Examination of Witnesses (Questions 29-39)
HELEN LENEY
23 OCTOBER 2007
Q29 Chairman: Ms Leney, welcome. We are
very glad to have you this afternoon. We have often heard about
the work that goes on in Thames Valley on this important and,
I do not mean this unkindly when I say, fashionable subject, fashionable
because everybody is looking to see what can be achieved. I wonder
if you can simply start by outlining how restorative justice works
in summary?
Helen Leney: It works because
it comes to an offence or crime from a different view-point from
the traditional criminal justice system which looks at what law
has been broken and what is the punishment for breaking that law.
Restorative justice looks at what harm has been caused and how
that harm can be repaired, and so central to the whole process
is the person who has been harmed, the victim, and other people
who have also been harmed, often the victim's family, often the
offender's family as well, and it brings all of those people together
to talk about what happened, how everyone has been affected and
then to discuss how things can be put right; how the harm that
has been caused can be repaired. It works because it gives victims
a voice in what happens, which is, in many cases, lacking from
the present criminal justice system, which can be very distressing
for victims if they feel they have been ignored, they have not
been heard. It also does not do much for their confidence in the
criminal justice system if they feel that they have been completely
ignored. It makes the offender face up to the harm that they have
caused in a way that is much more direct than if they are in a
court, which can sometimes be almost quite a faceless experience.
Q30 Chairman: It can be?
Helen Leney: Quite a faceless
experience. If an offender has pleaded guilty they do not even
have to say anything, except confirm their name, quite often.
It is quite different walking into a room where the victim and
his or her family is and having to face them and be accountable
for what you have done. Many offenders find that a very difficult
thing to do. We have actually had to push people through doors
before now just to get them into the room. In my experience it
motivates offenders to look at the reasons why they have committed
the offence and to do something about it. Victims very often want
to know what the offender is doing to not reoffend, because they
do not want anybody else to go through what they have been through,
and in a restorative justice conference, which is a face-to-face
meeting, quite often towards the end victims can become very encouraging
of offenders and talk about what they are doing in prison. Are
they getting some training? Are they getting some education? What
are their plans when they come out on release? In a community
sentence, we always invite probation officers to these meetings,
because the victims do want to be included and to have information
about what is happening in the community sentence, echoing what
the last speaker said. A lot of victims feel, particularly for
a violent offence, that if the offender is not sentenced to custody
then they have got off, whereas if they come to one of these meetings
and hear from the probation officer exactly what they are doing
in their community sentence, that is very reassuring for victims.
Q31 Chairman: How does dealing with
the harm issue fit with the obligations already confirmed by the
community sentence? The community sentence may involve some kind
of activity. How do you interpose the remedial aspect if you want
to do it in a way in which the criminal makes some restitution
either to the individual or to the neighbourhood in which they
have done some harm? Presumably that has to change the shape of
any community sentence, does it not?
Helen Leney: It does not affect
the sentence, because in Thames Valley, when we deal with a community
sentence under the 2003 Act, we deal post sentence, so the sentence
is already there.
Q32 Chairman: You mean the shape
of the sentence. Not its length but what the person is doing in
the course of it.
Helen Leney: Anything that the
people agree. It does not form part of the sentence, it is completely
voluntary. They can agree all sorts of things. It might be writing
a letter to a family member of the victim, perhaps who is not
present, who has been distressed by what has happened. We try
not to come up with suggestions about what people can do, because
it is not really for us to say what we think is going to make
this better. It is for the participants themselves to decide.
What we often find actually is that, having had an opportunity
to get together to talk about it, for the victim to say what they
want to say, to have their questions answered, to hear an apology
(which is very important) and to be able to judge whether that
apology is genuine as well (which is important for victims and
something that is often mistrusted when an apology is given in
court) quite often that is enough for victims to say, "It
is fine. It is done and dusted. Now I can go away and forget about
it. I do not want anything else to happen." So it provides
that sense of closure for victims.
Q33 Dr Whitehead: You presumably
have to have victims co-operating in the first place to enable
the whole process to begin?
Helen Leney: Yes.
Q34 Dr Whitehead: How would you describe
the initial attitude of victims towards restorative justice when
this particular path is put to them in the first place? What sort
of co-operation or, indeed, non co-operation arises from that?
