How would an anarchist society deal with domestic violence?

What anarchists can learn from traditional indigenous cultures about justice, healing, and the cycle of abuse

Probably one of the most serious gaps in the system is the different perception of wrongdoing and how to best treat it. In the non-Indian community, committing a crime seems to mean that the individual is a bad person and therefore must be punished.... The Indian communities view a wrongdoing as a misbehaviour which requires teaching or an illness which requires healing.”

- 1989 Justice proposal prepared by the Sandy Lake First Nation

Hey Folks,

I converted to anarchism when I was fifteen years old. Even before I knew what anarchism was, however, I think that I was an anarchist.

For one thing, I was raised in the Mennonite Church, which is one of the more anarchistic denominations of Christianity. Mennonites are taught to be “in the world but not of it” and traditionally seek to have as little to do with governments as possible.

Mennonites you meet these days are unlikely to tell you the real reason for this, but the traditional Mennonite belief is that all the governments of the world are quite literally controlled by the Devil. I think it’s a lot easier to become an anarchist when you’ve been raised to believe from a young age that the government is secretly Satanic.

I’m now 36 years old, which means that I have been an anarchist for over half my life. In that time, I’ve had a lot of time to think about how an anarchist society would organize itself.

I take an interest in questions that anarchists have difficulty with, because I believe that such questions point the way towards the areas of anarchist theory that require strengthening.

I think most people have no trouble imagining an anarchist society on the scale of a peasant village. When I point out to people that human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years before anyone ever got around to founding the first state, people tend to express doubts about how much studying cavemen can do to help us organize ourselves in modern times.

They have a point. Back when human population density was low and game was plentiful, people could move around more easily than they can do. Nomadic hunters and gatherers tend to have a “fission-fusion” social structure. Tribes were composed of many different bands, none of which would likely have consisted of more than 150 people. Individuals and families would regularly break off from one band and go join another. So if your overbearing father-in-law was getting on your nerves, you could always take your spouse and kids and go join another band. After awhile, you might decide to return. Amongst nomadic foragers, everyone is doing this all the time. It’s easy to see how this would have worked wonders in defusing conflict.

When it comes to sedentary societies, things are more difficult. More must be done to maintain social peace. One thing that the ethnographic record is clear about is that human beings have a tendency to quarrel with their neighbours. A traditional village may be idyllic and peaceful, but I doubt very much that there is a land on Planet Earth where no one ever fights.

This leads me to the subject of domestic violence. I am not a utopian, and I accept that we live in a world in which some people will take advantage of others. I do not believe it is realistic to eliminate domestic violence entirely, even within the most fiercely egalitarian society imaginable. Every society must have mechanisms to deal with antisocial behaviour.

Therefore, if we want to create an anarchist society, we need to have some sort of idea of how to do with domestic violence.

I am interested in the hard questions when it comes to anarchist theory, and this is certainly one of the hardest of all. Anarchists believe that people should mind their own business and not police the behaviour of their peers, but where do you draw the line? Would you like to live in a society where men can beat on their wives with impunity? Me neither.

Personally, I believe the hippie axiom that hurt people hurt people, to a degree. Domestic violence is a symptom of some kind of mental or spiritual illness affecting the perpetrator as well as his or her victims. I don’t believe that a healthy society would produce so many abusive people.

That said, humans are capable of evil. Some people choose to harm others. Some things cannot tolerated. I believe in compassion, but not limitless compassion

Surely there are some people whose crimes are so horrible that the world would be a better place without them. Does an anarchist society just kill such offenders? If so, who decides who gets to live and to die? It seems unlikely that consensus could be reached on such matter, meaning that someone would likely be required to wield executive power. And by giving someone such power, one has created an authority figure with power over life and death. That’s dangerous.

Plus, violence begets violence. What if the family members of someone who is executed does not agree with the decision, and decides to get revenge? Then you’ve got a blood feud on your hands. And blood feuding was indeed endemic is many traditional societies at many different moments of time. An anarchist society must have means of resolving such disputes if it is to remain an anarchist society. Better, however, is to prevent such feuds from occurring in the first place. But how?

