be found). She takes
in others trying to escape. She is in touch enough with what
she now regards as an alien part of herself--the part that
could be triggered and called out to cult activity--that she
ensures that she is always in safe company, so that she has
no chance to "lose time," as happens when people switch among
multiple personalities. In so doing she is in touch with her
real self, just as she pays attention to others. On her own
initiative, she started visiting a prisoner with whom I have
been corresponding for some years. She not only shows
sensitivity and empathy for those in whose company I see her;
ultimately she shows empathy for me. She is for instance
scrupulous about honoring my request to come and go to suit
my family schedule. She and her guests notice and express
appreciation even for little demonstrations of hospitality.
Noticing their empathy, I am confident that they will in no
way hurt me or my family. Their displays of empathy are
exercises in personal responsibility--in becoming different
from the way they were when they tortured and killed others.
To become responsible and empathetic, you have to have
confidence in the value and legitimacy of your own feelings
and needs. So my friend may show some remorse implicitly by
having tried for instance to identify her victims, but my
safety with her now in my judgment rests on her knowing that
it was a part of her that she now considers alien, that she
knows that basically she is better and more trustworthy than
the part of her that formerly hurt others. You have to like
and accept a part of yourself that you do not dissociate from
in order to be honest with others about what you do feel and
want, and it appears to me in this and other cases that one's
empathy sets in only as one feels one can be oneself without
being rejected for it. Trying to induce remorse and shame is
therefore counterproductive, for success in shaming lies in
making one loathe and reject and demean oneself. In shame,
one may either choose a safe, loving, vulnerable target such
as one's child and lash out in anger, just split off from
attention to the subject's feelings and let the rage out. It
is easy to imagine that when one is on the receiving end of
such an outburst, it feels as though you're going to die. In
the numbness and shame that follows victimization, shame may
do more than bottle up rage for politically convenient
outbursts. One may adapt by concluding that in this world
such as it is, you don't deserve or cannot expect better than
to hang onto one's abuser. The patterns protective mothers
describe to me indicate that those who aim to prey on "their"
children pick out women who have been beaten into feeling
responsible for being violated, into feeling that it was
their worldly, religious duty to serve men (generally) who
degraded them, and then beat them.
In neither case does shame help one's affliction.
Martyrdom and servitude are inherently instrumental.
Empathy is not. Empathy is an openness to new experience, a
relaxing of preconceptions as to what is expected, in English
metaphor, an opening of the heart. In Buddhist terms it is
pure life(-giving) energy, compassion in action. As Quinney
(1991) tells us, we end suffering by noticing it and
responding openly. Elements of empathy are captured in this
saying attributed to the Navajo, which I have posted in bold
letters outside my office:
SHOW UP
PAY ATTENTION
TELL THE TRUTH
DON'T BE ATTACHED TO OUTCOME
Attachment to outcome means that you know, before you hear
from others, what needs to be done. If you already know what
needs to be done, you have nothing to learn from listening to
others before your next move, in terms of what most demands
your attention. Your priorities are not up for discussion.
The energy in compassion or empathy lies in learning
something new to do by listening to those who will most be
affected by what you do next. Empathy is a suspension of
one's agenda to "pay attention" to what they say, and to let
their feelings soak into one's own conscious nervous energy.
Empathy begins with unencumbered listening (Pepinsky 1998a).
Of course, in order to pay attention you have to "show up"--
or as I hear people in my daughter's generation say, "be
there." You have to show interest and solicit voices of
those voices are least heard in whatever setting or reference
group you find yourself, in order to introduce balance into
the conversation--the structural manifestation that peace is
being made.
Our ultimate cultural barrier to substituting empathy for
obedience is our presumption that adults know more than
children. In a sense of course, that is true. But as
children, we have some vital gifts of our own to add to
conversations. Chief among these is our blatantly honest
desire to please and be accepted by adults. We bring honesty
to conversations, unless adults shut us down. We may be the
first to cry when we are all scared. We may be the first to
relax and pay attention at school when the parents we so much
want to please stop scaring each other. Adults who leave
"their" children out of their conversations are prone to
impose lessons gained from experience, including having to
lie, as Alice Miller puts it for the children's "own good."
How blind. How damaging to the very gift of empathy the
child spontaneously offers to our conversations.
