EMPOWERING VICTIMS
February 25, 2013
Alex
Kotlowitz’s account of young shooting victims’ desolation in yesterday’s New
York Times (
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/opinion/sunday/the-price-of-public-violence.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
) reminded me of prices paid by victims of violence who are abandoned save for
their value to law enforcement.
The
opinion article complements Kotlowitz’s current “This American Life” NPR series
on the problem of violence in the Chicagoland neighborhood of Harper High
School.
The article describes the suffering and
retraumatization of young shooting victims
even to the point of suicide, and of those who care about them.
Kotlowitz concludes:
…But missing from this conversation
[about curbing gun violence] is any acknowledgement that the violence eats away
at one’s soul—whether you’re a direct victim, a witness or, like Anita Stewart,
simply a friend of the deceased. Most suffer
silently. By themselves. Somewhere along the way, we need to focus on
those left behind in our cities whose very character and sense of future have
been altered by what they’ve experienced on the streets.
Amen. Meanwhile, it is common to hear police in
areas notorious for “gang” shootings complain that victims and potential
witnesses won’t “cooperate.” That being
the case, police have nothing to offer.
Victims fear either retaliation or other adverse consequences for
talking. Or are blamed as for being in
the wrong place. Or find people don’t
want to hear, and get berated for not getting over it. Where “it” includes those victimized by the
terror and pain of seeing someone shot, or the despair at seeing a promising
student deteriorate or learning the student has been killed.
The
maxim of rape crisis workers applies to all victims of personal violence. The violence has stripped them of power and
control over their bodies and social existence.
Healing requires giving survivors control over what is done with information
they “give up.” The common English word
for a promise that one will have control over the information s/he gives up is “confidentiality.”
The
cardinal difference I see between spreading violence and making peace with it
is whether do things to and for people to “solve” the violence, or let those
who have to live with the consequences of what we do decide what we help them
do next. This is the approach Kotlowitz
describes to be taken by a program in Philadelphia called Healing Hurt People,
whose people “scour” emergency rooms for young men who have been shot, simply
to offer them counseling.
Confidentiality
does not preclude preservation of evidence or prosecution. It does presume that the survivor will decide
whether information will be turned over for prosecutorial use, or that the
prosecutor promises not to proceed without the survivor’s permission.
In open
discussion in Trinidad last fall, senior police officers acknowledged that they
were able informally to grant measures of confidentiality with gang members
they had come to know. That means more
than not revealing the identity of an informant, which cannot be guaranteed
once the information gets out in any way.
Confidentiality means sharing information only with express permission
of the informant, the kinds of assurances journalists may be asked to
give. With specific exceptions, they are
assurances that clergy, medical personnel, licensed counselors and school
personnel, and lawyers are entitled to give.
I
suspect that the plight of victims of violence of a neighborhood I am getting
to know in Central Ohio is like that Kotlowitz describes in the Harper High
neighborhood. From what I have been
learning about the wave of programs across the US to give gang members in
murderous neighborhoods a choice between hard time and giving up guns and drugs
for the promise of social services,
there’s a whole lot of stereotyping and “intelligence” about what
shootings are about, without much information in most cases. Both for survivors’ sake, and for empowering
residents to know more than rumor and speculation about what is really
happening in their neighborhoods, it pays for residents to know there are
people they can trust to help them get
honest inside information instead. It
opens the opportunity for survivors to be hooked up with those who shoot and
their families of all kinds, as in the “peacemaking circles” Carolyn
Boyes-Watson (Peacemaking Circles and
Urban Youth: Bring youth home, St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2008)
describes created out of a community center, Roca, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Information sharing empowers those hurt and
threatened by violence, but only when the information is forthcoming and
honest.
I sense
across national boundaries that the pressure is on to show that gun violence is
“unacceptable.” Implicitly, the pressure
is on to use whatever information about that violence one gets to identify
perpetrators and get them off the streets.
For all I know, there are countless community workers including police
who are quietly, confidentially, using what they learn about violence to show
that they are there to help survivors—shooters included—take back control they
have lost. I hope so. One paradox of working with rather than doing
things to or for people is that the more plentiful it is, the less it makes the
news or makes it into criminologists’ data sets. One antidote is the kind of reporting that
Kotlowitz and Boyes-Watson are doing. For
all the hype about “best practices” to stop gang violence, the approaches
Kotlowitz and Boyes-Watson describe deserve
equal criminological, political and journalistic billing. This citizen thanks them for their
efforts. Love and peace--hal
