Cuestionamiento de la idea de vocación docente

I consider myself a feminist, social constructivist researcher with a particular interest in narrative whose research topic initially emerged from practice, as much RJ theory

102 does (Ashworth, 2002). As a mediator, I became increasingly interested at the abundance of referrals of young women from schools and various branches of the criminal justice system, and as a feminist researcher, I was interested in women’s experiences, particularly in areas where women’s voices were missing or underrepresented, which the literature review demonstrated was the case for RJ.

The problem in the literature was not only that young women did not enjoy their experiences in police-facilitated RJ (Maxwell et al, 2004) or that some of the positive associations—such as the decline in offending for young women after RJ—could not be proven due to the scarcity of young female offenders in RJ (Sherman et al., 2008), but that theorists and researcher observers often spoke about them or on their behalf. In the literature review, this was presented as part of a trend in restorative justice which presented women as too vulnerable to decide for themselves whether or not to participate in restorative justice. Although surveys have often been collected on satisfaction, fairness, and other thoughts and feelings, the data have not often been separated out by gender (Daly and Stubbs, 2006; Elis, 2005). Surveys may also not provide enough information to explore the complex relationship between decreased recidivism but increased hostility and frustration researchers reported women experiencing (Maxwell et al., 2004, Daly, 2008). It seemed to me that the call that Daly and Chesney-Lind (1988) made for increased qualitative research on female offenders’ experiences in the criminal justice system was now needed for restorative justice.

In researching vulnerable and marginalised women I sought out methodologies which would empower them, so that the research, as McCold and Wachtel (2003:2) have advocated for RJ, was done “with” them rather than “to” them. In doing research ‘with’ women, therefore, I wanted an interview setting and a form of analysis, which was respectful and empowering, and I wanted to as Crossley (2000: 39) has said, “to present individual (women’s) experiences in a ‘realistic’ way which appreciates both their ‘personal’ idiosyncratic nature, and also their linguistic and discursive structuring.”

As a social constructivist, I believed that any narrative produced in an interview setting would be “a joint production of the teller and the told” (Bruner, 1990: 123). Riessman (1993: 16, 65), for example, has described “research as a chorus of voices” where “narratives are laced with social discourses and power relations, which do not remain

103 constant over time…[meaning] there is no reason to assume that an individual’s narrative will, or should be, entirely consistent from one setting to the next.” From the beginning of the process I understood that I, too, would be within my narrators’ accounts, and I, therefore, was prepared to engage with my own talk as well as that of the participants. However, since I was mostly interested in hearing from young women, I was particularly attracted to interview styles and analyses, which suggested participants women were “given a voice,” which has been expressed as a specific feminist interest in restorative justice (Verrecchia, 2009: 86). Behind this dissertation also lay a profound belief in storytelling, which I carried with me from my previous studies in literature and language as well as my frequent moves between countries where I was asked to tell my life story over and over again.

Walter Benjamin (1999), in a powerful essay on the “death” of the storyteller, mourned the passing of oral literature in favour of written texts which separate the writer from the reader. Benjamin suggested that the movement towards writing threatened the immediacy and the power (hinted at by Bruner, 1990) that came from having a storyteller and a listener in the same room, or better yet in front of a collective audience (Benjamin, 1999, Bruner, 1990). For Benjamin, novels and newspapers signalled the end of a crucial tradition of community brought together because of and through storytelling (Benjamin, 1999).

My previous work, however, had convinced me that although the oral story has diminished in popularity as Benjamin (1999) predicted, the importance people placed in the oral story is still very much present, only rather than in a public house, storytelling, which people agreed was significant, now took place in different areas. Qualitative research, in a variety of disciplines, is, of course, one such location where the story a person has to tell is thought to be important. Narrative psychology and therapy is another (Crossley, 2000). And, of course, connected to this research is storytelling in both the community and criminal justice system through mediation and restorative justice, where true to Bruner’s (1990: 50) view of storytelling having a “peacekeeping function,” stories are told by individuals in a conflict in order to “resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future” (Marshall, 1996: 37).

104 The literature review described that restorative justice has become associated with “storytelling” (Umbreit, 1998a) and how some types of restorative justice (namely victim-offender mediation), go even further in deliberately shaping offender stories, with the help of a mediator, into ones that show remorse and accept responsibility (Bradshaw, 1998). As Bradshaw (1998: 16) suggests in the victim-offender training manual, such shaping is meant to move offenders away from the typical excuses that normally occur in their texts.

It is through storytelling that “transformation” in restorative justice is supposed to occur, although whether or not a transformation happens is a point of contention in the literature (see Daly, 2002: 66-67). As a practitioner of mediation, I had encountered a few transformations but for the most part I recognized that restorative justice was just a few hours in the lives of the young people I worked with. Once they left the room in our community centre or the school, they returned to their schools, families, and communities. While research shows us that some experiences can indeed act as turning points for young people who are criminally involved (Laub and Sampson, 1993, Sampson and Laub, 1996, Sampson et al., 2006), it is hard to evaluate whether restorative justice/storytelling alone can accomplish a turning point without taking into consideration other factors, as has been argued by Maxwell et al (2004) and Hoyle et al (2002).

In designing my research questions, I examined the general literature on young women offenders; research on restorative justice; and my practical experience. I emerged with questions concerning offending, identity, restorative justice, and community:

1. What do young women describe as major influences or turning points to offending?

2. How are offending identities described alongside other gendered identities? 3. What are young women’s experiences of restorative justice conferences? 4. How do young women see themselves in relation to their communities

subsequent to restorative justice, and to what community, if any, do they “belong”?

One purpose of the research was to explore the life pathways of young women that brought them to offending and then perhaps out of offending, paying attention to risks they encountered and resources they had. Another purpose was also to closely examine

105 the way young women described they felt about the offences they had committed to see if their accounts after RJ were similar or dissimilar to ‘typical’ offender narratives, and finally to hear about young women’s experiences in restorative justice.

One of the constants of the research was my desire to use narratives to explore restorative justice. Since the point of restorative justice is for individuals to have the chance to talk about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings in full, and the effects of doing so is supposed to change the way offenders think about what they did, I needed a methodology that allowed the interviewees the time and space to explore their identities and life stories in relation to offending in a similar way that restorative justice (hopefully) had.

As I was making contacts for an interview sample and beginning to read about interview styles and schedules and analysis, I considered grounded theory and thematic analysis, but decided that since these types of analysis break stories down (Riessman, 1990: 1195), the whole life narrative would be lost and therefore a sense of narrative identity (McAdams, 1993) as well as a sense of the “ ‘world’ recreated by the narrator” (Riessman, 1990: 1195). I also noted what Crossley (2000: 39) has suggested is “important from a feminist perspective:” “they [participants] need to maintain an element of individuality, agency and autonomy, and not simply to ‘die’ into the fragmentary, disordered condition characterized by postmodern theorists.” Thus, even from an early planning stage, narrative analysis seemed to fit best with my research questions which had to do with identity, offending, restorative justice and the social “world” (Riessman, 1990) around them.