ACA Blog

During my career as a police officer I recall moments when compassion and a second chance were warranted. It was through law enforcement that I realized character is not always accurately reflected by a criminal record or a bad decision. I have learned that people function according to their level of awareness. If people do not have access to information or resources conducive to awareness, then, they become students of trial and error.

It seems like when the “day goes wrong” in the criminal justice system, it really goes wrong. I have been spending a great deal of time thinking about just how to write this blog. Then I realized I had been thinking about it for a month, and it is just time to write.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about social justice and how the concept can be applied to our region. According to Chung & Bemak (2012) Social justice can be defined as issues that involve the individual, the family, the community, the wider society, and even the international community. It refers to unfair treatment or inequities that have resulted from racism, sexism, socioeconomics, sexual orientation, religion, ableism and other “isms” all o which affect quality of life.

I live in the Midwest (Missouri) and have been enduring over 100 degree weather now for too many days. Not only am I unmotivated, but all my outdoor plants have died. My yard has a few weeds and my grass lies dormant. Snow has never sounded so good. In the middle of this horribly hot summer I have had an experience that I will never forget. A mentally ill client, with legal problems herself, has become a victim of a horrendous crime. She opened the front door to her apartment in the middle of the night and was brutally beaten and raped.

I do a lot of social consciousness lectures and presentations in my work as a consultant. One of the things I’ve continually stressed is the need to learn from and engage in each other’s civil rights efforts because these are essentially our own. This seems to puzzle many people, so I use examples of some of the more successful civil rights outcomes of the 1960s. Many groups, such as the Black Panther Party, understood that their sociopolitical agenda was in fact part of a larger global effort for all persons of color to actively overcome the racially oppressive and imperialist contexts in which they lived. Even while the settings and players were different, as the BLP and other organizations understood, the system of oppression and the pain of loss it caused were shared by all. The shared value was of dismantling that system.

March, recognized as Women’s History Month, is drawing to a dreary and demoralizing close. To many women, it hasn’t appeared there was much cause for celebration lately. Women’s reproductive freedom – and it with it our potential for full and equal participation in society – has been under near-constant assault recently by some lawmakers and religious groups.

I am in the midst of teaching a course on social justice in which I use Sue and Sue’s (2008) well known text which requires an examination of areas of personal and systemic prejudice, bias and privilege. It is within this framework that I have been assessing the sexual abuse scandal at Penn State. Rereading Mark Kiselica’s introductory remarks (who coincidentally attended Penn State for his doctorate) was a timely reminder that we are both the products of and contributors to our culture. As I’ve read numerous articles on what the Penn State story entailed it has become clear that the culture at this university both produced and supported behaviors and beliefs while maintaining spoken and unspoken rules around who could speak up and who would be believed.

No wonder the clash between Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan is so confusing. Each seems to be using a different metaphor in their moral thinking. (See my blog 2 weeks ago or, better yet, H. Richard Niebuhr’s The Responsible Self’.) For the most part, Kohlberg uses ‘man-the-lawmaker’ to guide his description of the development of moral consciousness—justice and the order of community are two of his driving ideas. This metaphor requires answers to these three questions: 1. What is the law governing this situation? 2. What authority requires obedience to this law? and 3. What is the punishment for disobeying this law? Even in stage 3 when he talks about good motives and intentions, man-the-lawmaker is being followed because these are an important part of determining punishment in any court of law. This stage and further stages note that it is human beings who make and enforce the rules and that human beings are not as rigid as the legalist morals might imply. Justice has a human side.

It’s getting difficult to watch the news. It has been difficult for some time, with all of the problems that the world faces: poverty, disease, natural disasters, and economic woes. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve been verbally accosted with all of the “bad news makes popular news” mentality lately. It is important to be informed about current affairs around the world, but, in the U.S., we seem to thrive on bad news. I think that a lot of the fodder for negative reporting comes from our adversarial political system. It is no secret that we are a nation divided, with several smaller political factions thrown in to the mix to keep things fresh. It is in these times that counselors have the most important role to play: tending to the needs of the people in difficult times, when spirits are low.

The below information in quotes was posted on a blog entitled, “The Conscience of a Liberal.” “Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life." (Paul Krugman, 2008).