Restorative Practices to Resolve Conflict/Build Relationships: Katy Hutchison (Transcript)

So scissors weren’t a particular novelty for them. But for me at 7, I was fascinated with the fact that my father would have something that only he was allowed to use. And I remember watching him meticulously shaping his beard with these scissors. They were tiny, they were sharp, and they were very, very pointy.

So one day, I was doing a little craft project, which involved an enormous amount of paper, a huge amount of glue, and a few staples. And I decided that I needed to cut something. So I went into the bathroom and I took my father’s scissors. They were amazing, until, of course, I cut through a big glob of wet glue and a couple of staples. And I realized that I had damaged my father’s scissors.

So as stealthily as I had taken them out of the medicine cabinet, I put them back. The next day, my father came to me and he crouched down to eye level and he looked at me and he said, “Did you use my scissors?” And I lied. And then my father told me how disappointed he was in me. And he proceeded to show me how the scissors no longer easily cut his beard.

They snagged and pulled up the hair painfully. And he asked me again, “Did you use my scissors?” And this time, I told him I had. So my father took me for a walk in the garden and he didn’t say much for a while. And then he started to talk to me about honesty and about respecting people’s property, and most importantly, about respecting their feelings.

We came in the house and he showed me how to clean the dry glue off the blades with rubbing alcohol and how to finally sand the nick out with sandpaper. And then he made us two huge cups of hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows. And we never talked about the scissors incident again.

Time In vs. Time Out

Years later, when I had children of my own, I was grappling with finding a discipline technique that felt like it fit. Most of my friends were using the time out. But, you know, it seemed counterintuitive to me. And also, with toddler twins, it seemed almost impossible to manage two children in two different spaces. And also, it seems like the child who was most affected by a transgression ended up being the one that got the least amount of attention.

So I thought back to the way that I was raised, and I realized that in my family, it had really been much more about the time in. When something went wrong, my parents would sit down with us and they’d take the time to explain how our behavior was impacting the family, and then they would help us figure out a way to make things better.

So, my husband Bob and I adopted the time in method with our children, and that was the way we raised them. And I’m sure initially, a lot of the language went over their little heads to begin with. But ultimately, what it did was it set up an opportunity for my children to realize that what our default position was going to be was going to be to come together to talk about behavior, to talk about feelings and to talk about the impact that our actions have on the people that we care about.

Tragedy Strikes

Two weeks before my children’s fifth birthday, I found myself standing in the emergency room of a local hospital, watching a doctor with defibrillator panels in his hand, desperately trying to resuscitate my husband. Just an hour before, he and two friends had left our quiet New Year’s party to go check on the home of the vacationing neighbor whose son had decided to host a party of his own.

Something had gone wrong. Police officers started to fill that emergency room. And I stood there looking at the doctors, the nurses, the EMTs, those officers, and I realized every one of them was just desperately clinging to everything they had been trained to do as professionals when the most unthinkable of situations begins to unfold. But I also understood for them that at some moment, their shift was going to end and they were going to get to go home. But you see, I wasn’t at work.

My shift was never going to end. And I realized standing there in the middle of all that chaos that somehow I was going to have to find a way to live with whatever had just happened, and more importantly, to move forward in my life in a positive way. I left my dead 40-year-old husband at the hospital, and I went home to wait for my children to wake up so I could tell them that their daddy was dead. I looked for the plainest words I could, and I crouched down to their level, and I explained to them. And after a long pause, my little boy looked at me and he said, “Can I have some Cheerios?”

Of course. Because that’s what happens. Children wake up and they’re hungry. And after they eat, they play because that’s their job. They spend time outside and then maybe after a meal, somebody will help them with a bath, tuck them into bed, read them a story, they go to sleep.

They wake up the next day and they do it all over again. Day after day after day. And usually, one of the people that makes that come together for a child is their mother. And that was my job. And I realized that I couldn’t make their little life be all about my husband’s death.

So I made them a promise. I promised them that underneath the horror of what had just happened to our family, we would find a gift and perhaps one day an opportunity to share that gift.