Recently, I read an excellent book called Returning to the Teachings, which I would highly recommend to anyone interesting in exploring notions of restorative justice within a traditional indigenous worldview.

I have chosen to share some excerpts from it, along with some of my own thoughts, but I would really encourage anyone interested in this subject to read the book. I will certainly not be able to do it justice here.

Obviously, domestic violence is a tricky issue in every way. It is tricky in this society, and it would be tricky in an anarchist society as well. It’s a difficult issue for a lot of people to talk about, and it affects a lot of people.

So my purpose is to hopefully open up some space for thoughtful consideration of this subject. Your contributions in the comments will be appreciated.

RETURNING TO THE TEACHINGS

The book was written by a man named Rupert Ross, an Assistant Crown Attorney who spent years working in remote indigenous communities in Northwestern Ontario.

Back in the early 90’s, he was contracted by Justice Canada to investigate “peacemaker justice” in indigenous communities. At the time, there was widespread recognition that many indigenous people were stuck in a cycle of abuse, and that new approaches were needed.

A government report summed up the attitude, stating:

“If locking up those who violate the law contributed to safer societies, then the United States should be the safest country in the world.”

Rupert Ross seems to have born for this assignment. Over the course of three years, he visited many remote communities, participating in ceremony and learning from many different elders. He very clearly approached his mission in good faith, which cannot have been easy for someone trained as a lawyer, as he was soon to discover that part of the problem with the punitive model of justice is the very idea of having professional lawyers at all.

Wherever he went, he encountered similar attitudes amongst traditional people. Speaking of a Cree community in Northwestern Ontario, he recounts:

At one point I asked what the community used to do in traditional times, before the courts came, to those who misbehaved. An old lady answered immediately. Through the interpreter she said, “We didn’t do anything to them. We counselled them instead!”

This is something that you will hear again and again if you talk to indigenous people about justice. The emphasis is decidedly not on punishment, but the restoration of harmony to the community.

One community in Manitoba called Hollow Water expressed it this way in a document called “Position Paper on Incarceration”:

“Our tradition, our culture, speaks clearly about the concepts of judgement and punishment. They belong to the Creator. They are not ours. They are, therefore, not to be used in the way that we relate to each other.”

People who offend against another...are to be viewed and related to as people who are out of balance—with themselves, their family, their community and their Creator. A return to balance can best be accomplished through a process of accountability that includes support from the community through teaching and healing. The use of judgement and punishment actually works against the healing process. An already unbalanced person is moved further out of balance.

Clearly, this is a very different attitude than you will hear from many feminists, who often want abusive men to be punished severely. This is the polar opposite of the way of the Western legal system, which seeks to lay blame and to punish people, not heal them.

Many of us can imagine how we would feel if our loved ones were victimized. Many of us would want vengeance. But hopefully, there is more to justice than revenge.

This is something that is emphasized in Returning to the Teachings - that the perpetrator is not to be vilified or punished. This is important, because someone who is seen as a horrible person by others may begin seeing him or herself in similar terms. At that point they may cease even trying to improve themselves. But sometimes what people need is for other people to believe in them.

Ross recounts:

We were talking about Hollow Water’s “Position Paper on Incarceration” and its opposition to the use of jail for offenders. I pointed out that their stand was completely contrary to the one taken by most other groups representing women victims of sexual abuse. For the most part, such groups demand that governments get tougher with the men who abused them. When I asked what she would say to them, she did not hesitate for a second. She just turned to me and said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world: “Oh, we remember feeling that way too—before our own healing journeys began!” Then she added: “The next time you meet them, see if they'll come to visit so we can help them move beyond those feelings too.”

Ross then explores how the adversarial nature of the Canadian justice system was a big part of the problem. Because people might face jail time for admitting to certain actions, they are often loath to take responsibility for their own actions. And so abusers very often minimize the seriousness of their crimes, even to themselves. This prevents healing, because a key part of the healing process is owning up to one’s actions.

As a woman named Diane LeResche put it:

“Sacred justice is going beyond the techniques for handling conflicts; it involves going to the heart. It includes speaking from the heart, from one’s feelings... It is helping people ease, move beyond, transform the intense hurtful emotions like anger into reorienting and reuniting with that which is more important than the issues of the conflict.”

