The Heartware of RJ: A Journey of Nurturing a Restorative Posture

Lim Keng Yeow has been a District Judge for over 11 years. His judicial career involved a few years of focusing on cases involving juvenile delinquents and offenders, and also on criminal cases against youthful offenders at the State Courts. Although he may have handled such cases as a judge and not through personally facilitating processes such as resolution conferences, he is a firm believer in the philosophy, principles and posture behind restorative justice, and has sought to apply them in his work. He now sits at the Family Justice Courts, where he occasionally gets to hear some Youth Court cases.

The privilege is ours to have a judge that supports the use of restorative principles in judicial practice.

Restorative Justice (“RJ”) may often be discussed in terms of its underlying philosophy, its governing principles, and its adoptable practices. These form part of the hardware of RJ. What may also need emphasis is its heartware: the accompanying RJ posture of heart.

If the philosophy and principles deal with what RJ is all about and the practice of RJ covers how it is done, the posture of RJ focuses attention on the who, the individual who seeks to practise it.

Exploration of the RJ posture of heart deals with the inner disposition and mental attitudes of the individual. It suggests that the practitioner can grow to become more innately restorative as he or she increasingly internalises the core values and spirit behind RJ. This has important outcomes, as doing always flows from being. The more the restorative posture of heart is authentically nurtured over time, the more one’s practice of RJ flows from the inside-out with increasing consistency, congruity and cogency.

This workshop considers how a practitioner might nurture the posture of RJ, such that it complements the know-why and the know-how, and strengthens one’s practice of RJ. To this end, Lim Keng Yeow shares three personal posture-related lessons he had to learn in his own journey of aspiring to better practise RJ.

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