“…the power of it, it goes so deep…it almost makes your heart stop, when you’re forgiven for something you didn’t think you should be forgiven for”
(Dan, a VOMP participant reflecting on the impact of the process and the facilitated dialogue with his victim, Emily).
One of the joys of having had the privilege of serving Victim Offender Mediation program participants over the past 25 years is that we get to see the long-term impacts, the fruits of our labours. The case presented here, as briefly as we dare, is just one example in which those impacts have proven to be long-lasting and profound. We were again reminded, after recently re-connecting with both Dan and Emily (not their real names), the participants in this case, of what a gift it is to be privileged to do this work. Their case was the subject of a one hour CBC radio documentary broadcast a number of years ago on the TAPESTRY program as part of a series. It was simply titled “Apologies”. As we visited together and filled in the history since we had last all been in one room in a federal prison, Dan and Emily underscored for us what we had heard then and how it had impacted them since. Emily produced the copy she had been given by the producers of the Tapestry tape and we revisited some of the story along with interviews and things published since. The story and all that surrounds it could easily fill a book. I’ll share just a few excerpts from the things published to try to bring the characters to life.
Danny was one of the last people one would suspect of having what he now refers to as his dangerous ‘dark side’. Apparently pro-social, a reliable friend, steadily employed as a correctional officer, Danny harboured a secret rage. Women within a certain age bracket and with a resemblance to a care-giver who had violently sexually assaulted him as a four year old, would trigger an association for him, he says, that made them potential targets for the need he felt to have his own injury avenged. Emily, the last person in the world who would ever harm anyone, much less sexually harm a child, tragically bore just enough resemblance to his victimizer that Danny chose her as one of the targets of his rage. He was ultimately arrested, charged with five similar sexual assaults and sentenced, upon his guilty plea, to eighteen years in prison. He recalls the first years of his incarceration:
I remember being in [a maximum security penitentiary] looking up at the hill …hanging onto the bars and knowing that I was facing 18 years in prison. And I [remember] thinking, “What happened”? “What is this”? “What am I doing here”? “How could I have done what I did”?
Years were to pass. Dan’s violation of her had thrown Emily into a hellish ‘prison’ of her own. Afraid to leave her home, and afraid to be in it, Emily was just existing, watching her world become smaller, her circle of friends and family abandoning her, unable to understand her plight and unable to offer her any real help. Even after Dan was imprisoned Emily’s fear states and hyper vigilance improved only marginally. She was experiencing what most trauma survivors do: that the symptoms following traumatic incidents of the magnitude that cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) persevere, unrelentingly, and long after the initial danger has passed.
A number of years into his incarceration, Danny began to recognize that without serious help and serious effort on his own part to answer the questions he had been posing earlier, he would never be free of the rage he felt related to his own childhood sexual victimization or of the deviance that had caused harm to so many and consumed the best years of his life. He recalls the questions changing. He began to ask, “How can I become the man I really want to be?” “I think it started from there”, he says. That led to a conversation “with another prisoner who had participated in the VOMP program. He told me it had helped turn his life around; he was the one who suggested it to me.”
Fortunately, Danny also had one prison staff member who was prepared to believe in him, who trusted that Danny’s desire to understand how he had become so ‘bent’, to work hard at his treatment and rehabilitation and to seek to make meaningful amends to those he had harmed were all genuine. She made the formal referral to VOMP.
When we first met Emily, she was quite clear about having had need for answers to her questions. She was equally clear about her interest—even at this late date—in being provided with a mechanism for attempting to get answers to the questions that had plagued her for years, the questions she would have posed to Danny in the court room if that had been possible. That doesn’t happen of course. The rules are clear: the prosecutor, not the victim, asks the questions. And it is not unlikely that the victim/witness will be vigorously cross-examined to the point of wondering who is actually on trial. Emily was grateful for a mechanism (the VOMP process) and for a safe forum in which she could finally ask the questions that had relevance for her.
There is a danger, in the way that stories can ‘telescope’ time, that telling this one in so small a space might suggest that this went quickly or was a ‘miracle cure’. On the contrary. It was arduous, hard work for all involved, work that took months of concentrated effort. But it paid off. Step by step, as we supported both Emily and Danny in the individual work they felt they needed to do to prepare for their facilitated dialogues, it became clear that this case which at the beginning had been so rife with potential pitfalls now had much to recommend that we proceed. Emily wrote an initial list of questions out. Danny agreed to respond to them on videotape, in the moment, as we read them to him. We then returned to Emily’s home, taking Danny’s videotape with us, playing sections at a time and debriefing each of them.
Emily is a woman of amazing grace and strength. She was already feeling as though she had made substantial gains in her own healing as a result of her participation in the early phases of the VOMP process, but decided that she would make the 500 km trip to the prison to meet face-to-face with Dan, believing that, for both of them, the best was yet to come. Weeks later, all the arrangements had been made, and Emily was walking with us, through the principal entrance of the prison to the Board room where the dialogue would take place. She recalls:
The questions began, awkwardly at first and then, in a more meaningful way, the prisoner and I began to talk freely while I questioned every detail of why he did this to me. Much to the surprise of everyone in the room tears began to flow (tears of forgiveness, apology, repentance and relief). What began as a tense, frightening experience turned into a powerful encounter, one in which my truth–much of which had been denied by others—was validated and vindicated (Government of Canada, 2007).
