Restorative Circles

Restorative Circles are a patterned way of healing rifts in our social realm – when conflict has disconnected two or more people. 

They were designed by Dominic Barter who, among other cases, used them to bring together families where one family member killed another. I mention this because sometimes people think that restorative justice is a “weak” tool and might assume that it’s only suitable for smaller conflicts. Yet, proponents of restorative justice would argue that putting someone in prison – a decontextualization of sorts – is weaker because the social impact of a person death doesn’t have to be felt directly if the person is locked up. 

It might be easier to spend time away that to look into the eyes of the parents of the person you killed. 

The idea of restorative circles is that when two parties are in conflict, it ripples out into the community. This makes perfect sense in the way we’ve looked at the context. It’s impossible to think that a cut thread in one place of the weaving would not impact other realms, other threads or the integrity of the piece of weaving overall. 

The process is set up so victims are heard and witnessed by the offenders, helping victims regain some of the power they lost and therefore contribute to healing. 

A lot of the power of restorative circles comes from feeling the impact where it is, in the emotional and social realm, and witnessing it there. In this sense, they are not just conflict resolution tools – they are context-healing practices. Our togetherness, our shared context, is valued higher than the self-centered call for revenge. Retribution breads more violence and rift. 

Our current, punitive system can only be considered a “success” if we celebrate the profit earned by the companies that run prisons. Real context, real cohesion only loses in our current system, making restorative justice a vital part of the puzzle towards context stewardship.