Ross is clear, by the way, that he believes there is still a place for aspects of the Western justice system, such as when someone proclaims that they are innocent of crimes that their community believes they are guilty of, or when a community lacks the capacity to deal with the behaviour of an especially brutal man.

A realistic approach to restorative justice would likely involve admitting to ourselves that we do not live in a traditional society where everyone was taught good values from childhood. We must live in the world that we are in, meaning that punishment might be the most practical solution sometimes.

As the writers of the final report of the Traditional Dene Justice Project in the Northwest Territories stated in 1993:

“Many of the practices from the past cannot address current problems. However, if the values attached to those practices could be reclaimed, and new practices built on them, then it could work.”

And with that, I will leave you with an excerpt from Returning to the Teachings which describes one part of a non-punishment-oriented approach to domestic violence, the sentencing circle.

Plus note that the sentencing circle proposed here is only one part of a much larger process. On its own, it will be limited value, but I hope that I have piqued your interest in investigating indigenous notions of justice.

Obviously one short article on such a large subject will necessarily fall short, but I hope that this will be of interest to some of you out there.

The Hollow Water Sentencing Circle

by Rupert Ross, excerpted from Returning to the Teachings

In a 1994 interim report, CHCH team members outlined in point form their suggestions for how the court should be structured when it finally comes to sentencing victimizers. These suggestions have been accepted by presiding judges and are now well established. Remember that a great deal of healing work will already have been done by the CHCH team in the months between the entry of a guilty plea and the victimizer’s return to court for sentencing. Remember too that the victim and offender will not be brought together at the time of sentencing unless the team believes they are ready to face each other with relative honesty. As I noted earlier, nearly two hundred people attended the first such “community sentencing” to participate in this unique process.

Rationale:

1. In our conjunctive relationship with the legal system, we see our role as one of representing our community. We do not see ourselves as "being on the side of" the crown or the defense. The people they represent are both members of our community, and the pain of both is felt in our community.

Until now, our efforts have focused on (1) attempting to help both crown and defense see the issues in the court case as the community sees them and asking for their support, therefore, in representing the community’s interest, and (2) providing the court with a Pre-Sentence report which outlines the situation as we see it, informs the court of the work that we are doing with the victimizer, and offers recommendations on how we see best proceeding with the restoration of balance around the victimization.

Now, however, we believe that it is time to expand the community's involvement in this process. We believe that it is time for the court to hear directly from the community at the time of sentencing.

2. Up until now, the sentencing hearing has been the point at which all of the parties of the legal system (crown, defense, judge) and the community have come together. Major differences of opinion as to how to proceed have often existed. As we see it, the legal system usually arrives with an agenda of punishment and deterrence of the "guilty" victimizer, and safety and protection of the victim and the community; the community, on the other hand, arrives with an agenda of accountability of the victimizer to the community and a restoration of balance to all the parties of the victimization.

As we see it, the differences in agenda are seriously deterring the healing process of the community. We believe that the restoration of balance is more likely to occur if sentencing itself is more consistent in process and in content with the healing work of the community. Sentencing needs to become more of a step in the healing process, rather than a diversion from it.

The sentencing circle promotes the above rationale.

Purpose:

As we see it, the sentencing circle has two primary purposes:

1. it promotes the community healing process by providing a forum for the community to address the parties of the victimization at the time of sentencing; and

2. it allows the court to hear directly from the people most affected by the pain of the victimization. In the past, the crown and defense, as well as ourselves, have attempted to portray this information. We believe that it is now time for the court to hear from the victim, the family of the victim, the victimizer, the family of the victimizer, and the community at large.

Participants:

As we see it, the following need to be included, if at all possible, in the sentencing circle:

1. the victim;

2. those support people working with the victim, including his or her individual worker, group workers, psychologist, as well as members of his or her support group. If the victim is not able to attend, we see the individual worker taking the role of the victim representative;

3. the family of the victim;

4. the victimizer (offender);

5. those support people working with the victimizer, including his or her individual worker, group workers, psychologist, as well as members of his or her support group;

6. the family of the victimizer;

7. the community. This would include members of the Community Holistic Circle Healing team as well as whoever else from the community wishes to participate;

8. the court party. This would include the judge, crown, and defense; and

9. RCMP. This would hopefully include the members responsible for the investigation as well as for policing our community.