Norway is a second home to me. There at the dinner table in
party company, children are almost ritually brought into
conversations, to describe their worlds in their own terms,
as adults pay attention.
As adults share among themselves what they hear as they pay
attention to children, adults legitimize in safe company
reliving traumas of their own childhoods. I have seen this
happen time and again, as mothers trying to protect their
children recognize ways in which, as children themselves,
they too were sexually assaulted by someone they loved and
trusted. Without magically fixing their children's problems,
I have seen them and their children gain strength--as in the
case of eating disorders literally gaining weight. These
mothers have the greatest respect for the honesty, courage,
and wisdom of their children. That is their primary solace.
This, to me, is truly a break in an intergenerational cycle
of violence and victimization.
I sense that as growing numbers of children and adult
survivors share stories, validate one another, and speak out,
we will overcome our ignorance of what our children,
including the children buried in our adult selves, have to
teach us. That will be the profoundest peacemaking of all.
In the mid sixties in law school I learned that a minority
of states were setting a national trend, permitting "no-
fault" divorces. The common-law rule, in effect in New York
State at the time, was that one could obtain a divorce only
if one's spouse committed a statutory offense (adultery in
New York), and if one had "clean hands." So if one spouse
sued another for divorce proving adultery, and the other
spouse proved that the plaintiff was also committing
adultery, the law required that family to be reunified,
unless perhaps they consented to separate for an extended
period and then ask for a divorce together.
Women's shelters started opening up not long after. And in
growing numbers, women do leave battering relations. From
what I know of where custody disputes began (as by Children
of the Underground founder Faye Yager in 1973; Carpenter and
Dietrich 1997), children whose fathers were established in
communities in the middle class or higher first began to feel
safe enough to talk to mothers, who felt detached enough to
believe what they heard rather than telling their children to
stop telling lies. And in therapy, adults began to talk
about the violence of their own childhoods and be heard,
especially by women's advocates. (One sad void, for
instance, is in support groups for male survivors of
childhood incest.) Surveys were first conducted asking
people how often they had been sexually assaulted by someone
they knew in the late eighties. And so, I would say, out of
the movement to allow women to leave men who beat, rape, and
threaten them, we have liberated children's voices of
victimization into public discourse.
The results are scary. What amounts to unrelenting torture
of children once plainly described suddenly seems as though
it might be happening all around us. As I see it, this is an
awakening of our empathy for childhood, our own included. As
we recognize that children have as much to offer in decisions
that affect them as adults, our children will free themselves
of violence more readily. All it takes, actually, is for a
single adult whom the child manifestly likes and laughs with
to offer the child sanctuary from any adult whose company
scares the child, and for other adults to let sanctuary
happen (Bianchi 1994). There you have the fundamental
prerequisite of any child's safety. This may be hard to
achieve in a warring world, but people do achieve small bits
of empathy do provide remarkable measures of safety. One
survivor of cult torture, led by her socially and politically
prominent father, remembers a fifth-grade teacher looking at
her as though she understood that something wrong was being
done to her. That bit of empathic connection carried her
forward until she broke from the cult, and for years since
has been for instance in a very fulfilling and safe marriage.
A small dose of sanctuary can be life-sustaining.
The bad thing about scary news is that it makes you feel
that you have to shut the problem down. I have testified in
one case in which a judge actually ordered children NOT to be
in counseling so that they would stop saying bad stuff about
their father; I know of many others like it. All this is in
the guise that children are causing trouble for themselves by
threatening sacred family bonds. It is terrifying to think
that if we probe enough in our very own families, we may
discover that a valued relative was Jekyll and Hyde, or that
a monster may lurk in our child's daycare center or school.
As I hear individuals whom I know in other contexts talk
about how violence in the home including violence by children
is getting out of hand, I am struck that the tone and
substance of the protest is like that of someone confronting
any personal feeling or fear that s/he has denied. It is
inherently scary to emerge from denial of a problem, all the
more so when one's denial amounts to cultural blindness. And
yet, I see that as progress toward safety, in which each of
us learns to create families of choice rather than just doing
our ancestral duties. As I see it, record numbers of
children and adult survivors are sharing stories and being
heard about problems that for millenia in our European
ancestry at any rate were almost totally buried. As DeMause
(1982) traces it, children in Europe and Euro-America were
not legally and politically recognized as people to whom
adults owed any duty until about a hundred years ago. So we
have come a long way.
