Issues in Criminal Justice (JF)
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The following story from Margot Van Sluytman is taken from her article, "Finding a Song - a New Narrative After Murder."
Senseless violence with the murder of my father, Theodore Van Sluytman, in Toronto, in 1978 completely devestated me. At sixteen, I was thinking about marks, pimples, and volleyball. When I found out from a very tall police officer that my Dad was dead, my world changed. Forever.
As if rooted in the soil of anguish and pain, I felt that no matter how fat or thin I was, I could not walk without dragging the entire universe of sorrow with me. At that time, healing from that anguish was not even a concept. One healed a bloodied kene, or a broken bone; one did not fathom what it might mean to heal a broken heart, to never again enter the world without unspoken anguish and raw incomprehension.
In a very simple, profound, and subtle way, I did enter healing, however. Words not only saved my life (i.e. reading and writing) but eventually gave me my life back. The man who murdered my Dad, after reading about the work I do with poetry as healing voice, wrote to me. And I chose to respond.
I now know the words Restroative Justice, and I know many different meanings of that phrase. I now know restoration and transformation...
I do not believe that any of us is exempt from raw savage pain. I do believe however that compassion for ourselves and for others leaves room for the beginnings of dialogue, challengeing dialogue, with what it meants to enter our life with a view to finding and or creating new normals that can in time can include renewed hope.
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