Preparation for the Sentencing Circle:

1. Advance preparation will include:

• tobacco being offered to the presiding judge;

• the preparation of the pre-sentence report by the CHCH team, and distribution to crown, defense, and judge;

• meeting of the CHCH team with the chief, mayors, and councils to develop and implement a process for ensuring community participation;

• circles with victim, victimizer, and family/ies the day before the sentencing circle;

• the sweat lodge being available to any interested participant the evening before the sentencing circle.

2. In the morning of the day of the sentencing circle, preparations will include:

• a pipe ceremony;

• the hanging of the flags;

• the smudging of the court buildings;

• the placement of the community drum and eagle staff in the courtroom;

• serving breakfast to participants from outside the community; and

• offering tobacco for a prayer to guide the sentencing circle.

The Structure:

The courtroom will be set up in such a way that seating will consist of two circles, an inner one and an outer one. The inner circle will be for those participants who wish to speak. The outer circle will be for those who wish to just observe and listen. It is hoped that most participants will choose the inner circle.

Sentencing Circle Process:

The process of the sentencing circle will be as follows:

1. personal smudging;

2. opening prayer;

3. court technicalities (e.g., confirmation of pleas);

4. outline of “ground rules” that will govern the sentencing circle, by presiding judge;

5. first go-around: “Why did I come today? Why am I here?”;

6. second go-around: participants speak to the victim;

7. third go-around: participants speak to the victimizer (offender) about how the victimization has affected self, family, community;

8. fourth go-around: participants outline expectations to victimizer, and/or state opinion as to what needs to be done to restore balance;

9. judge gives decision re: sentencing;

10. closing prayer.

Following the judge’s decision and the closing prayer, participants will be invited to stay and use the circle for sharing/debriefing purposes.

Seating/Speaking Order of the Inner Circle:

The judge will occupy the seat at the northern point of the circle. On the judge’s immediate left will be two CHCH members who will play the role of process facilitators. To their left will sit the victimizer, followed by his or her individual worker, then four members of the CHCH team, then the victim, followed by his or her support workers, then all the other participants of the circle. Seated on the judge’s immediate right will be the crown and defense lawyers.

The first person to speak in the circle will be the person on the immediate left of the judge. Speaking will follow a clockwise direction and will end with the presiding judge.

The Rules That Govern the Circle: The following shall govern participants’ conduct in the circle:

1. only one person may speak at a time;

2. the Laws of the Creator shall govern the person speaking. Those laws are: (a) Honesty, (b) Kindness, (c) Sharing, and (d) Respect;

3. a person may only speak in turn. There are to be no interruptions while a person is speaking;

4. if desired, a person may pass when it is his/her turn to speak;

5. all other participants should be attentive to the person speaking.

Conclusions:

1. Use of the sentencing circle promotes sentencing as a step in the healing process;

2. Because those most affected by the victimization are involved and have input in the decision, the healing process of individuals, family, and community are enhanced;

3. The victimizer is both held accountable and supported by those most affected by the victimization;

4. Inclusion of the formal court party confirms the conjunctive relationship between the community and the legal system, as established through the protocol with the Attorney General's Department for Manitoba and supported by the federal Department of Justice.

Hollow Water is now conducting its own “review circles” at six-month intervals after the sentencing circle. They are structured in an identical fashion but do not involve the court party. Their purpose is to reinforce community expectations with victimizers, maintain accountability to the community, and review the progress of the healing plan. In effect, these reviews correspond to periodic visits from a Probation Officer, with the community-at-large assuming that supervisory role.

As of the spring of 1995, the healing circle team members at Hollow Water have worked with forty-eight offenders, eighty-three relatives of offenders, sixty-two victims of sexual abuse, and one hundred and fifty-three of their relatives. Many of them are still actively in the formal healing process and will be for some time. In only two instances did offenders reoffend—and, as I mentioned, one of them is now a valued member of the team itself.

If things can ever truly “speak for themselves,” then that enviable rate of recidivism sings a powerful song indeed.

I thin

Personally, I think that it is important to understand that t