“You can judge, but that’s not what we do in science.”
-Gary Slutkin, M.D., CeaseFire Executive Director, Professor of Epidemiology and International Health at University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health
A few weeks ago I saw the documentary The Interrupters (trailer below) at Nashville’s independent movie theater, The Belcourt. The documentary follows three “violence interrupters” over the course of a year in Chicago, documenting their work intervening in interpersonal and gang conflicts and offering alternatives to violence in conflict resolution. The Interrupters work for a program called CeaseFire, which views violence in these Chicago communities from a public health perspective as pathology or disease, and recognizes it as learned behavior. They break down the thought process of participants in violence in the following way:
1. I have a grievance.
2. My grievance justifies violence.
Their approach is to intervene between steps 1 and 2 to facilitate a nonviolent outcome.
When I began teaching, I remember being astounded by many students’ lack of what I thought of as “coping skills” for handling grievances (which were usually some form of feeling disrespected). I tried to address this problem by establishing a “Peace Table” in my classroom where I would mediate student conflicts using posted guidelines. Students would then have to collaborate to complete a form (pictured below) detailing the conflict and how they could behave differently in the future to avoid a similar problem. In some cases, as students became more familiar with the guidelines and if the conflict were low-intensity, they could resolve their issue without my assistance. Sometimes it worked better than others. But I like to think that it helped at least one student think about conflict resolution differently going forward.
(Clearly I created this form at a staff meeting or in some other setting that encouraged mutitasking with pen and paper.)
So yeah. We can choose to be disgusted by and judgmental of violent behavior (or any behavior we disagree with), or we can choose to understand why it’s happening, figure out ways to help minimize it, and work toward a better way. Hell, we might even learn a little something for ourselves in that case. And as is always important to remember, violence in our culture does not begin and end with the modern ghetto, inner city, or low-SES individual.