Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Nicoletta Pedrana
Forgiveness:
a feeling celebrated for thousands of years
by philosophers, theologians, and spiritual leaders.
Often described as a noble, humanitarian act,
capable of elevating the human spirit.
And yet, so difficult to experience,
especially when the responsible person has committed severe acts,
which cannot and should not be justified or forgotten.
Over the next few minutes,
I would like to talk to you about the origins of this feeling
and reveal how I believe it could and should be developed,
even when the gravity of the situation can make it difficult and controversial.
Why do I believe that forgiveness should be fostered?
Surely, we have all felt sometimes like we have been treated unjustly.
Perhaps, in a moment of need, we have been abandoned by a dear friend,
or betrayed by a person we love very much.
How did we feel, in that moment?
We probably felt sadness, anger, and resentment,
and maybe even desires of revenge against the person who hurt us.
However, who did these feelings really harm?
The people who hurt us, or only ourselves?
I would like to reflect on this question with you today,
convinced as I am that,
as the great American writer Mark Twain once argued,
"Anger is an acid
that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored
than anything on which it is poured."
But what is the origin of anger?
And if it creates so much harm, how can we overcome it?
Social psychology field research has demonstrated
that anger and resentment principally stem
from how we explain the actions of those who harmed us.
According to these studies,
when we find ourselves in the position of the victim,
we tend to erroneously picture the person who hurt us
as a fundamentally evil individual.
For example,
a friend who has abandoned us as an opportunist,
the parent who made us wrong as an egoist,
and the husband or wife who betrayed us as a cheater.
Conversely,
when we are the ones who betrayed somebody else,
or hurt someone somehow,
we generally tend to paint our actions as the result of external events,
and circumstances beyond our control.
For instance, we justify ourselves
saying that ours was only a reaction to the other person’s negative behaviour,
or that in that moment we were under stress,
or that we are going through a difficult time.
Research thus shows
that people tend to erroneously attribute other people’s behaviour
to fixed characteristics of their personality,
and their own behaviour to external circumstances.
Experts call this tendency the "Fundamental Attribution Error".
My idea is that,
if we wish to let go the anger and resentment,
which hinder the development of forgiveness,
the Fundamental Attribution Error needs to be fixed.
According to this idea, the Fundamental Attribution Error
is one of the primary obstacles on the road to forgiveness,
and the cause of many conflicts that keep us separated from each other,
both at an individual and a collective level.
These tendencies, at an individual level,
lead to a conceptual separation between the self and the other.
The other becomes the site of our negative projections,
is represented as something different from ourself,
as a separate entity unworthy of respect.
By hurting our feelings, and challenging our values,
the other loses its dignity as a human being,
and can therefore be treated accordingly.
At a collective level, these psychological tendencies
lead on the one hand to unending wars and conflicts,
such as the conflict between Israel and Palestine,
the civil war in Syria, and to terrorism;
on the other hand, they lead to the creation
of excessively punitive criminal justice systems,
which inflict, even for minor offenses, long and severe prison sentences.
Yet, as shown by the high levels of recidivism amongst ex-convicts
these punitive measures
can neither transform offenders’ behaviour,
nor stop social conflicts and create a safer world.
Perhaps, then, we should ask ourselves: are punishment and imprisonment
the only available methods to actually enact justice?
Or are there possibly alternative solutions?
There is, in fact, an alternative path.
A path that challenges our pre-established assumptions
about how individuals and society should respond to violence and conflict.
According to this idea,
if the objective is to bring peace and harmony in our society,
offenders need to be helped developing empathy towards their victims
and understand the harm their actions have caused.
On their part,
victims need to be helped
developing compassion and forgiveness towards the perpetrators,
notwithstanding the difficulty of the situation.
But why should victims aspire to forgive those who have harmed them?
Psychological research has shown
that transforming anger and resentment into compassion and forgiveness
promotes the psychological well-being, and physical health,
of the victims in the process.
However, it's argued by advocates of a traditional model of justice
that forgiving a person who has committed a criminal act
is disrespectful towards the victim’s pain and society’s moral values.
However, in my view, these critiques are based
on an idea of the relationship between the offender and the criminal act
which fails to recognize the fundamental moral justification for forgiveness.
Indeed, while the traditional system
tends to identify the sinner with the sin,
in order to be able to forgive without justifying,
we need to separate the criminal act, which can be condemned,
from the person responsible for this act, who can instead be forgiven.
By condemning the crime but not the person,
we still respect victims’ pain and society’s moral values,
while helping offenders not to identify with the mistake committed
and victims to forgive the person that caused them pain.
By fostering the conceptual separation between the crime and the person,
the role of the criminal justice system
can become critical for the development of forgiveness.
