MVFR IN THE NEWS

• Linda White in the Houston Chronicle

So Linda White went back to college the year after her daughter, Cathy, just 26, was abducted, raped and murdered. In the books and studies and challenges, Linda began to find comfort, relief.

She had tried looking for them in a support group, in meeting and talking with others who were suffering because someone dear to them had been murdered. But what she found there didn't suit her.

Oh, Linda understood their anger and desire for revenge . She felt them, too, at first. Ultimately, however, she knew that revenge was not what she wanted. And she just didn't have the energy required to maintain anger. Cathy left a 5-year-old daughter. Linda figured out later that she and her husband intuitively knew that focusing on anger would not serve the child well.

Linda read books about loss and grief. She learned that she was OK, that the panic attacks, the anxiety, the depression, the times she thought she was crazy, all were normal reactions for someone who suffers such a tremendous loss.

Becomes counselor, educator

She felt called to become a grief counselor and death educator, to teach others what she had learned. She studied psychology and philosophy, earned a bachelor's degree, kept right on going to a master's degree, and jumped into teaching just as a kid jumps into grandma's feather bed on a stormy night.

One day, the students in a couple of her classes were discussing a news story about the arrest of a white woman who had claimed that a black man took her two children but then police learned she killed them.

Linda's students talked about how they would like to punish the woman. The discussion became competitive, each trying to outdo the others in suggesting how society should take revenge for the crime.

Linda began looking for a way to respond to such an escalation of violent thoughts and talk. "That's how I got into restorative justice," she said, "and its principles that encourage doing no further harm."

Practicing restorative justice means focusing upon crime as harm, upon the harm it does to relationships. And then determining, not who should be punished, but what harm has been done and how to address it. What does the victim need? What does the offender need? What does the community need and how can it be involved?

The victim may need protection from further harm by the offender. The offender may need to be separated from the community. Prison has a place in restorative justice. Not as a means of punishment and revenge , but as a tool in restoring justice.

Victims' group is formed

All that Linda learned and experienced and studied and pondered after her daughter's death in 1986 blended together and, as one result, "last year, some of us formed a new victims' group called Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR)," she said. It is affiliated nationally.

"We are open to families on both sides who've lost loved ones to violence," she said, "including those who have had them executed, because we believe in healing above all else, and because we do not seek to add other families to the growing list of those grieving. We know the pain only too well. We believe that fighting violence with greater violence simply escalates the level and scope of violence."

Linda said one thing she tries to teach is that people do not have to take one side and then look at the other side as inhuman and devoid of any credibility.

She is pursuing her Ph.D. and works part time for Sam Houston State University, teaching inmates in the state prison in Huntsville.

"It doesn't mean I am pro-offender and anti-victim," she said. "I want to be part of what I think the solution is. . . . I believe we have to keep the dialogue going so victims and offenders can see each other as human beings.

"I didn't find solace in the revenge and the anger, and I really think that ultimately we're going to make serious dents in violence when we address it as an issue, even within ourselves."

Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation meets at 2:30 p.m. today at Zion Lutheran Church, 3606 Beauchamp. The phone number for more information is 281-456-7670.