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ARTS BASED LEARNING IN RESTORATIVE YOUTH JUSTICE: EMBODIED, MORAL AND AESTHETIC

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02650530701553724

1465-3885

Lynn Froggett,

Education Discipline and Inequality

Abstract Re‐integrative shaming has been a central, but by no means uncontroversial principle of restorative practices within the youth justice system. This paper draws on video data from a creative writing project with young offenders in the context of individuated restorative justice programmes. It presents material from work with a young female offender who has been caught up in violent family relations, committed violent offences and whose fantasy life is also permeated by images of violence. Within an on‐going conversation with a local poet she finds a symbolic form to symbolise destructive sides of the self. The inter‐subjective recognition within the poetry‐writing sessions takes place in a context where the tendency to institutionalised shaming embedded in the youth justice system is temporarily suspended. The paper considers the potential of such processes to facilitate moral learning by fostering guilt, concern and the wish to make reparation. Keywords: re‐integrative shamingguiltrecognitiondestructivenessyoung offendersrestorative justicereparationcreative interventionspoetry Acknowledgements With thanks to Dina Poursanidou and Alan Farrier of the Psychosocial Research Unit, University of Central Lancashire. The research from which this case study was drawn was funded by Crime Solutions based at the University of Central Lancashire. Notes 1. Standardised assessment formats approved by the Home Office for use with young offenders on court orders. 2. Thanks to Les Davies of the IIRP (International Institute for Restorative Practices) for a vigorous and productive discussion on this issue. The views presented here, however, are my own. 3. BNIM [Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method, see Wengraf (Citation2001) for detailed English language explanation and Froggett and Wengraf (Citation2004) for example of panel analysis] analysis is carried out on small chunks of data by future‐blind conjectures on where the text will lead. A panel speculates free associatively on the meaning of utterances, the speaker's conscious and unconscious intentions and on what will come next. Conjectures are thus either supported or refuted as the panel works through the text. The aim is to decipher the speaker's distinctive gestalt. The method tends to demonstrate that the gestalt is embedded in the form and performance of the utterance rather than the content. In other words the utterances or text segments of the data that are being analysed are typically found to be formulated with a personalised idiom or aesthetic of which the speaker may be unaware. We used this method on small chunks of video data, where the text is accompanied by non‐verbal communication giving access to the embodied quality of the utterance which is available for interpretation along with the spoken words. 4. Re‐integrative shaming refers to processes by which the disapproval of moral communities is brought to bear on deviant acts with the purpose of inducing regret in the actor. In contrast to stigmatisation, censure is directed at the act whilst the actor is a candidate for forgiveness and re‐integration once moral responsibility has been assumed. 5. The 'hoodie' refers to the hood attached to a sweat‐shirt jacket which, when worn over the head largely hides the face. Though widely adopted as street fashion among some adolescents and young adults, it has acquired sinister connotations as it inhibits identification in the UK's culture of high surveillance of people observed or filmed in the process of committing crime. 6. Not her real name. 7. Winnicott (Citation1965, Citation1971) developed the notion of the 'false self' specifically in order to describe the compliant child who, denied recognition of his or her destructiveness, loses the capacity for spontaneous authentic relating. It is not that the child consciously assumes a false self as a deceitful stratagem, rather that since destructiveness is part of reality testing, the child no longer 'feels real'. 8. By creative living Winnicott is referring to an essential capacity to shape the world one lives in rather than specific creativity embodied in a work of art. Nevertheless theorists of artistic endeavour in the object relations tradition (e.g. Milner, Citation1957; Segal, Citation1991; Ehrenzweig, Citation1967) have made much of the alternating rhythms of separation and fusion in the artistic process. These are thought to give material expression to fantasies of creativeness and destructiveness which characterise the artistic process but which are themselves a specific elaboration of the individuation process. 9. For Honneth these struggles for recognition are played out throughout adult life via demands for love (in the sphere of intimacy) and respect (inscribed in abstract juridicial rights) but the ethical life of the 'whole person' is achieved through solidarity: membership of a moral community in which each individual is valued precisely because of what makes them different. 10. The inversion of the Anti‐Social Behaviour Order into a 'badge of honour' amongst some sections of the offending population could be seen as resistance to the (non‐re‐integrative) public shaming entailed: it is a celebration of outlaw status which despairs of recognition relations within the criminal justice system. 11. In English and American social work the pervasive influence of the humanistic counselling tradition (Rogers, Citation1951) has emphasised this attitude as a mark of humane practice. While this may be a good starting point for relationship building it has arguably undermined the capacity of professionals to recognise and work with the conflicted nature of defended subjectivity. 12. The idea that destructiveness and aggression are linked to creativity through cros is well embedded in psychoanalytic thinking, especially in the work of Klein and Winnicott and in theories of artistic production in the object relations tradition.