Coordination of Revenge and Forgiveness in Colombian Adolescents’ Narrative Accounts of Peer Injury

• In Event: 3-048 - Schadenfreude, Revenge and Forgiveness: How Teens React to Others' Misfortunes and Transgressions

Integrative Statement

In both the scholarly and therapeutic literatures, revenge and forgiveness are overwhelmingly conceptualized as mutually exclusive responses to being harmed. That is, the persistence of retaliatory desires and/or the enactment of revenge are understood to be fundamentally incompatible with forgiveness (e.g., van der Wal, 2017). Research with adolescents in the United States (blinded) has largely conformed to these patterns, as youths’ desires for revenge were selectively carried out when youth failed to forgive the offender. In contrast, our research with urban Colombian adolescents suggests that the association between forgiveness and revenge may be more complex in samples of youth exposed to relatively high levels of violence and injustice.
This study explored how revenge was juxtaposed with forgiveness in youths’ accounts of peer conflict. Specifically, we examined the different ways in which revenge and forgiveness were coordinated (or not coordinated) in adolescents’ narrative accounts of forgiveness.
A sample of 14- to 17-year-old urban Colombian adolescents (N = 96; 47 boys) were asked to recount an experience of peer conflict in which they forgave a peer for hurting them. Accounts were previously coded for youths’ descriptions of retaliation. The current qualitative analysis was based on the forgiveness narratives in which youth described retaliating against others (n = 37).
Analyses suggested three overall ways in which forgiveness and revenge were juxtaposed. First, in some accounts, revenge was described as initiating a process leading to forgiveness. Specifically, youth described revenge as facilitating forgiveness because it (a) restored justice, (b) provided a release of anger, (c) prompted the offender to apologize, or (d) induced the narrator’s own guilt for having retaliated, which led them to acknowledge their own role in the conflict and opened the door to reconciliation.
Second, in some cases, revenge preceded forgiveness, but was not coordinated with youths’ decisions to forgive. Often, youth described retaliating in the immediate aftermath of the harm and then forgiving after the passage of time or other unrelated intervening events. In contrast to the first pattern, these narratives pose fewer challenges to dominant conceptions of what it means to forgive, in that revenge is not described as part of the forgiveness process.
Third, less commonly, retaliation occurred after the victim had reconciled with the offender and had nominally forgiven him/her. This underscores that psychological closure and a positive change in motivations towards the offender may not be defining features of forgiveness for at least some youth.
Taken together, these patterns emphasize how youths’ experiences of revenge and forgiveness are intertwined with their understandings of justice, strategies for emotion regulation and conflict reconciliation, expectations for treatment from others, and moral commitments. Certainly, our results problematize conceptions of forgiveness and revenge as mutually opposed, at least as they are experienced by youth themselves. This may be especially the case in samples of adolescents affected by violence and injustice. As such, the discussion will focus on how exposure to violence may influence the ways in which youth make sense of their everyday morally-laden experiences.

Authors

• Holly Recchia, Concordia University
  Presenting Author

• Cecilia Wainryb, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• Fatima Inigo, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Angelica Restrepo, Concordia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Olga Lucia Gonzalez Beltran, Universidad de Los Andes
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roberto Posada, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
  Non-Presenting Author