We can of course follow the same principles of making peace
in any company, with or without children. Basically though,
our defenses against forsaking duty for empathy lie embedded
in the violence we suffer as children. We may join the mob
in going after this or that public villain, but at root, in
areas of our lives remote from police and legal surveillance,
we are most likely to be trapped in violence or safe from it.
Empathy and honesty pay off anywhere in daily or political
life. By "showing up" and "paying attention" to the voices
of our childhood, we most directly accomplish the safety
which Karl Marx (1963) called "human emancipation."
In the Navajo saying, "telling the truth" refers to honesty.
If you want someone honestly to talk about his or her
reaction to having committed a crime, you don't set up plea
bargaining ceremonies of remorse in order to draw out how the
offender honestly feels and believes. The condition for
honesty is essentially acceptance of this principle: When I
ask you for truth, I grant you the responsibility of how next
what you tell me gets used.
This condition sets the principle behind "Incidents Teams"
established by the dean of students office on my home campus
of Indiana University. I am delighted to have
representatives of the nearly decade-old Racial Incidents
Team, and Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual Anti-Harassment Team make
presentations in my classes on "social control." The Racial
Incidents Team invites people to report harassment or crimes
committed against them which appears based on race or
ethnicity, or on religious beliefs. The GLB Anti-Harassment
Team invites reports of gaybashing (whether or not the person
victimized is gay). Among other things the teams annually
publish summaries of every incident reported annually. Each
is a team of professional staff who first invite each
complainant to elaborate, and then brainstorm options as to
what the complainant might do further. The options are
diverse and imaginative, ranging from education to
notification to invoking disciplinary or legal processes. It
is up to the complainant to ask the Team to help her or him
implement the package of the complainant's choice.
In most cases, complainants are satisfied to have the report
on file, and want to go no further. Team members report
occasional frustration when for instance a complainant
declines to report a crime to police or the prosecutor. But
the rule of confidentiality and abiding by complainant wishes
is ironclad.
This is precisely the rule followed by therapists and rape
or domestic violence crisis counselors. The one who has been
victimized suffers a loss of control. Restoration of a sense
of personal safety rests on the one who has been victimized
resuming control of her social relations. Since s/he is the
one at hand who has most been stripped of a voice in what
happens to her or him, her or his voice is the one most
urgently needing to be drawn into the ensuing conversation.
If that voice matters, it will guide and be supported by what
it says. Let the one who has most been traumatized by
victimization be the primary guide to what comes next. This
is the principle by which the Incidents Teams operate. It
seems to me that incidents teams would be a useful
independent adjunct to police, prosecutors and courts. Those
who complained could have the support of the Team on their
terms regardless of what police or prosecutors decided duty
demanded of themselves. This would represent organizing to
create empathy in the wake of violence, as a supplement to
organizing to demand obedience of perpetrators. Time and
again I have heard survivors of traumatic violence like
incestuous rape say that the most healing, energizing
response they received when they first told about the event
was from those who sat, listened, said as little as "How
terrible; I'm so sorry," and did nothing else to try to take
over and fix it. Incidents team members at IU report much
the same experience. Offering safe refuge from further
violence is the next most crucial step to safety.
Martyrdom and servitude represent trying to do things for
others on pain of social or heavenly rejection. Regardless
of whether people who martyr themselves or serve others are
forced by other people to do so or "choose" to subordinate
their own needs to others', at a basic internal level they
feel they have or deserve no choice. They must discern and
obey the demands or fill the needs of the gods or people they
serve, or else...they cut off their social and spiritual
connections at the roots. As Weber (1999) discerned, the
difference lies in whether one is born in a state of grace,
or has to earn grace. If one is born in a state of grace,
one does not have to justify one's existence. If one must
justify one's existence, one is trapped into meeting external
standards to make one's life worthwhile.
