Newswise — The news last October from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was horrific: A gunman had taken hostages at an Amish schoolhouse, eventually killing five girls before taking his own life.
Follow-up reports also baffled many observers: The grieving Amish community responded by offering comfort to the shooter's family, even setting up a charitable fund for the wife and children of the man responsible for the tragedy.
Was this collective act of mercy genuine or contrived? Robert Enright, a pioneer in the academic study of forgiveness, assured inquiring reporters that, to the Amish community, forgiveness comes as naturally as breathing.
"People can respond to injustice and tragedy in a forgiving way," explains Enright, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Because they had "built their forgiveness muscle," the Amish were prepared to respond to tragedy in an emotionally healthy way, he says. "I would like to give this to Belfast and Milwaukee" - two cities that have witnessed plenty of tragedy and violence.
Enright and his wife, Jeanette Knutson Enright, have been leading an initiative in Northern Ireland for five years and in Wisconsin's largest city for three to develop, introduce, and assess a comprehensive curriculum for introducing children to the idea of forgiveness.
He explains: Exposure to poverty, prejudice, and violence puts children at increased risk of emotional problems - including depression, anxiety, and excessive anger - that ultimately can compromise their psychological development. "Our work in forgiveness education is based on the conviction that forgiveness can reduce anger, and that a decrease in anger leads to less depression and anxiety and to stronger academic achievement and more peaceful social behavior."
Early evidence suggests that the initiatives are making headway in both places, but Enright isn't rushing to declare victory and move on. He anticipates investing another dozen or more years - regardless of funding - "for the sake of the children."
Enright's scholarly focus on forgiveness dates back to the mid-1980s, when he began his trail-blazing work of charting the psychological pathway that individuals follow when they forgive. "We had to do everything from scratch," he says.
He has been careful to validate his findings using accepted scientific procedures, such as randomized trials. He collaborated with Michael Subkoviak, now an emeritus professor of educational psychology, to create a reliable social development test, the Enright Forgiveness Inventory.
In his studies, Enright looked at individuals from a variety of cultures - including Taiwan, Brazil, Austria, and Denmark - who have suffered grave unfairness, including incest, spousal betrayal, a partner's decision to abort without the other's consent, and child abuse. From this, he identified three characteristics of forgiveness common to all adults:
The individual has been treated unjustly.
The individual struggles to deal with the injustice.
The individual looks for something good and positive to give to the offending person, regardless of whether the offender deserves mercy.
He found that people who had been deeply hurt and emotionally compromised often were depressed and struggled with high levels of anger and anxiety and low self-esteem. Those who followed Enright's roadmap to forgiveness were able to reduce their depression, anger, and anxiety, and improve their self-esteem. Follow-ups found that that the emotional health improvements were sustained.
"Forgiveness has a way of cutting through anger, anxiety and depression, and restoring emotional health," he concludes. He adds that even moderate levels of forgiveness can make a difference.
He describes forgiveness as a voluntary gift of mercy from someone who has been offended, but points out that forgiving isn't the same as condoning, excusing, forgetting, or necessarily even reconciling with the offender. By forgiving, an individual refuses to let anger and resentment prevail.
Several years ago, Enright and his colleagues became intrigued by the idea of cultivating forgiveness on a community level in an area afflicted by war or violence. "No social experiment where forgiveness is planted as a component of the peace movement had ever been done," he notes. He doesn't offer forgiveness education as an opiate, but as a means to equip people to respond with mercy to difficulties.
Enright's team selected Belfast, Northern Ireland, where residents spoke English - avoiding the need for translators - and the warring English Protestants and Irish Catholics hold world views that respect the idea of forgiving. Seeds of Hope, a Belfast peace organization, helped Enright to open doors in a community that generally resisted the meddling of outsiders. He was given access after presenting his ideas to principals, teachers, parents, and the de facto power brokers, the paramilitaries.
