In the Aftermath of Violence: What Constitutes a Responsive Response?
David Gadd
Forthcoming in the November 2015 issues of the British Journal of Criminology
As I began to finalise this introduction, reports were emerging of how a 21 year old white man, called Dylann Storm Roof, had massacred nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Members of the congregation had attempted to dissuade him, but Roof had insisted that he had no choice; that he had ‘to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.’ In the immediate aftermath of what was widely reported as a ‘brutal’ and ‘senselsss’ ‘hate crime’, the governor of South Carolina, Nikki R. Haley, called for the death penalty, explaining that this was the ‘worst hate…the country has seen — in a long time’. Such reactions will no doubt recurr when Storm faces trial, but they must now also compete with the responses of the families of the deceased who, within days of the carnage, offered to forgive the accused despite the acute pain and distress they were evidently suffering (Stewart and Pérez-Peñajune, 2015).
Immediate offers of forgiveness are rare so soon after tragedy, but accounts of violence perpetrated in what are assumed to be relatively peaceful contexts are nevertheless a common feature of Western news coverage. This violence takes many forms. It includes: the mass killings perpetrated by men like Anders Behring Breivik in Norway and Adam Lanza and the Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the USA, hostage takings like the one perperpetrated by Man Haron Monis in Sydney in December 2014, inner-city riots like those that gripped English cities in 2011 and American cities in 2014 and 2015, terrorist attacks, shootings perpetrated by law enforcement officers, abuses perpetrated within institutions – including the church, residential care homes, prisons or the BBC – as well as the lethal and near lethal acts of interpersonal violence we think of as hate crimes, robberies and domestic assaults. Journalists are often quick to ask criminologists to explain why the perpetrators did what they did, while criminologists often prefer to say little publicly about crimes that defy the broadly humanizing thrust of most conventional socio-economic, psychological and political explanations. The recent upsurge in interest in public criminology notwithstanding (Loader and Sparks, 2010), criminological comment on what motivated particular perpetrators is both rare and rarely well received in the public domain (Sereny, 2000). This, as the contributors to this volume, all agree, needs to change if criminology is not to become a hostage to the kind of political fortune that already defines the aftermath of much 21st century violence.
Perhaps what matters more than the question of ‘why they did it’, however, is how violence was responded to in its aftermath, since this can determine how it is defined and whether it continues, retribution follows, as well as whether some form of justice is attained (Hydén et al., 2015). It is crucial, as Shadd Maruna (2014: 13) argues, following Albert Eglash, to separate ‘blame for the past from responsibility for the future’ when dealing with offenders.
The trouble is that it is difficult indeed, while the threat of violence remains imminent, to sustain a public debate about what it means to deal fairly and responsively with offenders. When security is threatened and lives are at risk, suspected terrorists are liable to being shot dead, often with few questions asked subsequently, as was the case in Paris and Copenhagen in 2015, following the murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. Such reflection, however, is not necessarily any more prevalent in the routine day-to-day work of criminal justice practitioners tasked with responding to violent offenders. In many contexts, risk management approaches that attempt to anticipate prospective levels of dangerousness have made it increasingly difficult to tailor interventions in ways that are responsive to the complex social, educational and psychological needs of the most troubled and troubling violence perpetrators (Robinson, 2002).
Against this backdrop criminologists have sometimes hoped that engaging with victims through restorative justice might enable at least some offenders to re-identify with feelings of vulnerability disowned in hurtful crimes against others (Braithwaite, 1989). The research evidence, however, suggests that such outcomes are by no means certain, for they are highly contingent on both the skill of facilitators and the motives of participants (Daly, 2002; Roche, 2003; Strang, 2002). Restoration, reintegration and reconciliation are noble goals but they have to be worked at. ‘Success’ is often shortlived, rarely absolute and far from guaranteed. John Braithwaite's (2011) latter advocacy for 'responsive regulation' also cautions against a one-stop shop approach to the resolution of conflicts, whether local or international. Instead he argues for 'collaborative capacity building' that harnesses the authority of 'pyramids of support' able to actively 'listen', 'praise' and convey a 'commitment' to resolving problems by helping people 'find their own motivations to improve' and/or deliver 'reform and repair' (p475-6 and 483). The psychotherapeutic wisdom is not so dissimilar, though it perhaps provides a fuller account of the scale and nature of the interpersonal demands responsivity can entail. For the client in therapy to have a chance at being able to change, the therapist must be closely attuned to any specific losses – of life, health, money, or feelings of security – he or she has suffered. The therapist must also be willing and able to tolerate and contain hostility or aggression that is transferred onto them from the client. In other words, they must convey a commitment to staying with, enduring, and working through the pain that overcoming defences, grief and denials inevitably entail (Benjamin, 1998; Bollas, 2013; Leader, 2009).
Needless to say, such demanding interventions are exceptionally rare in criminal justice and generally hard to resource, but there are good reasons to consider the political ramifications of acknowledging the emotional demands working for such changes on a global scale might entail. When people are seriously harmed or murdered it is often difficult to discern where the violence ends and the aftermath begins. The terror of reoccurrence mingles with the trauma of recollecting. Such trauma can incite more violence. And yet it is through recollection that survivors are brought together in the desire to make sense of their grief, rebuild communities and assert their resilience. The One Billion Rising campaign, the Black Lives Matter project, together with the many Mardi Gras that celebrate sexual diversity annually within the world’s major cities, are evidence of the power of people to come together in the aftermath of violence and discrimination to assert their enduring pride in who they are and what they have achieved and to resist the pressure to be defined by the hatefulness and prejudices of those who have attacked them. Such projects insist not on vengeance, but recognition of the enduring humanity and dignity of those unwilling to surrender to terror in the aftermath of violence.
