Child sexual abuse: Restorative justice ‘a confidential process’, says practitioner appointed to Spiritan programme

The Spiritan Congregation has set up a restorative justice programme comprised of independent experts to engage with survivors of historical abuse at schools and institutions run by the congregation.

Tim Chapman, who has been appointed to lead the restorative justice programme launched at Wednesday’s RDS press conference, described himself there as “a teacher, lecturer, university researcher and a practitioner in restorative practice and have been for the last 20 years”.

An independent restorative justice practitioner, he has been chairman of the Board of the European Forum for Restorative Justice since 2016 and is visiting professor at Glasgow’s Strathclyde University and at the Università degli Studi di Sassari in Sardinia.

A law graduate of the University of Warwick in England, he graduated with an MSc in applied social studies from the University of Ulster in 1975 before becoming assistant chief probation officer in Northern Ireland from 1975 until 1999. He has been a criminal justice consultant since then and was visiting lecturer in restorative practices at the University of Ulster University for 11 years until 2019.

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Restorative justice, he said on Wednesday, was “an informal process which allows somebody who has been harmed to engage in dialogue with the person or the body they say is harming them. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year in this project with various people. It requires a confidential process, it’s totally voluntary for both sides. It only works if both sides want to go ahead with it.”

He had been approached by the four men abused at Willow Park and Blackrock College, who hosted the press conference alongside Spiritan provincial Fr Martin Kelly, “during the summer last year, 2021, to talk to them about the possibility of a restorative approach to child sexual abuse in the schools.”

He “met with the Spiritans and the project got going in September last year, with a meeting”. The Spiritans “I must say, showed great commitment in trying to fit in with the wishes and the needs of the victims,” he said.

‘Blackrock and Willow Park’

Over the past year he had “met 19 ex-students of Blackrock and Willow Park. They’ve all been abused. The nature of the abuse is depressingly similar but the impact on them, their stories, are all unique to them,” he said. “Two pressing cases are with the gardaí.” There had been nine restorative meetings “with Spiritans and two [school] principals”.

For him, in meeting the men making allegations of abuse, “the extraordinary thing is that they remember it as if it was yesterday. And we’re talking of things that may have happened 40, more than 40 years ago. But they can still smell the perpetrator, they can still see the saliva on the edge of his mouth, they can still feel the hand on them. It’s very difficult to listen to.

“And then they would talk about the impact it has had on their lives and that varies again. Some of them, on the surface you’d think are very, very successful people, but underneath they’re still carrying a very hurt 12-year old child inside them, for most of their lives.”

There was also “a certain anger that it has taken so long for them to have the opportunity to speak about it”, he said.

He added that Spiritans’ safeguarding officer Liam Lally and Fr Kelly “have responded with great compassion. They have believed the stories, which is very important, because some of these individuals told the story when they were kids and were not believed.”