• The Forgiveness Project

One evening back in 2002, local television news reported the story of a three-year-old girl who had died in a London hospital after mistakenly being given laughing gas instead of oxygen. As the parents, lawyers and hospital staff emerged from the coroner’s court, the interviewer thrust a microphone under the father’s nose and asked how he felt about the consultant responsible.

I expected to hear bitter words of revenge and hatred but instead the father said simply that he had crossed the room, hugged the tormented consultant, and told him 'I forgive you'. It was a particularly moving moment of television, not least because in the lead up to the Iraq war the bellicose rhetoric of revenge and pay-back were grabbing all the headlines.

The F Word

As a journalist it inspired me to do something different; so began a year-long search for similar stories of forgiveness and reconciliation. The result – thanks to sponsorship from human rights campaigner Anita Roddick - was a mobile exhibition called The f Word: images of forgiveness. I called it The f Word, because, through meeting both victims and perpetrators of crime and violence, I’d come to realise that forgiveness was not easy, weak or glib, nor the privilege of some superior spiritual wisdom, but difficult, costly, and painful… if also potentially transformative.

The Forgiveness Project grew from the exhibition. It is a charitable organisation, collecting personal stories of forgiveness, reconciliation and restorative justice. We provide workshops and materials for prisons and schools. These move from exploring concepts of truth, justice, forgiveness and revenge, to personal responsibility at an individual and societal level. The project has neither religious nor political affiliations.

If empathy connects us as human-beings, then the testimonies give insight and understanding into the lives of those who have been harmed as well as those who have harmed others.

Personal testimonies have a powerful impact. This is why we focus on stories in our prison programme and have people come in and share their stories in person.

Marian Partington’s sister was murdered by Fred and Rosemary West. For Marian, ‘forgiveness began with murderous rage’ when she realised – in a moment of intense anger – that she too was capable of killing and that therefore, at some profound level, she was no different from the Wests’.

Richard McCann’s mother was the first victim of Peter Sutcliffe. His life fell apart; as an adult, he even served a prison sentence. Now a successful motivational speaker and writer, he helps prisoners realise that the difference between their life and his is only that he made different choices.

Peter Woolf, once a hardened career criminal and drug addict, turned his life round following a restorative justice conference with two of his victims. 

Self-forgiveness, it seems, is the hardest thing of all.

Exploring forgiveness through the experience and testimonies of others is tough work for prisoners. In the past two years we have worked in five UK prisons, including the therapeutic prison, Grendon Underwood. The lifers at Grendon admitted that it was a subject they were scared to visit, full of pain and regret.

However, I have observed how once prisoners reflect on others’ experiences and relate them to their own lives, attitudes can shift dramatically.

Above all, the programme gives prisoners a chance to face up to the harm they have done and the harm that has been done to them. It helps them come to that point of letting go of some of the resentment and grievances which keep them stuck. 'Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past,' is the way psychologist Jerry Jampolsky has put it. Of all the definitions of forgiveness – and there are many – this is the one that prisoners seem to relate to most.

The Forgiveness Project does not sell forgiveness, it doesn’t offer 12 Steps to forgiveness, or tell people they should forgive. In that way it has no agenda. The stories are about the struggle for understanding, for empathy, for letting go of the grip of the perpetrator. Every story is a journey.

Jane Corrin, Community Integration Manager at HMP High Down recently commented, 'of those prisoners who participated in the Forgiveness Project’s Restorative Justice Programme, the response was quite phenomenal'. Comments from prisoners include 'breath-taking', 'inspirational', and 'it allows you to come to terms with yourself, so that you can come to terms with what you’ve done to others'.

The Forgiveness Project Prison Programme

There are three stages. We start with a one day introduction for a group of up to 50 who have expressed interest in the project and the work. From this, prisoners self-select and up to 20 join the three-day forgiveness workshop.

Having presented stories in film, words, pictures and in person, we move on to focus on prisoners’ own stories. Using life-lines to map out their experiences on paper, they identify patterns and key triggers in an attempt to untangle their lives. The emphasis is on change; what is needed to break destructive patterns?

Prisoners are given cell work to complete in the evenings to complement each day’s discussion. It is stressed that no one is obliged to forgive; the point is to engage in a personal exploration of the subject. The workshop provides the opportunity for prisoners to address the harm they have caused and, most importantly, to explore the relationship between themselves as victims and the victims of their crimes.

Following this workshop, participants are offered the opportunity to attend a 20 hour digital video and television production course which by October this year will be Open College Network (OCN) accredited. The aim is to produce a short film or films, exploring forgiveness. The prisoners discuss and agree on the target audience, either within or outside the prison.

Producing the films allows prisoners some distance from their own crime or life experience whilst they continue their individual journey toward forgiveness. This distancing method can also prove successful through drama and writing workshops, although these usually explore visceral targets such as anger, crime, drugs and relationships. The broader sweep of issues faced along an individual’s journey toward forgiveness can be infinitely more subtle.

The courses end with one day filming in the prison. Every idea, image, script and performance is contributed by the prisoners. The result so far has been extraordinary in its depth and understanding of the subject matter.  

The Forgiveness Project postbag reveals some terrible sentimentality about the meaning of forgiveness. What is so gratifying about the short films the prisoners produce as an expression of their own life experiences, is that they are real, raw and without a grain of slushiness.

We live in a punitive society where it is expected that settling scores will make us feel better. These stories show otherwise, by looking at crime and violence through a different lens. Examining the healing of breaches, redressing of imbalances and the restoration of broken relationships through the framework of restorative justice is a way of transforming both internal and external conflict.