The contributors to this collection share an aspiration to a foster dialogue that is responsive to the needs of both victims and offenders in the aftermath of violence – whether interpersonal or mass in nature – and to identify how such responsivity might be better facilitated. They share also a desire to interrogate both the overlaps and disjunctions between what might be regarded as responsible responses – those that imply a (usually self-evident) moral imperative to reduce risk, follow due process, secure justce for victims and prevent a reoccurence – and responsive responses – those that acknowledge and work with the mixed and shifting emotions of all parties, including the reticence of victims to resort to law, agonizing identifications with the aggressor manifested in the desire for retribution, the tortured minds of perpetrators, and the stifled silences of academics unsure of what to recommend in the heat of crises in which law and its enforcement are proferred as the only certainties one can truly rely upon.
Overcoming polarities that are played out politically, conceptually and emotionally is a core element of any responsive response, for the aftermath of violence is littered with examples of how binary thinking disbars understanding between the harmed and the harmful. During the so-called War on Terror, for example, Westerners were asked to choose whose side they were on - ‘good’ or ‘evil’ - and, in opting for the former, to accept compromises to their personal freedoms alongside the gross violation of suspects' human rights (Robinson and Gadd, 2015). In the US the National Rifle Association promotes a similar discourse in arguing for armed security in all schools. Their political logic tends merely to invert the binary thinking of those perpetrators who perceive the world as comprising only of good and bad people, with no-one in between.
In this way the aftermath of violence is frequently lived through countervailing demonizing discourses – what psychoanalysts calls 'splitting' (Gadd, 2002) - some of which lend themselves all too conveniently to political one-upmanship. For a politician looking to gain advantage from someone else’s tragedy the most opportune path is clear. Find a simple cause, locate it within a particular kind of person and promise to root it out in the service of preserving the national fabric. Harold Garfinkel (1956) taught us as much. In the UK, the discourse may be less physically combative than in the US, but it is no less pernicious. Hence, when Mick Philpot was convicted in 2013 of murdering six of his children, having started a fire in his own home, sections of the British media and government moved swiftly to accelerate a clamp down – not on arsonists or men who abuse children - but on families dependent on benefits, as if making the lives of children already living in poverty even harder was any kind of solution to neglect and abuse (Dolan and Bentley, 2013). By any moral or social scientific standard, this was a totally inappropriate response to the murder of six children, yet it was greeted by criminologists with almost absolute silence.
As the late Nils Christie (1986) noted long ago, the public like their offenders to be monsters and their victims to be blameless, compliant, vulnerable and hence not too outspoken. Forty years on we still hear victims of rape being blamed for failing to protect themselves, and not only in India where Delhi police chief commissioner, KP Raghuvanshi, suggested that young women should carry chilli powder to protect themselves from gang rape (Burke, 2012); but also in the UK where the National Health Service’s 2014 campaign to reduce alcohol consumption warned that ‘One in three reported rapes happens when the victim has been drinking’, without offering any explanation as to why this might be so, any critique of the men who perpetrate such crimes, or even any reflection on why the vast majority of sexual assaults happen when victims are sober.
Sexism and other institutionalized prejudices often prevent a responsive response – as we also learnt from the inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence (Macpherson, 1999). But as the Lawrence case has also revealed, the harm inflicted by individual hate crime perpetrators is made much worse when law enforcement seeks to tarnish the reputations of victims and their families and to cover up professional misconduct and corruption. So, in the days following the shooting of 34 striking mineworkers at the Marikana platinum mine in South Africa in August 2012, 270 strikers were charged with the murder of their workmates despite overwhelming evidence that the victims had been killed by members of the South African Police Service (BBC, 2012). Similarly in Britain high profile shootings carried out by the Metropolitan Police have been rationalised through bogus claims to the effect that the victims were armed – most notably in the shootings of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell in 2005 (Punch, 2010) and Mark Duggan in Tottenham in 2011. The English riots of that summer were in part a response to the propagation of such misinformation. Similar misinformation has also been the source of outrage behind rioting in US cities in 2014 and 2015 as the police have justified their killing of young African American (and in most cases, unarmed) men as self-defence. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray are the names of the victims of police violence the public are now most familiar with, but such cases are only the tip of an iceberg-sized problem which is not properly measured by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics nor routinely reported in the media (McCarthy, 2015).
Denial, as the late Stan Cohen (2001) argued, is a very pervasive response to violence, as well as the least responsive response we might hope for from officials tasked with providing security. The refusal to think about a problem, to admit that it exists, to name it, or to accept that someone suffered as a result of it is a response of sorts, but one that is overtly inattentive to the needs of the aggrieved. More containing and progressive responses are, however, sometimes possible. Jens Stoltenberg's insistence that Norway respond to the murders perpetrated by Breivik with more democracy, more openness, and more participation in society appeared to many the world over to be a startling exemplar of what was politically possible (Galpin, 2012). Likewise, South Africa’s relatively peaceful transition from apartheid autocracy to constitutional democracy owed a great deal to the willingness of Nelson Mandela and other leaders of the liberation movement not to seek vengeance for the wrongs they had suffered. At a more modest level, similar sentiments were implicit in Birmingham father Tariq Jahan’s appeal, after the death of his son in the summer riots of 2011, to those looking for retribution as fathers and sons to ‘go home’ (Dowd, 2011). What is it about these kinds of responses that enables people, especially men prone to violence, to move beyond the desire to meet force with force? How do they prevail alongside, or even in spite of political and economic inequalities? How can we foster responsiveness in the aftermath of violence? These are some of the key questions this special issue will address.