But is our criminal justice system
suited to sustain this conceptual separation?
In the traditional retributive model,
the balance of justice
is obtained by inflicting a level of punishment
proportionate to the social harm caused by the crime.
According to some critics,
focusing exclusively on the action to be taken towards the offender,
the traditional model tends to ignore the needs of the victim in the process.
In fact, by depriving victims of a voice in the process,
the criminal justice system tends to negate them
the possibility to express their emotions and fears,
and overcome in so doing the trauma caused by the event.
To solve this problem,
these critics propose an alternative model of justice,
based on the repair of the harm
caused by the crime to the victims and the society,
rather than on the amount of punishment to be inflicted on the offender.
There are various methods to implement this model;
one of the most successful are restorative justice conferences.
Restorative justice conferences try to bring together
victims, offenders, and their families
to find a constructive solution together to the harms caused by the crime,
helped by an impartial mediator: generally, a police officer.
While the traditional system is based
on an antagonistic relationship between the state and offenders,
restorative justice conferences try to create a cooperative relationship
between all the parties involved, in a circular type of dynamic.
My idea is that,
while the antagonistic approach of the traditional system
rarely stimulates the offender to ask for forgiveness
and the victim to forgive,
the cooperative and circular nature of the restorative justice conference
creates the ideal context for this kind of exchange.
This idea is based on a series of studies conducted in Australia and New Zealand,
which have shown the extraordinary transformative potential of this model.
As we have seen, to be able to forgive
the victim needs to separate the identity of the criminal
from his behaviour;
for example, by identifying the external circumstances
that might have contributed to the offender’s actions.
The studies from Australia and New Zealand
demonstrate that the majority of the restorative justice conferences
are capable of sustaining this conceptual separation.
In fact, almost 70 percent of the victims interviewed in New Zealand
described the offender as a fundamentally good person
who had committed a wrong act;
while the victims interviewed in Australia
rarely rejected the offender as a person.
In contrast, as we have seen, to be able to apologise
offenders need to develop empathy towards their victims,
and understand the harm that their actions have provoked.
The Australian studies show that restorative justice conferences
are more effective than traditional criminal trials
in facilitating this type of transformation.
Indeed, while in traditional criminal trials
only 19 percent of the victims reported to have received an apology,
in restorative justice conferences these percentages spiked to 72 percent.
This data is particularly meaningful
since research has shown
that victims are more likely to forgive
when they receive an apology,
as one would expect.
Finally, in order to be able to forgive,
victims need to let go their anger
and develop compassion towards the offenders.
Once again, the studies conducted in Australia
prove the effectiveness of restorative justice conferences
in sustaining this emotional transformation.
In fact, while before the restorative justice conferences
63 percent of the victims felt anger towards their offenders,
these percentages halved after the conferences,
drastically lowering to 29 percent.
Conversely, if before the restorative justice conferences
only 19 percent of the victims felt compassion towards the offenders,
after the conferences these percentages doubled,
rocketing to 48 percent.
Hence, as these studies show,
a successfully completed restorative justice conference
can contribute to the creation
of a new relationship between the victim and the criminal,
and lead over time to forgiveness and reconciliation.
However, some critics suggest
that restorative justice is based on naïve and utopian ideas.
They emphasise the egoism that pervades many social relationships,
arguing that this challenges
the faith in the empathic virtues of man the restorative justice is based upon.
Psychological and experimental research shows, however,
that if we treat people honestly,
they will in turn be more inclined to behave honestly.
If we treat them as if they were reliable,
they will in turn act more reliably.
And if we give them an active responsibility,
they will assume it in constructive ways.
Trusting the human ability for empathy is thus not a naivety,
but a choice that's based
on a careful observation of the available data.
Restorative justice is not a utopian solution.
On the contrary, this model is currently implemented
in various Anglo-Saxon countries such as United States and Great Britain,
in countries devastated by the civil war, like Rwanda,
and in various other parts of the world, including Italy.
Despite progress, however, we are still at an embryonic stage.
The criminal justice system is currently rife with problems.
For example, as many of you probably know,
over the last few years we have witnessed
exponential growth in the number of prisoners
and extremely high levels of recidivism following release.
By labelling offenders as criminals,
we have pushed them to identify with their actions,
effectively hindering every possibility of change.
Instead, if we separate
the identity of the criminal from his actions,
and rethink what we mean by justice
and what we wish to obtain through its use,
we can create an alternative model
which focuses not so much on the infliction of punishment,
but on the well-being and maturation of all the parties involved:
victims, offenders, and the wider community.
Until today, we have always asked ourselves:
How much punishment should we inflict for this crime?
What if we instead started asking ourselves:
What can we do, to re-establish the lost harmony?
Thank you.
(Applause)