A new book examined the use of restorative justice in repairing the harm created by criminal offences. The book explored the development of empathy and compassion across the 'timeline' of restorative justice, from the committed offence, through the criminal justice process, to the restorative meeting, drawing on United Kingdom case studies.
This unique book is a clear and detailed introduction that analyses how restorative justice nurtures empathy, exploring key themes such as responsibility, shame, forgiveness and closure.
The core notion of the book is that when a crime is committed, it separates people, creating a ‘gap’.
This can only be reduced or closed through information and insight about the other person, which have the potential to elicit empathy and compassion from both sides.
This Article examines the role of empathy in judging, which has been directly raised and questioned in recent years, in light of the discussion surrounding judicial nominations and appointments to the Supreme Court.
President Barack Obama was right to emphasize that empathy is an important quality to be found in a judicial nominee, but his public support for empathetic judging was unfortunately cut short due to the political controversy and misunderstanding surrounding what empathy means.
The opportunity remains, however, for a renewed discussion regarding judicial empathy by expressly connecting it to our vision of judicial impartiality.
This Article makes an affirmative case for empathetic decision making and argues that empathetic judging is necessary for objective adjudication....
Restorative justice, realized in many states and localities as a new framework, views and responds to youth crime with a different lens....
The national political will continues to shift towards the power of restorative justice, and its efficacy and tangible data make it hard to deny at very least giving this movement the attention it deserves. As District Attorney Stanley Garnett (Boulder County, CO) confirms: "Restorative justice is not just some pipe dream placebo--it's a time and money saver and stats don't lie: recidivism drops significantly when restorative justice processes are employed."
======================
Restorative justice is not just some pipe dream placebo - it's a time and money saver
]Restorative Circles, a new program at Godfrey Lee Middle School, teaches conflict resolution skills and builds empathy with help from the Dispute Resolution Center of West Michigan.
The goal of the restorative plan is to restore harmony to the school, so the teacher can get back to teaching and students can focus on learning, Gilman says. The circle process also fosters empathy, active listening, and healthy communication skills. Participants are encouraged to share their thoughts, feelings and points of view.
The circle process also fosters empathy,
active listening, and healthy communication
skills. Participants are encouraged to share
their thoughts, feelings and points of view.
The Dispute Resolution Center secured several grants to offer Restorative Circles at Godfrey Lee, including one from the Wyoming Community Foundation and two at the state level. Godfrey Lee was identified at the state level for being a school with a large disparity between the suspension and expulsion rates of special education and minority students versus white students, Gilman says. Curry says the school has a high minority population and very few fights.
In writing her memoir, My Beloved World, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressly acknowledges that she is a public role model and embraces this responsibility by making herself accessible to a broad audience.
As a public figure, she sees an opportunity to connect with others through an account of her life journey, with details of initial challenges and lessons learned along the way, to show that one’s beginnings need not constrain one’s aspirations.
Although her memoir ends at the point she begins her judicial career, twenty years ago, her experiences and reflections provide a sense of how she may approach her work on the Supreme Court, including the importance she attaches to perspective-taking—or empathy—in relating to others and viewing the larger world.
Her empathic skill, as well as her understanding
of public purpose as a Justice and role model,
all serve to strengthen
the judicial function
Her empathic skill, as well as her understanding of public purpose as a Justice and role model, all serve to strengthen the judicial function and present a hopeful picture of further important contributions to come as she continues her work on the bench.
Rebecca K. Lee, Sonia Sotomayor: Role Model of Empathy and Purposeful Ambition, 98 Minn. L. Rev. Headnotes 73 (2013).
In their campaign to malign Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, Republican senators have confused empathy for sympathy, blatantly distorting the meaning of a word for political purposes.
Grassley worried that Sonia Sotomayor
might be too empathic.
Senator Grassley used a term today at the hearings of Sonia Sotomayor: “The Empathy Standard.” Citing President Obama’s stated criterion that he would nominate someone for the Supreme Court who had a capacity for empathy, Grassley worried that Sonia Sotomayor might be too empathic. And this propensity made him and a number of other Republican senators anxious [See “Obama’s Pick Sotomayor Derided by Conservatives for Empathy,” by Paul Gorrell].
