The Bigger Picture: It is a cold and perhaps cruel truth, but the purpose of a trial is not to give us answers. It is to decide if an individual has broken a law and whether they should be punished.
To be attacked, stolen from or deceived hurts an individual, challenging our ability to hope and carry on to our full ability. However, murder - death by another, even manslaughter - brings forth a pain like no other. This pain radiates out, piercing the hearts of many, letting us function a little less if at all, possibly forever. And so, our whole society diminishes.
There would seem no way to console a parent from the murder of their child. How do you recover from the loss of your loved one so unexpectedly, so unfairly, through reckless inhumanity? It is nothing that should ever be part of life, nothing we are designed to anticipate, and nothing we can emerge from without first facing down the darkest pain imaginable.
Majella Holohan, mother of an 11-year-old child who died at the hand of another, whose detailed victim impact statement is now in the public domain, gave us a rare opportunity to think about what the killing of someone we love deeply might feel like. This is important. We must know.
Our generation is marked by the fact that we can now kill more people from further away than ever before. Every day, we see violent deaths recreated fictionally through cartoons, drama and computer games, and hear their real occurrences reported in our news. And we accept it. . . walk past. . . are numb to the reality of what this means. In this way, each one of us is de-humanised.
Our trial and prison system is not acting as a deterrent, and provides no reconciliation. No one recovers (well, most no one). Healing for perpetrators (in the name of rehabilitation) is only a secondary priority, if at all.
Victims and their families are barely considered partners in the process. Even those who must enforce the punishment - the prison guards - are damaged in the process. It is a wasteful, dispiriting process that has lost sight of what is really important in society - recovery, reconciliation, re-connection and the opportunity to move forward.
Our trial and prison system is not designed to give answers. It is not designed to create healing. It is designed to allow for strategy towards making a decision as to whether to punish an individual for what has occurred. As we discover, this is not enough to help.
Victims and families are right to demand forums where truth is revealed and questions are answered. This is the path of reconciliation, and far more helpful than compensation, revenge or like suffering. Victims need truth aired and facts acknowledged.
They will feel the pain regardless of whether they are enlightened of the truth. However, if we surround them with love and assist in the delivery of truth to them, we create the possibility of somehow, strangely, moving them forward from their nightmare.
They need us to listen, really pay attention, be present, understand the reality, and stay with them as they lead us through outrage, heartbreak, anger and grief. This is something we need to do together. We must not be numb, but rather face it until we feel we almost cannot bear it. We must awaken from the complacency to injustice that is plaguing our society.
Perpetrators must, too, face the truth of what has happened and their participation in it - and it makes little difference to me whether they inflicted hurt intentionally, accidentally or unawares. The difference is made only to their own recovery. The damage is no less.
Much more important than banishing someone from society is the recovery of that individual. They must discover what it means to act as they have done, how it destroys things, how it damages people and how it has and will continue to damage themselves.
There is another problem with prison. In order to face our struggles, let ourselves be vulnerable and welcome the challenge of our distresses, we must embody humility. While this is essential, humility is not easily born from enforced humiliation. On the contrary, these are the conditions that allow defensiveness to gain strength and progress to be obstructed.
The most powerful tool we have to combat violence is our own belief in the dignity of life.
I am glad I heard Majella Holohan's thoughts on her life, her son, and how she and her family have felt since his death. I needed to know. As for answers for what happened to her son, she needs to know. It is essential to her humanity, her functioning and her healing as a human being, and this is the most important thing that must happen in this case.
This is matched only by the equal need for the perpetrator to face what he has done and the implications of his actions to his humanity so that he, too, may somehow be able to recover. Ultimately, I need a world where we have them both back.
Shalini Sinha has founded Forward Movement, a social justice clinic where she practises life coaching, the Bowen Technique, and is training in nutritional medicine.