When doing one's painful duty to abide by external needs or
rules, one is literally just following orders. Regardless of
whether this defense is accepted as a legal justification for
violence, the honest truth is that obedient actors have
forsaken personal responsibility for their actions, quite
literally so. Responsibility is implied instead by the
simple claim, "I did it because I wanted to." What one once
wanted to do for one reason, one can responsibility and
expressly choose to do differently in order to enjoy the
safety of empathic relations oneself--because you feel a need
to hear and respect the sensibilities of those whose turn it
is to join the conversation, because it makes you feel
connected. As Quinney would say, you have heard the
suffering at hand and been moved by it. When you do that, by
definition, your violence stops in its tracks.
I have been close to people who I believing to be repeatedly
assaulting or harassing others. I have heard plenty of
remorse. I have seen how hard it is for those who I find at
risk of repeating their violence to empathize. They are too
hung up on their own problems, and desperate to do whatever
they feel they must to cling to others. I find that empathy,
unlike a polygraph, is hard to fake. And when people like
the houseguests whom I describe above shows one another and
me empathy, I find that I can afford to let down my guard and
enjoy my safety in their company. I also notice that I
receive ample warning as empathy shuts down before someone
bursts into violence, which helps me relax and be able to
empathize myself, rather than to be on guard for renewed
attack.
At the individual level one's capacity for empathy with
others remains in balance with what I consider empathy for
oneself "telling the truth" to oneself and others about what
one feels and needs to feel validated and connected to others
merely for being oneself, not denying one's own needs and
feelings in martyrdom or self-sacrifice. In enjoying the
safety of empathy one takes heart from watching those who
have been victimized gain voice and assume responsibility for
their lives, and one's satisfaction rests in being there to
validate and honor the occasion. In martyrdom or self-
sacrifice one becomes what Schaef (1992) and others call co-
dependent, and attempts to assume responsibility for others'
needs rather than enhancing their assumption of
responsibility for meeting theirs while burying one's own
feelings and needs. When enjoying empathic relations, one
loses "attachment to outcome." One's faith that balanced
participation in itself increases the chances that one's own
most crying needs will be accommodated, supplants faith that
someone else has to do something one divines oneself as a
predicate to safety. From showing up to letting go of
attachment to outcome, the Navajo saying summarizes the range
of elements on which empathy rests.
Trying to make anyone else empathic or responsible rests on
the fallacy of making empathy an act of obedience. The logic
on which empathy rests determines that empathy and
responsibility can only be invited by showing empathy and
responsibility. This means listening down--drawing out
voices most excluded from our conversations and being guided
by them--rather than subordinating others, which literally is
a refusal to grant empathy. It means listening down in
balance with listening down into one's own self. It is by
allowing one's sharing of one's own feelings and self with
others to emerge that one can feel at all, truly feel, and
hence feel what others are expressing in the event. It is as
one turns off one's own feelings and denies one's own
sensibilities that one turns instead to connecting with
others in the manner of one of Milgram's obedient subjects.
This includes feeling too ashamed and inadequate to deserve
to have one's feelings and sensibilities count, or have them
enter the conversation. Ultimately, shame deprives not other
offenders but oneself of one's capacity to enjoy empathy with
others in concert with empathy with oneself. One bears
responsibility as one dares to bare oneself and let outcomes
fall where they may. Insofar as one bears oneself, one cares
and dares to listen to others' pain and fears without having
to fix or solve them either. Letting go of attachment to
outcome allows oneself to attend and respond to one's
present. It is, as Ernest Becker (1968: 327-46) concludes,
our self-esteem rather than our shame which allows us to
connect safely and honestly with others. That is no less
true of one's worst enemy than it is of oneself. One cannot
dictate whether anyone gives empathy, but safety lies only
where feelings of the moment are noticed and recognized, and
acted upon. Empathy rests on embracing a part of one's own
inner self as a foundation for rejecting what has been wrong
with oneself.
I work a lot these days in cases of apparent violence
against children. Contrary to warmaking expectations, I find
that children facing violence are much more compassionate and
reasonable than adults around them. One child advocate I
know who had to fight off her own stepfather's regular
demands for oral sex just wanted him out of the home when the
police only wanted the stepfather restrained from entering
her home. The police responded that she should either press
charges and get her stepfather jailed, or go home with him.