Takaku’s research offers important insights on how apologies “work.” Mutual empathy is key. While the offer of an apology may be the result of, and an expression of, the offender’s empathy with the offended party, forgiveness requires empathy from the offended to the offender.
Empathy must be experienced by, and communicated by, both parties to the conflict, not simply one or the other. In other words, to be effective in resolving conflict, apology and forgiveness are best viewed as interactive processes, not simply one-sided speech events.
forgiveness requires empathy
from the offended to the offender.
Takaku’s research demonstrates that an offended party has the power to shift the nature of a conflict interaction by reflecting on his or her own “imperfect nature,” developing empathy for the offender, and thus being open to the process of apology and forgiveness. Some people can undertake such reflection on their own; others might need to be prompted toward reflection.
However, Takaku also urged caution: care must be taken regarding who prompts the offended party to reflect on his or her own imperfections. For example, if the offending party makes the prompt, it would likely generate resistance on the part of the offended party and actually escalate the conflict.
Summary of Seeing Theory in Practice: An Analysis of Empathy in Mediation "Seeing Theory in Practice: An Analysis of Empathy in Mediation," Dorothy J. Della Noce, Negotiation Journal, 15:3 (July 1999), pp.
In problem-solving, empathy is seen as an instrument, valuable in so far as it helps the parties satisfy their (personal, pre-existing) interests. "Bargainers need only understand enough about the other's interests to get to a satisfactory deal."(p. 283) Empathy is also treated as a commodity for exchange, offered on the condition that the other party does the same.
In problem-solving, empathy is seen as
an instrument, valuable in so far as it
helps the parties satisfy their
(personal, pre-existing) interests.
The author argues that "The mediator who privileges Individualist assumptions by adopting interest-based bargaining will filter the parties' communication through a transactional lens, which, in turn, will color what the mediator recognizes as an opportunity for empathy and deems a competent response."(p. 283) Empathy is used to uncover interests, and competent empathic responses are those which clarify interests.
In transformative mediation,
empathy is valued in itself.
In transformative mediation, empathy is valued in itself. "With the focus on interaction rather than individual psychology, the communicative process of developing empathy is valuable in its own right, whatever the outcome, because empathy itself expresses the enrichment of interaction and personal awareness that embodies the 'good' in Relational ideology."(p. 285)
Della Noce examines different mediators' responses to the same conflict simulation, and finds that "the mediators heard very different things from the parties as they interacted with each other, highlighted different aspects of the interaction as salient to mediation, and responded in different ways."(p. 294) These differences in mediator practice correspond with differences in their preferred mediation approaches, and underlying ideology.
For some, there seems to be nothing wrong with what Ena and Julian are doing. It is not surprising. South Africans are no strangers to empathy. The half-phony Damascus moment in 1994 was partly built on the tenets of empty empathy. The 1996 Truth and Reconciliation Commission supposedly gave many South Africans a chance to confront the violent horrors of the past and forgive each other, unconditionally without recourse.
The nature of it all compelled most
South Africans to show a bit of empathy,
in various ways.
Empathy for the mother who lost her son to the torture and veiled killings by the apartheid police. Empathy for the white family who lost their father in a civilian bomb attack. The uneven wounds of the past were ideal threads that wove the new South Africa as we now know it. It was all a performative exercise really.
The emotional scars of many were used to advance the half-baked project of the rainbow nation. The rainbow, as we now know, couldn’t hold for long. The pieces now lie shattered in front of us.
With In Defense of Judicial Empathy, Thomas Colby undertakes the first comprehensive scholarly treatment and defense of the President’s arguments and of empathy as an essential and unavoidable component of good judicial decisionmaking. And he ties the centrality of empathy to broader debates over the judicial role.
