Poster #131 - Young Children’s Understanding of Restorative Justice

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

In the field of developmental psychology, compared with the wealth of studies on how young children understand distributive justice, which focuses on a fair distribution of resources, few studies have shed light on how children understand the concept of restorative justice, which emphasizes repairing harm and loss in the aftermath of misconduct. With the recognition of the limitation of retributive justice, the importance of restorative justice is increasingly emphasized in contemporary societies. Given the complexity of the concept, it is particularly challenging to investigate how young children make sense of restorative justice.

Taking into consideration the developmental nature of young children, the present study applies a choice-based paradigm to investigate their understanding of restorative justice along the implicit-explicit dimension. Two interactive storybooks, containing the respective moral transgression scenarios of stealing and harm-causing behavior, were deliberatively designed to capture the multiple facets of restorative justice, which encompass a concern for the victim, the offender and the community, as well as their involvement in the justice-seeking process.

A total of 93 5-year-olds from a kindergarten and 100 8-year-olds from a primary school at a middle-sized city in China participated in this study. Half of the children read the story of stealing behavior and the other half read the story of harm-causing behavior. Before and after learning the hardship background of the offender or the victim (between-subject condition), children were asked to judge the acceptability of the act and the actor of the moral transgression, followed by ranking their preference for two restorative and two retributive treatments, namely actual restorative treatment, apology (psychological restorative treatment), imprisonment (actual retributive treatment), and criticism (psychological retributive treatment). Children were further asked to estimate the impact of the moral transgression on the community and rank their preference of community-level restorative treatments (e.g., education) and retributive treatments (e.g., social exclusion) on the offender and the community.

The results showed that children judged the harm-causing behavior as less acceptable than the stealing behavior. After learning the offender’s hardship, children generally viewed the transgression as more acceptable. Reversely, they generally viewed the transgression as less acceptable after learning the victim’s hardship. Overall, a preference of restorative treatments over retributive treatments was shown in this sample. Older children were more likely to endorse actual restoration than their younger counterparts in the harm-causing situation. In both the stealing and the harm-causing situations, older children were more likely to endorse apology than the younger ones. In parallel, older children were less likely to support severe retributive treatment of imprisonment (Table 1). At the level of community involvement, older children endorsed restorative treatments more often while being less supportive of retributive treatments. We also analyzed children’s consistency in their endorsement of restorative treatments across different situations. The results indicated that more 8-year-olds held a consistent endorsement of restorative treatments across different situations as compared to the 5-year-olds (Table 2). Interpreting through the lens of the Representation Redescription model, more 8-year-olds have probably attained the level of Explicit-1 in their understanding of restorative justice.

Authors

• Zheng Zhou, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics
  Presenting Author

• Wan Chi Wong, Chinese University of Hong Kong
  Non-Presenting Author