About the Practitioner
Valerie primarily works in the the area of regulation in the government sector. She encourages and supports the use of Restorative Practice among regulators to resolve conflicts, address harms and make amends if possible, and ensure harms do not continue. Take the new aged care legislation as an example. The new Aged Care Act is human rights focused. When human rights are abused-or simply not respected, conversations based on Restorative Practice will build awareness of what human rights mean for older persons receiving care and for respecting those rights in the future.
In many cases, restorative conversations and restorative circles are a more important regulatory intervention than issuing fines and sanctions to an aged care provider for being non compliant. Sometimes this will happen as well of course, but restorative circles enable the harms experience by an older person to be directly and inclusively addressed. It's important when harm has been done, to bring people together to discuss the issues and determine a process by which it can be corrected.
In human services, there is a strong moral imperative to do no harm, and should harm be done, ways of stopping the behaviour need to be developed and implemented. Justice should heal and Restorative Justice offers opportunity for that to occur in regulating hospitals, health care centres, schools, universities and colleges, and child care centres for example.
Valerie emphasises the importance of regulators being good listeners, open to criticism and receptive to introducing Restorative Practices in a legal/regulatory framework. It's important that regulators meet face to face with stakeholders, listening to their ideas and encouraging them to be innovative in how they might go about meeting standards.That said, sometimes regulators need to take control to prevent harm. Restorative Justice circles do not solve every problem regulators encounter.
Many credit Professor John Braithwaite for their introduction and subsequent passion for the processes of Restorative Justice and Restorative Practice, however none more so than Valerie, John's wife.
They met when they attended kindergarten together in their hometown of Ipswich. Valerie disliked sleep time so much at kindie that she cried and kept everyone awake, including John. Yet 16 years later they married. 53 years on, John works at all hours of the night and keeps Valerie awake. They practice tolerance and forgiveness restoratively.
Valerie says that John has championed justice, inclusion, equality and peaceful resolution of conflict throughout his life.
John's father Richard 'Dick', was one of only six of the 2,424 POWs, to survive the Sandakan Death Marches. Valerie believes that lessons learnt from Richard, played an important part shaping the way John has led and continues to live his life. John's Peacebuilding Compared Project which has involved fieldwork in conflict zones across the world for the past 20 years has brought the whole family into thinking about how we might all do better to live our lives in a more restorative way.
Valerie is a psychologist by training and strongly believes in the importance of relationships to define who we are, to reflect on our failings, and to enable us to grow and develop.
Valerie has applied her knowledge of psychology and Restorative Justice to regulation since the 1990's.
Valerie advocates for the use of Restorative Justice through government advisory groups on regulation: Restorative Justice is a way of ensuring people have support, a voice, and are listened to, resulting in them becoming empowered to find their own solutions, not having solutions imposed upon them.
Over a number of years, Valerie has learnt much about Restorative Justice from her students, now colleagues, many of whom have successfully completed doctoral and masters dissertations in areas as diverse as taxpaying, family violence, crime, school bullying, work health and safety, emotional work, child protection, and the environment.
Valerie has also benefitted from the insights of her students from China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, South Korea,Indonesia, South Africa and closer to home, Indigenous Australians. They have broadened her horizons and deepened her understanding of what it truly means to practice restoratively cross culturally.
Organisation
- Academic - lecturer,
- Academic - researcher
- University
- Child and Family support services
- Education - University
- Culture change
- Health and well being
- Human rights
- Policy development
- Program development
- Research
- Responding to child sexual abuse
- Responding to sexual assault/harm
- Rights of older people
- School - K-12
- Sexual assault