Colby begins by identifying and correcting the arguable cause of much of the controversy over the President’s standard—the confusion between empathy and sympathy. While empathy is a relatively new word of contested meaning, Colby adopts the dictionary definition: the “action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”
Empathy is the cognitive skill of being able to see a situation from someone else’s perspective and to understand how and why someone sees, feels, and acts as they do. That is fundamentally different than sympathy, through which a person is affected by and acts in support of the feelings of another. As Colby puts it,
In our final episode of the series Conflict and Empathy: Where Has Empathy and Compassion Gone? Keiko Krahnke from the University of Colorado will join me and Edwin Rutsch, Center for Building a Culture of Empathy to discuss how do we foster empathy in a business, work and beyond? We will also look at the larger social systems and see how we can build a truly global culture of empathy.
Questions
Last episode we talked a great deal about building empathy by starting with the family first. But what about the business world? I happened to mention our series to someone in the business world and their response was ‘does it even have a place in business?’ Let’s start there.
========================
Given what feels like a lack of empathy
and compassion in the workplace,
how does a leader even begin to
address this in their organization?
==============
How can employees begin to take ownership of building empathy and compassion in their workplace?
How do we go “beyond” and building a global culture of empathy?
What can global citizens do to support and do their part?
How can each of us cultivate empathy in our daily lives?
I'll be interviewed four times this month by Pattie Porter, the Texas Conflict Coach, about how to foster empathy for resolving conflict. See the program schedule and listen in at:http://j.mp/130SJQ9 ;
Pattie is a conflict resolution expert, mediator, conflict coach, facilitator and speaker. In this first of our four episode radio series – Conflict and Empathy: Where Has Empathy and Compassion Gone?– we will introduce the “wheel of empathy” and the “feel of empathy” as defined by Edwin Rutsch, Founder of a global empathy movement called The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy. We will also discuss how compassion intertwines with empathy and set the foundation for how you build empathy.
============================
We will also discuss how compassion
intertwines with empathy and
set the foundation for
how you build empathy.
==============
Welcome to Texas Conflict Coach. I am your host Pattie Porter, conflict resolution expert, mediator, conflict coach, facilitator and speaker.
Join me and our special guests live every Tuesday for a 30 minute program.
Our program aims to “Coach you through conflict constructively” to • Become more self-aware • Build your conflict competency skills • Learn to negotiate effectively • Manage and cool your hot buttons • Learn resources and tools for effective conflict management
You will hear about all kinds of situations and strategies to deal with those stressful conflict tensions that show up in our everyday lives whether it be at work, in our relationships with family or neighbors, in our communities and church, in your business partnerships, or just simply the conflict we deal within ourselves.
What Have I Done? will be ideal for victim empathy work in Youth Offending Teams and Young Offender Institutions, and can equally be used in schools, children's homes, youth groups and any context with young people.
The programme is measurable, featuring pre- and post-programme empathy scales, and is suitable for young offenders subject to a youth rehabilitation order.
The biggest thing we do is create empathy, and the way you get empathy is by talking about how you feel and by listening to how others feel,”
says Danna. “I tell them that you have to understand each other’s perspectives.
It doesn’t mean you have to be friends. But you do have to figure out how to get through your day together. It’s a very assertive way of teaching them to take care of themselves.”
This workshop is about empathy and how it can be used as a tool to bring about better human interaction and social progress! Join us for our dialogue series to learn, engage, and eat!
The A&S Inclusion and Equity Internship program exposes a team of students to the best practices concerning inclusiveness and equity, with the purpose of cultivating social justice leadership skills. Sponsored by the A&S Office for International, Diversity, and Outreach Programs.
Dominic Barter plays with dialogue and partnership, focusing primarily in the fields of education, justice, culture and social change. In the mid-90s he collaborated in the development of Restorative Circles, a community-based and -owned practice for dynamic engagement with conflict that grew from conversations with residents in gang-controlled shantytown favelas in Rio de Janeiro.
He adapted the practice for the Brazilian Ministry of Justice's award-winning national projects in Restorative Justice and supports its application in a further 25 countries. In recent years he has supervised the mediation program for the Police Pacification Units in Rio, served as invited professor at the Standing Group for Consensual Methods of Conflict Resolution, at the High Court of Rio, with a focus on school mediation and bullying, and focused on the development of restorative community. Currently Dominic directs the Dialogue Restoration project for the State Education Department of Rio de Janeiro and partners with the Centre for the Study of Public Security and Citizenship at Candido Mendes University.