Quite typically, children who are "molested" by a parent want
to work out some safe form of contact, while adults around
them fight over whether that parent deserves to own the
child's company on the parent's unilateral terms or not at
all. The mission of Adult Children of Alcoholics recognizes
how out of loving duty children go out of their way to feel,
be, and do what their parents need rather than the reverse.
As children learn languages readily so as to communicate as
circumstances allow, so when as children we are in warmaking
perspective most ignorant and out of control, we are in fact
more responsible than we generally dare grow up to be. We
grow up learning agendas we must perform, learning to
subordinate our own feelings, and in the process, subordinate
feelings of others to what we are most carefully taught we
must do so that they do what they must or should, all
personal feelings aside.
Ironically, then, age and experience seem to harden our
propensity to lie or deny even our own feelings and
experience. Age and experience are liable to ingrain
defenses and prejudices in us which a child's fresh eyes can
see through more readily. In any command structure, it is
fallacious to presume that superiors know and do better than
their subordinates. Power over others preaches and embeds in
our psyches its own false justification--that powerholders
are wiser, truer and kinder than subordinates. Balancing
conversations is the only way out of thralldom in this
falsehood.
OBEDIENCE IS INHERENTLY UNFAIR
Obedience is a matter of choosing whose voices get to be
heard as against others'. The very definition of who offends
and who gets victimized becomes a matter of who is entitled
to define who the offenders and victims are. This is a power
trip. The logic of a system run by mobilizing power over
others is inescapable: Those who enjoy most power to dictate
definitions of others' situations are by virtue of power
alone odds on to--as Jeffrey Reiman (1997) puts it, "get
richer and the poor get prison." It doesn't take long
growing up in the game of obedience to learn that in cases of
difference, the one who is highest in the power configuration
gets to decide on grounds that in case of dispute, what I say
goes. The realities of subordination manifest themselves
repeatedly. Nowhere recently have these realities more
clearly manifested themselves to me than in contests between
children who say that a custodian is sexually assaulting
them, and the caretakers accused. It appears as though the
more corroborative evidence there is, like a child's having a
sexually transmitted disease or torn anus or vaginal opening,
and the more serious the assault would be if the fact of it
were recognized, the greater the odds that officials will
rule evidence of the caretaker's assaults inadequate to find
fault, and hence that the child should be taken from the
presence of any parent or therapist to whom the child
complains (Rosen and Etlin 1996).
In the face of the rule that those who hold more power are
more likely to win power games, as we continue to seek safety
via subordination of miscreants, we find ourselves in ever
more jeopardy, caught in a world where "inequalities" and
"injustice" harden and grow. From the peacemaker view, I am
safer the more readily those who are obedient find relations
in which they share attending to one another's will and
needs. Extend the boundaries within which those whom I
mistrust and I share empathy, and I become safer. Raise the
number of those whose fates I separate from mine via
subordination, and I become endangered, not only from those
authoritatively subordinated as by being labeled "offender,"
but from all those who empathize and share destinies with
them. Thus, justice is something that happens to me and my
fellow creatures together, one way or the other. The gods
who render justice don't appear to care who started violence.
It is simply that the more firmly separated enemy fates
become, the more endangered we are. The justice we face is
that we all ultimately become safer or more endangered
together. This is what Hindus call karma. In terms of how
stressed out or relaxed I am while I survive, and indeed in
terms of how likely some friend will feed, shelter, and hold
me in need, insofar as we enjoy empathy, we enjoy safety.
Insofar as we resort to violence, we fear and hurt from
violence. That is not a prophecy. That is simply how
justice gets done one way or the other.
Within the microlimits of our individual lives, just having
friends with whom we can safely, honestly share fear and pain
is the essence of being safe from personal violence.
Personal investment in empathy pays off in personal security
and self-esteem. Personal investment in empathy means not
letting one's own feelings and sensibilities be subordinated,
balanced with hearing the first and foremost the most subdued
voices in one's own here and now. One proposition I have put
to students is that it is safer to invest in friendship than
in Wall Street. When the market crashes, I rest my survival
on having friends who will take me in and feed me from their
own stocks. That is my primary social security. The more
heavily others follow my lead in investing in this market of
peace, the more readily we all will free ourselves from
violence, regardless of how quickly or steadily the personal
safety we build close around ourselves with friends
translates into global safety. Within the peacemaking
frame, the broader the divergence in background, class,
status, power among those who empathize, the brighter and
broader the halo of empathy around that accommodation. But
empathy pays off in the personal safety of the one who
invests in it regardless of how slowly culture follows.
