 I've worked in a community over the last 20 years with guys who use violence against criminal partners and their children for much of our time. So, and those men are often mandated to be there, but there's also volunteer men as well. For much of that time, it's been more recent that I've actually been using restorative justice as a language to describe my work in practice, really it's resonated quite loudly with me as I've learned more about it with really work that we've been doing for about the last 15 years at this community organization. So we work with both the men and their families and this approach to a restorative approach to working with intimate partner violence that's really been developed with a number of people, Merriven Berwash-Brennan at Bridges, Jane Donovan at Newstart and more recently, cultivating these conversations of the violence against women community with Emma Harrison, I had a shelter movement fans for a number of years, most of her own singer, so I just wanted to show to them. Here's my own work. I initially was trained with Alan Pence in Duluth and that work remains still very valuable to me. I could pull into narrative therapy circles with Alan Jenkins and Michael White. So that was another influence in the work that I'm gonna describe a little bit today. And then more recently than there used to, Jennifer Lawrence worked around restorative justice and that's really been helpful in pushing the work even further. I'm gonna talk a little bit. One of the places that the restorative justice lens has given me is to really, for me to reconsider what I think about justice. I think for years I've kind of conceived justice to something lawyers were doing. I have two siblings that are lawyers, so I'm a national of it, but I have a close of lawyers. That restorative justice was, or the justice was something that was happening in the Department of Justice. And more recently as I've been thinking about how to define justice and thinking about ideas of well maybe we could be thinking rather than prosecution, protest and so forth as justice that we could actually be thinking about that the healing repair of the harms that have happened. Maybe I could be thinking about that as justice. When I start to think about that as justice really many of my colleagues and restoring values around safety, quality, respect, many of my colleagues and I have been working on that project for a long time. The shelter movement has been working on trying to restore women's safety and respect and integrity and equality for a long time. So it made sense to me if I could loosen up this definition of justice and pull it away from the Department of Justice only and think about actually the work that we might be doing to try and help work with women in a way that was repairing and healing the harms. But in fact, maybe justice is happening in our offices, in our community centers. So I wanna be clear just as I walk a little bit down the road, I'm just obviously gonna be talking about a bit small sliver of the practice that we do. But I wanna be clear that I'm not talking about restoring intimate relationships, but I'm talking about restoring justice and intimate partner violence. I'm talking about restoring equality, safety, repairing harms. So again, the relationship may be over but the guy can still take responsibility to repair the harms that he's created. So it's not dependent on that coming back. And that those can be very meaningful conversations for a guy to take responsibility in front of his ex-partner or his partner about taking responsibility. It's not dependent on necessarily than continuing intimate relationship. I also wanna be clear. I'm not talking about putting all these people in a room together necessarily. Some women may want that and it may be safe and the workers think it's a good idea and so forth. That's, it's not, I think it was sort of justice. Again, it's a lens, it's a theoretical framework. The actual practices are gonna be very dependent on all the people involved and particular situations. So some women will, that'll be a good idea and some women that will not be a good idea. And at the same time, even if there's not that conversation together that can, that restorative sensibility remains important to me and to the work. And I'm also not trying to take incarceration or incapacitation off the table through restorative justice. We still need processes that if a guy is not going to take responsibility that we can still create safety in our community for those who have been harmed. So I just wanna be clear about that. One thing, if we can go to that. So I just wanna give you a little bit of an overview, a slice of the practice of working with men. So within this organization, there'll be people working with women and working with the men primarily. I'm not gonna be talking about guys who use violence against their female partners. That's primarily configuration. I work with, there's lots more complexity to that that I wish I had more time to unpack. But why don't we go to the next slide? Where's that? Is that up to me? Okay. So in terms of, just to give you a brief overview of this process of working with a guy and how we've slowed this down. To be clear, there's more time in Nova Scotia in terms of the Department of Justice not working on intimate partner violence or sexual violence. Makes sense to me why that moratorium is in place and the concerns that we have around that. So this restorative approach has really been developed outside of that in the body of the community. So what I have here is I'm starting with A. So there's a process here of kind of moving up. The first part is about working with a guy separately from his partner without any contact. And it's not just working with a guy. Maybe also working with his surrounding community or banding groups. And so the part A of this process is again, starting from the bottom, what part of restorative justice allows more robust understanding of what take responsibility might look like. So parts of that, I will work with the men individually first before they ever get any contact formal and the contact may be face to face, but again, there's many other ways contact could happen, which I'll explain. So the ground level here is acknowledging the abuse is part of taking responsibility. And the next part would be a plan to stop the abuse. So what's the man's plan? And we've got to develop that all before there's any contact. Get the engagement into what the effects are of the abuse. And then upon studying the effects and looking at, well, what healing and repair look like in this process? And those would be conversations about restoring values and transformation and so forth. As I move through that process, then for some guys, I'm gonna move on to having some kind of contact either through social workers, through video, through in-person, or whatever the woman