===========================
"There's something really unique about
empathy, that it clears the things that
are blocking action, and that it connects both inside and to other people in a way that is transformative."
Erwin James: Clive Martin, campaigner for groups that support offenders and their families says that Chris Grayling's massive reorganisation of rehabilitation will not in itself cut reoffending
Does he feel the system has lost faith in the possibility of rehabilitation? "I think the system has become all stick and no carrot," he says. "In my experience working in prison education, I met very few people who didn't want to change. But in public discourse and the way the issues are presented to the public by policymakers, there seems to be a sense that we have given up on hope. We talk about 'the market' and 'programmes', but we don't talk about people. For whatever reason, empathy has been pushed to the sidelines. We don't feel empathetic towards groups of people – even fairly obvious groups such as unemployed young people, who we tend to blame for their situation.
For whatever reason, empathy has been
pushed to the sidelines. We don't
feel empathetic towards
groups of people
"If you look at what most people in prison were before they were labelled 'offender', they were people who had terrible upbringings, people who were abused, people with mental health problems – they're the sort of people we would normally tend to have some sympathy with, but we don't. We see them as a drain, a burden, rather than a part of us. We forget that there but for the grace of God go so many of us ."
Conservatives insist that empathy is a touchy-feely code word for pro-choice and pro-LGBT rights. But true empathy is a form of intelligence that, according to studies, may be missing in those predisposed to authoritarian rule.
Conservatives insist that empathy is a
touchy-feely code word for pro-choice
and pro-LGBT rights
Rules-Based Personalities, Fundamentalism, and Empathy
Several different types of psychological assessments claim to measure the empathy of an individual. Some include psychometric scoring of self-reported information related to values, motives, and behaviors, while others measure observed behaviors.
In most validation studies on empathy (such as a recent study here of medical military personnel) women do tend to score higher on empathy than their male counterparts. Based on these findings, women have greater potential for effectively interpreting the experience of those they interact with.
Q: President Obama has said that judges should possess “empathy,” and that in the toughest cases, “the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” Do you agree?
President Obama has said that
judges should possess “empathy"
A: Sometimes people are cautious about that. You see the poor person hurt and the defendant is rich so you think maybe they should have the money. And if that’s how the word “empathy” plays out in your mind then there is a problem with it.
But I sometimes ask my grandkids, what do you think are in all those books that are on my walls? Those are cases. Those are stories about real people, and their hopes and their aspirations, their disappointments, their mistakes. Real people are going to be bound by what you do.
One of the ‘founder generation’ of transformative mediation, Dorothy J. Della Noce, has published an interesting piece on apology in the first issue of the Dutch journal, ConflictInzichtmagazine. It’s largely based on research by Seiji Takaku, a report of which appeared in theJournal of Social Psychology, 141(4), 494-508 under the title, “The effects of apology and perspective taking on interpersonal forgiveness: A dissonance-attribution model of interpersonal forgiveness.”
For me, the key learning point is:
Empathy must be experienced by,
and communicated by,
both parties to the conflict,
not simply one or the other.
In other words, to be effective in resolving conflict, apology and forgiveness are best viewed as interactive processes, not simply one-sided speech events.
Dean's Lecture Series: "Empathy and Experience in the Sotomayor Hearings", 36 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 263 (2010) - PDF Version (1.55 Mb)
For four days last summer, I felt I had taken a dizzying plunge down arabbit hole and landed in a very strange place. The visual markers identified it as the U.S. Senate, exercising its "advise and consent" powers on the nomination of a new justice of the Supreme Court. But much of what I heard there seemed utterly baffling.
A federal judge, who had served with distinction and minimal controversy for seventeen years, who had been confirmed in two previous Senate processes, and who had received the highest rating from the American Bar Association, was being lectured, patronized, and treated as a potential dissident, likely to break free of the tethers of stare decisis and fair play as soon as she was handed her Supreme Court robes.