Seeking Justice and Understanding

Autopsy results revealed that Bob had died from multiple kicks to the head, but the information really stopped there. A code of silence descended over the small community we lived in. None of the 200 young people that were at that party gave the police the information that they needed to move forward with their investigation.

The media were on my doorstep immediately, shoving a microphone in my face saying, “What do you want to see happen to the person that did this?” I thought I would throw up. My children had just lost their father. I didn’t want them to lose me in the process. If I had responded frankly the way society expected me to, filled with hatred, filled with vengeance, what kind of person, what kind of parent was I going to become?

Absolutely, I wanted answers. Absolutely, I wanted somebody to be accountable. But I also wanted to know that my children were going to be okay, that my community was going to be okay. And that included whoever was on the other side in this horrible tragedy. It was five years before Ryan Aldridge was arrested and charged in connection with my husband’s death.

The police called to tell me they were ready to make the arrest, and I told them I was on my way. “What are you talking about? Why would you want to meet the person that killed your husband? Leave that to the police in the system.” I said I need to sit down with him.

I need to speak to him face to face. I need to understand what was going on in his life to make him capable of doing what he did. I need him to understand what’s been going on in our lives. I need to tie him in. Sixteen hours after Ryan was arrested, I was back in that community sitting in a small interrogation room about to meet the young man that killed my husband.

Meeting Ryan

I thought my heart would come out of my mouth. I expected some kind of monster to walk through the door, not a young man that could be my son, your son, somebody’s best friend. He sat across from me, slumped over sobbing. I handed him ball after ball of tissue, and it was all I could do not to get out of my seat, to cross over the other side of the room, and to give him a hug. Because he looked like that was what he needed more than just about anything.

We didn’t say a whole lot to each other when we first met, but I told him his confession was the first step in the right direction. And the next step I urged him to consider would be pleading guilty, so that neither of our families would have to endure a trial. As soon as Ryan went to jail, I worried about him. I had no idea what was going to happen behind bars to support his rehabilitation. So, I began to educate myself about that and the system.

Discovering Restorative Justice

And it was then that I learned about the powerful model of restorative justice. Now, our conventional system, you are all familiar with. It asks the question, what law was broken, who broke that law, and what’s the punishment going to be? But it pays little attention to the needs of the victim or the community. The restorative model, on the other hand, works from the assumption that when harm happens in our community, it is a violation of relationship.

And the questions are slightly different. We want to know what happened, who’s been affected and what are we going to do to make things right. Ryan served three out of five years of his sentence. And during that time, we did a properly facilitated restorative process called a victim offender mediation. I spent an entire day in jail with Ryan.

When I hear the political rhetoric about getting tough on crime, man, that’s what we did that day. We got tough on crime. Lots of tears, lots of long silences where neither of us could find the words, but ultimately, it was an opportunity for us to find some humanity around a situation that to this point had been anything but humane. I don’t think that Ryan went out that day with the intention of killing somebody. But what I understand now is that he made a series of poor choices throughout his adolescence and teen years that culminated in a fatal one that brought our lives together.

Ryan had been a small child. He had a speech impediment. He was picked on and bullied in school. When his parents divorced, he didn’t know where he belonged. When he lost a friend in a drinking and driving crash, he didn’t understand that getting drunk and putting your fist through the wall does not qualify as grieving.

Finding Common Ground

The more time we spent together, the more that we realized we had things in common because that is what happens when you share space with someone. We talked about the things that matter to us, our families, a love of the outdoors. We discovered we had a mutual interest in art. He went to his cell. He brought a sketchbook back to show me his drawings.

I brought my laptop. I showed him the presentation that I developed for youth around social responsibility. And I said to him, “It’s a powerful message, but it occurs to me that it’s only half the story. Perhaps, you’d like to share it with me.” And after he got out of jail, Ryan and I worked together for a number of years, sharing our story with thousands of kids in D.C.