It is presumptuous of anyone to suppose that s/he knows how
to accomplish justice. It is practical to invest empathy for
safety's sake, and because safety lies in treating one
another fairly and with balance.
Until as recently as my "peacemaking primer" (Pepinsky
1995), I looked on "dumping up" as a means to making peace.
I recant. Any form of dumping is a bid for obedience. I
know from growing up and circulating among rich and powerful
people that people up there tend to suspect that no one
really loves them for themselves and feel mighty scared,
vulnerable, driven to defend their claim to a social stake.
I know they are as wary as are streetpeople I have met.
Fitness to survive unrelenting struggles over power and
obedience entails greater vigilance against betrayal than
those one has dumped up and out. Those who find the
legitimacy of their power positions drawn into question
naturally focus more on establishing who remains in charge,
and in justifying the system to which one belongs, than to
noticing how subordinates feel and see and hear things. We
can by empathy and refuge free people from subordination far
more readily than we can beat powerholders into empathy.
A little listening means a lot. Those who are trapped in
recurrent victimization offer large doses of personal
appreciation to anyone who just stops and listens to them.
Rather than depending on dumping up, the logic of balancing
conversations by spreading empathy dictates that I instead
help amplify the left-out voices, to let them speak for
themselves rather than seeking to speak for them. In the
practice of mediating imbalances in conversation, the floor
oscillates back and forth between concerns of those at the
poles of each interest in conflict, so that once those who
are weakest are aired and heard, the floor passes upward, so
that those who have offended and those who hold power may
enjoy their turn at being heard, honestly heard. Peacemaking
entails taking turns in conversation about oneself and one's
own feelings and interests, up and down the power structure
like a child's see-saw or teeter-totter. Insofar as one
offers empathy rather than a demand for obedience, one offers
a gift rather than imposing an obligation. Whatever the
response, it is responsible and trustworthy only insofar as
it is not commanded, or more implicitly, expected. What
matters is whether concern for others' interests manifestly
redirects the response. Empathy may be reciprocated and
hence create safety; a command will never do so. The
peacemaker's faith is that the co-generation of empathy will
create responses which will accommodate everyone's needs more
readily than any other response. The karmic promise, the
promise of justice, is that social security and equity in
having needs accommodated will resonate outward from
individual increases in safety against personal violence,
from taking turns listening in dyadic conversations, to
allowing workers and customers fair shares of ownership in
corporate decisions and losses or profits to, to mediating
conversations between those we designate victims and
offenders...wherever, at whatever social level one wants to
measure equity of participation in conversations. That's the
starting point and the way regardless of how far apart people
start.
When we are truly responsible, we are responsible for our
own choices and for responding to the consequences, not
oxymoronically responsible for making others do anything.
Insofar as we become conscious of the role our empathy alone
plays in creating the results, I propose that we will feel
safer, and by any number of measures of violence and
inequality will become safer.
Balancing voices in our conversations requires that we
individually feel secure enough to dampen our narcissism,
including letting go of getting our own points across,
relaxing our determination to reach some objective we have
set for ourselves or for others in advance. Implicit in a
concern for doing ju
peace, the more readily we all will free ourselves from
violence, regardless of how quickly or steadily the personal
safety we build close around ourselves with friends
translates into global safety. Within the peacemaking
frame, the broader the divergence in background, class,
status, power among those who empathize, the brighter and
broader the halo of empathy around that accommodation. But
empathy pays off in the personal safety of the one who
invests in it regardless of how slowly culture follows.
It is presumptuous of anyone to suppose that s/he knows how
to accomplish justice. It is practical to invest empathy for
safety's sake, and because safety lies in treating one
another fairly and with balance.
Until as recently as my "peacemaking primer" (Pepinsky
1995), I looked on "dumping up" as a means to making peace.
I recant. Any form of dumping is a bid for obedience. I
know from growing up and circulating among rich and powerful
people that people up there tend to suspect that no one
really loves them for themselves and feel mighty scared,
vulnerable, driven to defend their claim to a social stake.
I know they are as wary as are streetpeople I have met.