There were two primary sources of this controlled mayhem. The first was a statement by President Barack Obama that among Judge Sonia Sotomayor's virtues was a set of life experiences that would permit her to empathize with parties who had experienced disadvantage.'
Sotomayor's virtues was a set of life
experiences that would permit her
to empathize with parties who
had experienced disadvantage.'
The second was a series of speeches by Judge Sotomayor herself, musing about the effects of her life experience on her performance as a judge and, most notably, expressing her hope that wise Latina with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male judge who hasn't lived that life."
Courtroom sketch of Judge Shira Scheindlin. (AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams) A decision is imminent in New York’s historic stop-and-frisk case, tried for two months in a Manhattan federal courtroom.
Empathy does play a greater role where a judge may have some discretion, in sentencing for example, and often in family law. Yet, even then, one’s empathetic understanding may not trump other factors. I once had to decide whether a woman could move to a distant country with her three kids, leaving the father in New York. Throughout the non-jury trial I could appreciate the wife’s feelings that the man was a rotten husband and only a passable father.
I saw through her why it would be good for her to get away, start life anew, have more opportunities. It was what I would have wanted to do in her place. But then the gold standard—the best interest of the children—kicked in and, despite my understanding of her, even my personal opinion, there was no evidence that it was in the best interest of her kids to be cut off from their father and their culture. Empathy placed me in the shoes of each of the family members.
President Barack H. Obama has repeatedly stated that he views a capacity for empathy as an essential attribute of a good judge. And conservatives have heaped mountains of scorn upon him for saying so—accusing him of expressing open contempt for the rule of law.To date, the debate has been surprisingly one-sided. One federal judge has recently noted that “President Obama’s statement that judges should have ‘empathy’ was met with strong criticism from his opponents and uncomfortable silence from his supporters.” No one has yet offered a sustained scholarly defense of the President’s call for empathy in judging. This Article seeks to fill that void.
========================
“President Obama’s statement that judges
should have ‘empathy’ was met with strong
criticism from his opponents and uncomfortable
silence from his supporters.”
==============
Part I summarizes and critiques the agonizingly simplistic and misleading public and political debate over the proper role empathy (and its popular adversary—umpiring) in the judicial craft. It laments the success that the President’s critics have had in misleadingly portraying the judicial selection process as a choice between conservative judges who simply call balls and strikes and decide all cases according to determinative rules set down by the governing sources of law, and liberal judges whose relianceon empathy amounts to ignoring the law and deciding cases in favor of whichever party seems more sympathetic.
Part II then examines the treatment of the President’s call for judicial empathy at the hands of conservative legal intellectuals, which, disappointingly, tends to be only marginally more nuanced....
Four Week Series: Conflict and Empathy http://j.mp/ZQ1Iab ; Pattie Porter (The Texas Conflict Coach) Interviews Edwin Rutsch Part 1: What Does Empathy Got To Do With It?
For many of us engaged in conflict or embroiled in a dispute, it can be very difficult to muster up empathy and compassion for the other side. The longer the conflict goes unresolved it seems the less empathy we have for them as a human being.
In this first of our four episode series–Conflict and Empathy: Where Has Empathy and Compassion Gone?– we will introduce the “wheel of empathy” and the “feel of empathy” as defined by Edwin Rutsch, Founder of a global empathy movement called The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy.
========================
For many of us engaged in conflict or
embroiled in a dispute, it can be very difficult
to muster up empathy and
compassion for the other side
==============
Questions =========== Let’s start by sharing with listeners about how you got started in this work of building a culture of empathy and creating the Center.
Given that this is the first episode in our series Conflict and Empathy, let’s set the stage and define some of these concepts.
What exactly is empathy and the intention behind it?
How is empathy different from sympathy?
How does compassion intertwine with empathy?
We said that we would introduce two concepts…the “wheel of empathy” and the “feel of empathy.” What is important to know about these concepts?
How do these wheels tie into the Empathy Circles you host through Google Hangouts?
We will also discuss how compassion intertwines with empathy and set the foundation for how you build empathy.
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