But we don’t work together anymore for what I like to think are all the right reasons. Because Ryan finished his sentence. He’s moved on with his life. He’s employed. He just got married.

I found out last week they’re expecting a family. The fact that Ryan seems incapable now of inflicting any further harm is the gift that I was looking for. I reflect back on the lessons that my father taught me about stepping up, accepting responsibility, moving forward and forgiving. How that shaped the way I parent, how that shaped the way I chose to deal with Ryan. And I feel grateful.

The Role of Education

But what does this have to do with education? It has everything to do with education because what we’re doing is we’re teaching young people to engage in and maintain relationships. And the way that we do that is by modeling qualities such as tolerance, inclusiveness, respect, integrity, empathy and forgiveness. The restorative model that I encountered when I was looking for truth and accountability has applications far beyond the bounds of the criminal justice system. We call it restorative practices when we’re talking about problem solving in our communities, in our places of work, and most especially, in our educational settings.

I’ll leave the measurement of the performance and the efficacy of restorative practices up to the practitioners and the academics. But let me say this, as an advocate who’s had the opportunity to visit hundreds of schools all over the world, there is a palpable difference in a restorative school as soon as you walk through the door. Greater connection between children of different ages. Greater connection between students and teachers. Between teachers and administration.

Students describe a sense of pride in their community because they feel like they have ownership. They develop a skill set for problem solving at the ground level. Teachers describe their classrooms as being calmer. Administrators spend way less time doling out suspensions and much more time delegating peacemaking. I wonder what would have happened to the trajectory of Ryan’s life had he had an opportunity for restorative conversation when he was in school.

Restorative Practices in Action

And you see, young people will take these skills home with them. I visited an inner city school in Baltimore recently, an elementary school that was renowned for its restorative programming. This school was located in the midst of a number of housing projects. There was open drug dealing going on right outside the door. But as soon as I walked through those doors, every classroom I visited was using the circle in some way to either facilitate learning or problem solving.

And the principal shared a story with me. She said two mothers came bursting through the front door of the office, screaming at one another, obviously engaged in a heated argument. And they stopped yelling just long enough to ask to see the principal. And when she appeared, they said, “We need one of those circle things our kids keep talking about to solve our argument.” I believe if we raise a generation of young people who expect a restorative opportunity and learn those skills, hone those skills while they’re in school, then they will take that out into their lives.

And when they become employed, when they have families of their own, that is what they’re going to look to. Where am I? I’m concerned about what I see in the media in terms of the way restorative—excuse me, the way bullying and anti-bullying initiatives are portrayed. I feel like the focus is so much on labeling people as either being the bully or the victim or the bystander. When I think if we’re honest with ourselves, as human beings, we’re capable of being all three.

We need to drop the labels. We need to focus on the behavior that erodes our sense of community. And I know of no better way of doing that than engaging in restorative practices. Whether we’re parents or whether we’re teachers or whether we’re both, what we’re engaged in here is raising and nurturing human beings, not human doings.

The Importance of Time and Intention

I’d love to think that my children are going to find meaningful ways to put food on their table. But what interests me more is who they’re going to be while it is they do whatever it is they do. I want my children to be kind to people. I want them to be good partners, parents, coworkers. I haven’t spoken to Ryan in a long time, but I felt the need to check in with him recently.

And I called him and he told me about his new job and he told me about his wedding, about the baby that was on the way. And I asked him, “What’s important to you, Ryan?” Wouldn’t you know it? He said time. He looks back on his life and he thinks how differently things might have turned out if he’d taken the time to think through some of his decisions.

And now, he says he carves out lots of time for intention and for purpose and to cultivate his relationships with the people that he cares about. So, Monday morning, if you have the privilege of beginning your day in the presence of a group of young people in a classroom, I encourage you, push the desks aside, bring the chairs into a circle, sit together, have a time in. If your day on the other hand might begin in a staff room or an office, you might want to try the same thing. I assure you that it will enrich the relationship that you have in your learning community. And that is going to be a conversation worth having.

Thank you so much.

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