Helen Leney: I can give you some
figures on victim responses. Unfortunately I only have figures
on this bit until the end of last year: 63% of victims that we
have approached wanted to be involved in some way—that is
not necessarily in a face-to-face meeting, for a lot of people
that is a step too far, but they did want some sort of involvement—30%
either we could not find (which is always a problem) or did not
respond to letters or telephone calls, and the other 17% we did
not contract because the offender in question was breached or
reoffended and the order was revoked. So, you could say that two-thirds
of victims respond positively. Certainly, from my experience,
and when I started doing this in 2001 I was completely new to
the criminal justice system and I started on the research for
the Home Office for the JRC in Thames Valley, the thing that struck
me when I was contacting victims post sentence was the level of
anger and distress about the way the criminal justice system had
treated them, and what restorative justice does is balance that
out by going along and saying: this is an opportunity for you
to be involved. One of the most distressing things that victims
would say was, "Nobody told me anything." I saw one
young man who the first thing he knew of a sentence having been
passed was when he read about it in the local paper with his name
in it, and when I rang him up I had to hold the phone away from
my ear because of his anger, and I have had that on a number of
occasions.
Q35 Dr Whitehead: Do you get cases
where you say, "We cannot really do this?" Maybe there
is a long running feud or obsessive behaviour of the part of the
perpetrator that you cannot be expected to come to an understanding.
Helen Leney: Yes, those cases
are weeded out, hopefully, before we get to them, and we have
not had a case that we have had to send back because it was not
suitable for restorative justice. The way we operate is we work
very closely with Thames Valley Probation, who are one of our
partner agencies, and the person who writes the pre-sentence report
will, as part of the interview, assess whether the offender is
suitable for restorative justice. We have a check-list which they
go through and, if there is doubt, they can ring us up and ask
our advice, and if they think that the person is suitable and
the offence is suitable, then they recommend in the pre-sentence
report that an order is made for a community sentence. So, by
the time they get to us any cases where there are concerns about
revictimising, where there are drug and alcohol or mental health
issues which would mean that the offender was unlikely to be able
to take a responsible part in the restorative justice process,
or if the offender was so against the principle of restorative
justice that they would be unlikely to turn up for a meeting,
then they are not suitable and they would not be recommended.
Q36 Dr Whitehead: What about the
other way round: if the victim does not want to participate? Is
that a complete veto on any proceedings or are there circumstances
under which the process can take place even without the victim
participating?
Helen Leney: We would not do a
face-to-face or a restorative justice conference without a victim.
Research done elsewhere has shown that if you drag in a community
member or somebody who is not the direct victim, it can actually
make the likelihood of reoffending greater, so we do not do that.
Q37 Chairman: You mean he goes round
to the house later on?
Helen Leney: It seems to instil
a sense of anger in the offender, because they have somebody who
is not connected with the offence telling them off and that is
very unhelpful. Not all victims do want to meet, for a variety
of reasons, and if they do not want to meet they may still have
questions that they want answers to, they may still want the offender
to know how they have been affected by it, they may want an apology,
so we can do some indirect mediation type work, and quite a few
of our cases fall into that category. I would draw your attention
to the Sherman and Strang Report, which looks at cases worldwide,
and also to Joanna Shapland's report on the JLC research on benefits
to victims. All the research indicates that a face-to-face meeting
is what is most helpful for people and is best, but even when
we do something like a letter of apology... Can I give you an
example of one case where the victim was a middle-aged man? He
had been assaulted by somebody who lived locally outside the local
shops. For some reason it took a year to come to court, and so
I did not see the victim until a year later and he still had not
been out on his own because he was worried about what this particular
person would do: was he out there waiting to see him again and
what was he going to do when he did see him? After six months
he had started going out with somebody else, but he still would
not go down to the local shops. I did quite a bit of toing and
froing between the two of them, because he did not want to meet
face to face, and the offender wrote quite a long letter, which
I then took round to the victim, and he read it through twice,
very slowly, and then he turned to me and said, "Now I feel
safe." So, even without a face-to-face meeting, you can still
do things which are going to make things better for victims. On
rare occasions the victim does not want anything, any feedback
at all, and in that situation we work usually with the probation
officer and we do some sort of enhanced victim awareness work—it
is more, I was going to say theoretical, it is not theoretical,
but it is not related to specific victim so much—but those
are the minority of cases.
Q38 Dr Whitehead: This presents a
series of outcomes which are potentially very different to what
is available anywhere else in the country.
Helen Leney: Yes.
Q39 Dr Whitehead: In order to get
to that position, has that required a whole range of different
assumptions on the part of those people taking part in the process
such that you have a rather different structure of justice, you
might say, or do you think that is something which, if people
said, "Let us do this everywhere", it would be relatively
easy and straightforward to take up?
Helen Leney: I am not quite sure
I understand. Are you asking if there is anything specific about
Thames Valley that means that we are unique and we are likely
to remain unique?
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