A CBC radio documentary about the case provides the following dialogue:
EMILY: For the villain to come and say he was deeply sorry was a wonderful healing process…someone believes me, at last. He knows what he did; he knows, because he was there, and he’s saying he’s sorry….. The feeling of being ‘unclean’…–once he apologized–that seemed to go away, and I began to see myself as something good, and not something dirty, or promiscuous or wild, or all these different things that [society suggests a rape victim must be]…once he apologized, then I began to feel relief, that’s when the real relief began to come (CBC Radio, 1997).
In the testimonial she wrote for National Crime Victims Awareness Week, Emily concluded:
I cannot begin to relate what a difference it has made in my life when [CJI’s VOMP staff] took the time to walk me through all the steps needed to put closure to such a traumatic event. Not only have these people…helped me to accomplish what I had set out to do, which was to forgive and to overcome my fears, but they have kept in touch by phone, by visits to my home and with e-mails over the ensuing years. They have never abandoned me since the case was closed. Their care, client centred approach and understanding of complex psychology assisted me to the point that all of the post-trauma symptoms that had plagued me for years completely evaporated within months of meeting them (Government of Canada).
For his part, Danny recalls the astonishment he felt when he realized that Emily had come, not just to rage at him, but to get answers for herself, to offer forgiveness in response to a meaningful apology, and to challenge him to get whatever healing assistance he needed to ensure that there would be no more victims. He struggled to describe the feeling, and offered this:
[W]hen she showed me care and concern it was like a knife that went straight into my heart. Like, it’s like telling a demon that you love him: it would kill him, you know? (CBC Radio).
As a result, I mean it not only seemed to really be a revelation for [Emily], the residual was, was, a total…a total metamorphoses for me, you know, like I completely changed from an animal into a human being, umm, as a spiritual person, as an intellectual person—everything–in a very short span (post VOMP participation interview, January 3, 2007).
There can be tremendous cynicism around how people (outside observers, that is) view these victim offender dialogues and these sorts of apologies. But for two full decades now (and with a substantial portion of the more than 500 referrals we’ve received, since we began, culminating in face-to-face meetings between the victim and offender participants) we have seen those apologies have tremendous meaning to the people who receive them and the prisoners who make them. The outcomes for both victims and offenders are of real interest to trauma recovery and offender treatment specialists alike. For many victims, sincere apology seems to have a powerful impact on their sense of vindication and validation as innocent parties. Beyond that, the process, of which apology is often a part, seems to have the ability to free them and release them, even to the point of diminishing or even extinguishing the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (Gustafson, 2005).
Tellingly, too, commitments made by prisoners to their victims in these facilitated dialogues to have “no more victims” result in remarkably low rates of repeat offending—a measure which certainly has meaning for victims, no matter what else it might mean to other observers. Low rates of recidivism as a program outcome for VOMP participants continue to be borne out by research, such as the successive Victim Offender Mediation Program (VOMP) Correctional Results Reports (Petrellis, 2009).
Once offender participants make commitments to their victims as part of VOMP process, they keep them to a degree most sceptics would never believe. Danny explains his own motivation:
No one, absolutely no one: not the judge, not the cops, not the prison system, no one, has more power than my victim to suggest I change my ways or to require things of me…and yet what motivates me is not some additional kind of coercion, but the gift of her grace and forgiveness. I can never repay her for that, never. But I’m going to work at it…. Unconditional love has changed my life (interview, January 03, 2007).
Forgiveness of offenders by their victims is not one of the program goals or objectives of VOMP. Healing, transformation and change, rather, are paramount. In fact, staff raise the issue of forgiveness only when program participants, themselves, do. But when forgiveness is offered in response to genuine responsibility taking, genuine apology and attempts to make meaningful amends—as it so often is—it can be an integral part of what participants experience as ‘healing’ and an amazing thing to witness. That is especially true in situations where the harms are as serious as those with which we deal. We frequently witness the paradox which Nic Tavuchis describes this way: “an apology, no matter how sincere or effective, does not and cannot undo what has been done. And yet, in a mysterious way and according to its own logic, this is precisely what it manages to do” (1991:33).
And when it does, when true repentance and apology do their work, when forgiveness flows:
“…the power of it, it goes so deep…
it almost makes your heart stop….”
References:
“Apologies”. Tapestry Program. CBC Radio. Trish Naylor, producer. Jan. 26, 1997.
Canada. National Crime Victims Awareness Week, Resource Manual Testimonials (2007), Ottawa.
Gustafson, D (2005). Exploring Treatment and Trauma Recovery Implications of Facilitating Victim Offender Encounters in Crimes of Severe Violence: Lessons from the Canadian Experience. In E. Elliott & R. Gordon (Eds.), New Directions in Restorative Justice: Issues, Practice, Evaluation, (193-228), Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing.
Petrellis, T., (2009). Presentation to Restorative Practices International Conference, Vancouver, BC., June 1, 2009). Tavuchis, N. (1991). Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