Fitness to survive unrelenting struggles over power and
obedience entails greater vigilance against betrayal than
those one has dumped up and out. Those who find the
legitimacy of their power positions drawn into question
naturally focus more on establishing who remains in charge,
and in justifying the system to which one belongs, than to
noticing how subordinates feel and see and hear things. We
can by empathy and refuge free people from subordination far
more readily than we can beat powerholders into empathy.
A little listening means a lot. Those who are trapped in
recurrent victimization offer large doses of personal
appreciation to anyone who just stops and listens to them.
Rather than depending on dumping up, the logic of balancing
conversations by spreading empathy dictates that I instead
help amplify the left-out voices, to let them speak for
themselves rather than seeking to speak for them. In the
practice of mediating imbalances in conversation, the floor
oscillates back and forth between concerns of those at the
poles of each interest in conflict, so that once those who
are weakest are aired and heard, the floor passes upward, so
that those who have offended and those who hold power may
enjoy their turn at being heard, honestly heard. Peacemaking
entails taking turns in conversation about oneself and one's
own feelings and interests, up and down the power structure
like a child's see-saw or teeter-totter. Insofar as one
offers empathy rather than a demand for obedience, one offers
a gift rather than imposing an obligation. Whatever the
response, it is responsible and trustworthy only insofar as
it is not commanded, or more implicitly, expected. What
matters is whether concern for others' interests manifestly
redirects the response. Empathy may be reciprocated and
hence create safety; a command will never do so. The
peacemaker's faith is that the co-generation of empathy will
create responses which will accommodate everyone's needs more
readily than any other response. The karmic promise, the
promise of justice, is that social security and equity in
having needs accommodated will resonate outward from
individual increases in safety against personal violence,
from taking turns listening in dyadic conversations, to
allowing workers and customers fair shares of ownership in
corporate decisions and losses or profits to, to mediating
conversations between those we designate victims and
offenders...wherever, at whatever social level one wants to
measure equity of participation in conversations. That's the
starting point and the way regardless of how far apart people
start.
When we are truly responsible, we are responsible for our
own choices and for responding to the consequences, not
oxymoronically responsible for making others do anything.
Insofar as we become conscious of the role our empathy alone
plays in creating the results, I propose that we will feel
safer, and by any number of measures of violence and
inequality will become safer.
Balancing voices in our conversations requires that we
individually feel secure enough to dampen our narcissism,
including letting go of getting our own points across,
relaxing our determination to reach some objective we have
set for ourselves or for others in advance. Implicit in a
concern for doing justice, rather than making sure others too
have a balanced say in what happens, is a need to justify a
result rather than attention to the process by which results
are achieved. Gaining safety makes a simple but unyielding
demand--that we pay attention to the sensibilities of the
people we live with rather than to performing some higher
social agenda.
CONSEQUENCES
There has been a lot of talk for over twenty years about
"widening the net" of criminal justice (Cohen 1979, Pepinsky
1973). When programs are introduced which are supposed to
offer alternatives to incarceration, the odds shift toward
using the alternatives on those who otherwise would have had
less done to them, with potential for creating records of
failure of alternatives which justify and thus increase use
of incarceration. I have noticed over the years an impasse
between academicians who recognize this dynamic and
practitioners who protest that they use alternatives and are
not widening the net. Recently, an official who works with
youth explained how those who seek to mitigate punishment
widen nets.
She was speaking of the need for a local juvenile detention
center. She said that since it was so expensive to have
juveniles transported several counties away to be detained,
the judge could only really afford to send juveniles for a
minimum stay of six days. Meanwhile, there were youths at
risk who had had the benefit of all the alternatives the
system had to offer, and who might be turned around from
getting into further trouble by just being given 24 hours in
detention to teach them that wrongdoing "has consequences."
So if the local detention center is built, new classes of
youths will be given this "shock." And what is to be done if
they for instance fail the routine urinalysis (given by that
juvenile probation office regardless of offense charged) in
the aftermath? Finckenauer (1982) found that those who had
been "scared straight" in confrontations with lifers in a
maximum security prison afterwards got arrested more than a
matched control group of those who had not undergone the
program. In the game of demanding obedience, the need for
sterner measures spreads inexorably.
