The general attitude from a good proportion of the participants on the course is palpably anti children and young people. It seems the more you work directly face to face with young people the less you like, trust and respect them. As someone who spent many, many years trying to bring about a cultural revolution in provided services for people with learning disabilities, it all feels horribly familiar.
Actually the practices and principles of working in a restorative way are the same as person centred planning, hosting and harvesting, consensus building and conflict resolution. As the tutor says, it really is more of a collection of best practices than anything new or revolutionary. The revolution is trying to change what there is now into this new way of working. To coin one of my more favourite phrases, if that's where you want to get to, you wouldn't start from here.
When people have been functioning for a long time within a paradigm of having immense amounts of power over the people they are 'wards' of, it's really hard for them to see exactly how far down the rabbit hole they have gone. No-one disagrees with the principles of working alongside people, being 'with' rather than 'doing to', but as conversations unfold and phrases like "But it's me that has to end up dealing with it" when, by 'it', they mean an actual person, then underlying belief structures become unmasked.
One of my motivating forces for being on the training, other than it's right up my street and suits me and my way of working down to the ground, is because we have had a lot of reports anecdotally from teenage girls about being badly mis-treated by both police and school staff. I would like a culture of acceptance and respect for a space where young women can tell the people who have power over them what it feels like to them, and ask them why they are treated in the ways that they are. Although it's possible that we might get there in Leeds, at the moment unfortunately, the only thoughts of the 40 early innovators on the training at the moment seems to be that restorative practice is another way, a really good way, for young people to learn better about their own wrong doings.
It doesn't seem to have fully occurred to anyone yet, not out loud anyway, that they may be perceived as the perpetrator and a young person may be the victim of their behaviour. Until we do start to view the process as a 360 process, I think we're a long way from ever being a 'Child Friendly City'.
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