Domestic Violence Restorative Circles
Overview
The DVRC Program serves people who have used and survived domestic violence. Its primary purpose is to help communities recover from harm, prevent new violence, transform out of dominant norms that enable violence, and thrive. Like all MAP programs, the DVRC Program is based in the belief that people connected to communities are more likely to flourish, treat themselves and each other with care, and respond humanely to anyone who causes or survives harm.
• Transition Circle Candidate Referral form (for professionals referring people who have criminal domestic assault records)
• Community Volunteer Application form (for community members who want to help people who have used or survived violence)
COVID Video Series
Check out our series of brief, informal chats about COVID-based challenges for people whose jobs focus on preventing and responding to domestic violence.
Sponsored by a St. Louis County Covid Relief Grant.
Transition Circles
Every DVRC transition circle is made up of four or five trained community volunteers and a participant who has faced legal consequences multiple times for using domestic abuse. Before volunteers become part of a circle, DVRC staff train them in basic domestic-violence dynamics and a community-based dialogue process intended to help participants build awareness, repair harm they have caused, live non-violently, and contribute to helping their communities thrive. Completing the program according to its rigorous expectations is usually one of the participant’s post-incarceration probation conditions.
Circles meet for two hours once a week over seven or eight months. After gradually getting to know and trust each other, volunteers and participants discuss what participants can do to repair harm their violence has caused and thrive without violence in the future. Throughout the participant’s time in the program they are on the caseload of a specific Arrowhead Regional Corrections probation officer and they appear for frequent review hearings in front of a specific Minnesota Sixth Judicial District judge. If a participant is unable or unwilling to abide by program expectations, they may face consequences including jail or prison time.
Eventually volunteers help participants craft written commitments to harm repair and non-violence that become part of their probation conditions. Ideally those commitments reflect not just a desire to behave differently but also change away from beliefs that support using violence and toward beliefs that . After the participant, circle volunteers, DVRC staff, the probation officer, and the judge are approve the goals and agreements, the participant’s circle process is officially complete. Once that happens, most circles choose to meet once a month for three months to discuss the participant’s progress. Even after the participant has completed that follow-up period, the probation officer and judge help them maintain their commitments to repairing harm and living non-violently. Violating or failing to abide by commitments can trigger legal consequences.
Support Circles
DVRC staff offer voluntary, individualized support circles for all survivors of violence used by transition circle participants. Most survivors initially decline the offer. Some accept it after a few weeks or months. Some simply stay in intermittent contact with DVRC staff. The offer never expires, and support circles can be anything a survivor wants or needs including conversation, help accessing or navigating non-MAP services, and emotional support. Every aspect of every support circle, including how many volunteers it includes and what their backgrounds are, is decided in close collaboration with the survivor.
Required and Desired Transition Circle Outcomes
Maintaining and completing the transition-circle process successfully requires participants to show they are taking responsibility for violence they have used and harm it has caused, are starting to repair harm where possible, and are clearly making credible commitments to living non-violently and continuing to repair harm. Ideally, they will also show that their beliefs no longer support using violence.
Some examples of evidence a transition circle participant is meeting required outcomes:
Survivors or their advocates describe, uncoerced, how the participant has done or is doing it.
Participant clearly describes the violence they have used without minimizing it, denying it, blaming it on anyone or anything else, or otherwise diminishing what they did, how it harmed survivors and the community, and what repairing that harm will require.
Participant honors survivors’ descriptions of violence the participant used and the harm it has inflicted.
Participant uses no violence and stops considering it as an option.
Participant identifies and changes beliefs and intentions that led to using violence and would keep leading to it.
Participant describes how specific acts of their violence fit within their larger patterns of behaviors, intentions, and beliefs.
Participant explains what violence and harm they’re sorry for and why.
Participant describes what behaviors, intentions, or beliefs they need and want to change in order to live non-violently, repair harm their violence has caused, and contribute to helping communities thrive.
Participant develops practices and behaviors that support their overall wellbeing and the wellbeing of others.
Participant acts autonomously — bases none of their process on what survivors of their violence or members of their community are or aren’t doing (does their own work regardless of whether anyone else is or isn’t responding to them, working on themselves, etc.).