feels is a good idea and the workers involved think is a good idea. Then the contact I would be moving through those stages again where he's actually acknowledging the abuse in front of her, that he's sharing a plan with her, but what his plan is to stop the abuse. The sure doesn't happen. Sharing with her and hearing from her about what he thinks may be the effects are and she'll be also able to speak to those effects and then looking at issues of healing and repair the effects. So that's a general overview of the process. I just want to slow it down a bit in terms of looking at the importance of some of the work that we do before we've ever had any contact. So the acknowledgement of the abuse, of course, many of the men who come into the process are ambivalent and best of those actually showing up. And so there's a lot of minimization of the seriousness of the use and denying that there's a lot of other people. So I don't want to have those issues worked up in front of the worker. I want to work with that before he ever gets because I thought the situation where she is, if we didn't do that work, if they haven't really acknowledging that he did it and this is a problem and studying the seriousness of it, that it doesn't happen. It sets up a situation where of course she's trying to convince him of the seriousness of what he's done. That's not a very satisfying experience for many women to be in that position. So they're trying to convince him that this is what happened and this is what my experience was. And with him denying and minimizing that, that's not going to be helpful. So again, working with the guy to push through that towards that acknowledgement is important before he ever had contact. Then looking at a plan to stop the abuse so that the guy works out a plan, he's gonna consult with her through this process. That'll be the second stage, but I think he needs to take responsibility in thinking about this himself. He needs to come up with a plan, how he's gonna slow down, study some of the warning signs and so forth for how to stop this violence and then some sense of what he needs to stay connected with so we can interrupt that. Then we're also going to have him look at the, invite him to consider what her experience might have been like. So this becomes a really important part of the process, not as a substitute for listening to her or hearing from her, but part of what I want to work through is that the guys is kind of trying to put themselves in their shoes, so he's not in front of her being defensive or saying you don't need to feel that way, you shouldn't feel that way, that's not what I meant. All that kind of stuff, I thought I'm very not feeling, not repairing if he still hasn't really kind of put himself in front of her shoes before he gets into the context with her. Often guys are thinking in the beginning stage that she's gonna be really happy that I changed and there's gonna be some congratulatory response from the partner, often that's, I mean, partners are often happy that he's changed, but that's usually not what they lead with, what they lead with is their best off and they're very angry that they've lived with this. And I'm gonna make sure the guy before he ever gets a reasonable contact with her around these issues that he can absorb that, that he gets, that's probably important, that he gets what the values are there, that anger is connected to it and the fact that she was thinking that her anger stems from wanting to stand up against violence and the injustice has played out in their relationship and that he might be able to see in her anger the same values that he's trying to take a stand for now as he's trying to take responsibility. And then looking at feeling the repair of the effects of the abuse, so we'll get him to think about it. Of course, she needs to be asked what's gonna be helpful here but also what needs to happen is he needs to be thinking about that. First it's not gonna be good enough for him to go into the room and say what do you want me to do? Like it's just her problem, the burden's on her to come up with how to fix all this stuff that she'll actually be consulted. Then the guy would come up but then the pawn's kind of laying this foundation that there may be some contact created where he's acknowledging the abuse and these are often for women to actually get to, so I'll have conversations with guys taking responsibility in front of her and for the women to get the opportunity to hear the guy who was blaming her say that. You know, the head guy said no, I was blaming you for the violence and I was wrong. I know that probably made you feel crazy to think that I was blaming you for the violence. When we've been trying to convince women for years that you're not to blame, you're not to blame, but actually the guy saying it to her who was doing the blaming of her is often very powerful for women, very important that they have access to that. Also in terms of acknowledging the abuse, we can go through that process. So looking at him sharing the plan to stop the abuse that we have also heard of it, just want to finish. And then also looking at not only healing for parents of the relationship or in terms of healing the effects of the woman, but also the children and so forth. So there's a lot more in those conversations maybe we'll get that back in tomorrow. I just want to draw your attention to the pamphlets that we put on the table. Just in terms of as an example, it's a documentary that I've been involved with and it's going to come up next year and I just want to put an end to it. As it was a woman who had been beaten up by her partner for two years and 20 years later she met him on the streets of Toronto and she told herself at that time I never see him, I'm going to ask him if I'll let me interview him on camera about our relationship 20 years ago. Meanwhile during that 20 years she had joined about her women's movement. She said post-traumatic stress, she couldn't sleep, she carried all my attention with her. And so low and behold, she didn't meet up with him again and he agreed to be interviewed on camera. And so they had this push, they said she read some of my writing and sent it down to me and I could see them trying to have these restorative conversations and see that how, what they were trying to reach for in terms of healing repair, he was trying to reach for it in terms of healing repair what he had done, he had lived with this for 20 years and so they flew me back and forth from Toronto a few times. And so what ended up happening was we had these restorative conversations about intimate partner violence in the lights of Hollywood and it was really quite something. So it's going to be picked up at Margaret Atwood, tweeted it, Arcade Fire, people and so forth. So it really exploded through the room so I encourage people to look at that, you can see the trailer online.