Working with teachers in the "interface areas," Belfast's most dangerous neighborhoods, Enright's team started with a first-grade curriculum that introduces the idea of forgiveness through the stories of Dr. Seuss and has added to the curricula one grade level per year. As the children get older, the lessons have grown in sophistication. The effort started in three classrooms and now is used in 75 classrooms, with an average of 25 students per class.
In these schools, where no psychological services are offered, the teachers play an integral role in shaping how this curriculum is delivered.
"It is important that the child's own teacher, rather than our research group, impart the concepts to the children to ensure cultural and religious sensitivity regarding the nuances of forgiveness," Enright explains, "We know the core of forgiveness, but we don't know the nuances for every culture. We stand by the teachers and nurture them through the curricula."
Follow-up research has found that children exposed to the forgiveness program showed reduced levels of anger and anxiety compared to those in control groups - classes where the introduction of forgiveness curricula has been delayed.
"If these children can reduce anger and become more forgiving throughout the course of their schooling, they will have built their forgiveness muscle," Enright explains. "The findings are above our expectations."
Three years ago, Enright's team began to introduce forgiveness education closer to home - in Milwaukee, a segregated city with a murder rate higher than Belfast."Children in inner-city Milwaukee are growing up in a violent community," he says. He offers his program to supplement, not replace, the justice and social service activities already in place: "What's missing is the care of the angry heart through forgiveness."
Psychological assessments conducted as part of this initiative found that average first graders in central Milwaukee already were excessively angry and would be seen as good candidates for psychotherapy. "That's an extremely sobering statistic."
Janet Taylor, who has been involved in the Milwaukee initiative from the start, has taught for seven years at the Urban Day School - where the student population is African-American and more than 95 percent qualify to receive free or reduced-price lunches. Three years ago, Taylor first introduced the forgiveness curriculum in her first-grade class, teaching 17 lessons based on Dr. Seuss, while the school's other first grade classroom served as a control group.
Members of Enright's research group interviewed students before and after the lessons were taught and found that children introduced to the forgiveness concepts showed significant decreases in their levels of anger, while those in control groups - who had not yet received the forgiveness instruction - continued to grow in measures of anger.
"I think that the lasting value of the program is through a cumulative impact on students as they work with the same concepts year after year, along with an expanding awareness of themselves and of the world around them," Taylor says.
"Some students enter the school in the morning angry because of things that have happened to them outside of school. This anger affects their relationships with other students and with their teachers, and it can hinder their ability to focus on schoolwork. The forgiveness curriculum aims to allow them to release that anger without accepting continued ill treatment," she says.
"Throughout our curriculum, the teachers make the important distinction between learning about forgiveness and choosing to practice it in certain contexts," Enright explains. "Children are always free to try or not try forgiveness in response to their own personal hurts borne out of unfair treatment. In our experience in Belfast to date, children willingly try forgiveness when they are free to choose the person who was unfair to them, and the event that each child considers to be unfair."
Taylor adds, "Since the goal is an internal change in children, it can be difficult for me to discover those changes, but I do hear the children using some of the vocabulary of the program, particularly when they talk about being kind to each other. The lessons also encourage them to reveal their feelings through art, and sometimes their drawings are very powerful."
Regarding the use of Dr. Seuss stories, she notes, "It is quite impressive how students can relate stories about Sneetches or Horton the Elephant to discussions of their own lives."
With support from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the Milwaukee effort has grown from five first-grade classrooms to 50 classrooms in first through fourth grades. "We'd be in 500 if we had the funding," Enright adds.
"We're just two small people trying to do the best we can," he says, referring to him and his wife. "It's time to act now. I would like to have all of central Milwaukee involved. We are offering a vision to war-torn and violence-torn communities."
He sums up that vision: "Forgiveness within individuals' hearts and minds may change communities that have not known peace for many decades. In other words, forgiveness education, though it has immediate benefits of improved emotional health, may have even wider benefits as more psychologically healthy adults are able to sit down together for mutual benefit as well as gain to the entire community."
Editor's note: This story is part of a regular series exploring the Wisconsin Idea in action. Read more at http://www.wisconsinidea.wisc.edu/
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