We started with sexual abuse in our community because that was one of the root causes of the chaos we were seeing on a daily basis. We certainly had no intention of starting from there; however, we couldn't avoid it.
Once we made the decision to deal with sexual abuse, we then developed a process that we called a community approach. That community approach takes in the RCMP, probations, and justice people, such as prosecutors, defence lawyers, and judges.
Once we got into that arena, there were timeframes that we were presented with. For example, once we became engaged with a family, how were we going to make sure that we remained connected with the family until the justice piece was finished? That also included child and family services, because for a lot of the children who were disclosing, automatically child and family services became one of the programs. We had to make sure that we were working within their parameters of making sure the children were safe.
When we first started the process, we had to develop it from the Anishinabe philosophy and values. When we developed our assessment tools, we based them on the four dimensions of a person. They all have to be in balance.
For example, if the offender came in with addiction problems, then the first thing we had to do was to make sure that person cleaned that part of his or her life. Sometimes that required residential care. Sometimes we had to develop a community process for the person rather than have them go to treatment. The process also had to take in individuals, families, the community, and the nation. These were the levels we looked at for assessment.
We also used the concept of circles for the ongoing work that had to be done. That involved individual circles. Next were circles with the whole family—the victim and the whole family or the offender and the whole family. The third type of circle involved the victim and the offender coming together.
We use traditional ways of healing, such as sweat lodges. In the beginning, sweat lodges were all we had, but in the years since, we've brought a couple of other lodges back to our community—the fasting lodge and the moon lodge.
So we had all these traditional ways of working with individuals and families, but we also had to use contemporary ways, including seeing therapists for one-on-one counselling, one-on-one therapy, or group therapy. Years later we also were able to incorporate on-the-land types of prevention programs and other types of therapies that were more in line with our culture.
Those were the ways we worked with people in the beginning. Then about half-way into our work with the justice program we brought in the judge, the crown, the defence, and the RCMP. We set up a sentencing circle, which is exactly the same as a court trial and court, except that all the evidence is pre-recorded and reports have been distributed to all the key people, and everybody is on board in terms of what the recommendations are asking for.
We have a position paper on incarceration because of our observations of what happens to people when they are gone away to jail. Basically everybody has a time-out kind of situation, because the victim and the families that are left behind and the community that is left behind cannot really do very much. The key disrupter of the whole family system is gone to jail for maybe 18 months, and that person is sitting over there. There's a lot of work that person has to do back home. There's a lot of restitution and a lot of repairs that have to be made to victims and the families.
So that's the whole intent of the community approach. It's the offender who has done wrong and it's the offender who has to make right all the wrong he has caused and all the harm he has caused. Without that person—