It is like what a parent faces who has spanked a child hard
and yet had a recurrence of disobedience. A sterner measure
is called for in the logic of commanding obedience.
The same official who illustrated to me how people think as
they widen nets also was giving reassurance to volunteers in
a new Victim Offender Reconciliation Program. She noted that
after 13 years of work she had taken heart from some people
who had come back to her years later and had told her that
because she had cared when other adults had not, she had
turned their lives around. I expect that these were moments
of empathy which tend not to be shared or even remembered
because they don't count in the game of imposing
consequences. Empathy matters nonetheless.
No matter what our formal or official exteriors, we show
empathy in some measure, almost all of us. It is indeed what
makes the doing of any of our jobs socially worthwhile. It
is just too bad when we feel obliged to attribute what our
empathy has achieved to doing our duty to command obedience.
The popular criminal legal jargon these days around me is
that since we know the system is out of hand and don't really
favor punishment, we "give consequences" instead. It occurs
to me as I begin service as a VORP mediator that my
preoccupation is with focusing attention on consequences--
first and foremost harm to those victimized--which have
already occurred. Why demand that people attend instead to
consequences I or others have devised? I seek to have those
most affected by the crimes referred to us tell one another
what they have done and what has already happened, and then
assume responsibility for devising responses to the
consequences at hand. Results of that process may feel safe.
Introducing consequences means that I assume responsibility
and make decisions for others, taking away their room for
exercise of responsibility. I don't even give myself a
chance to learn how they might respond if I did not impose my
own consequences. And as by urine testing, I who impose
consequences will want to ensure accountability not to my
subject's personal responsibility, but to me. I will find
myself driven to imposing closer and closer scrutiny of my
subjects. How unsafe to be on guard so.
Anyone with a problem of violence in or out of the criminal
justice system enjoys a measure of discretion whether next to
listen or pass on what someone says, or to execute or follow
an order. That is the only remedy I see for an escalation in
incarceration in my home United States since the Vietnam War
ended in 1975, which otherwise could be diverted only by
sending a mass of young U.S. soldiers abroad into open combat
with a foreign enemy (Pepinsky 1996, 1991: 34-61).
A year after I moved to my current home town, in 1977, my
county whose population has since climbed from 90-120,000
hired a not-for-profit consultant who told us that our county
jail could be gutted and made into 40 cells which would last
us until well into the next millenium. That consultant then
formed a for-profit firm, so that by 1983 he had forecast
what we would need 95-110 cells to last us into the next
millenium. I joined a friend suing to void county council
approval of a leasing arrangement for a jail which--to round
off corners on the top of a new "justice building"--would
have 124 cells. We lost. That jail as opened in 1986, and
episodically spilled to over capacity within six months of
its opening. Now we appear destined to approve building a
jail truly sufficient to meet our needs as we enter the new
millenium--with 4-500 cells.
I was talking with a friend who inspired my failed lawsuit,
and we agreed that--karmically--our efforts to tell people
that the new jail would be filled had helped create the
monster we now face. A burst of official effort went into
organizing and using defendant- or offender-subsidized
"alternative" "consequences" for offenders, which apparently
generated records of failure of "lenient" measures, and
widened the net far faster than I might have imagined.
As I begin learning how to serve as a VORP mediator, I have
no illusions that VORP or any other restorative justice
program will empty the jail. Nor do I think that officials
are more to blame than the will in all of us to respond to
place obedience before empathy.
I have fantasized about a bumper sticker: "Safer to Carry a
Friend than a Gun." There is remarkable, significant safety
in each empathetic connection we make. All structural
safety, all signs of the withering away of oppression and
inequality, rest on attending to empathy, which in turn
requires letting go of obedience. The science and art of
achieving safety in the face of personal violence is that of
empathy, which I call making peace instead of making war.
Empathy can start anywhere, on any job. Empathy is the only
mechanism which protects us against personal violence. The
personal violence recorded by criminologists and police is
but a shadow of the violence and terror of isolation (and
attendant worthlessness) that threatens us routinely in our
daily lives, where outsiders including police and child
protection workers fear to intrude. Whether we humans
achieve greater violence or safety, justice will prevail,
where the just results of our efforts to become safer in one
another's company will show that for us all, empathy works,
obedience doesn't.
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