3 Elements of Restorative Justice: Victim - Community - Offender

The concept of restorative justice is now very much in fashion. There are political parties that already include it in their electoral campaigns. In some countries, there are versions of this type of justice that are been used in legal practice. But the concept in itself is not new - it is, in fact, as old as or older than its opposing concept, that of retributive justice.

Two years ago, when we spoke about the Non-Violent Communication, we addressed these two concepts of justice in an article. We repeat here much of what we said at the time about these concepts because it is not possible to talk about one without also talking about the other. After distinguishing one concept of justice from the other, the aim of this text is to show how restorative justice works in contrast to retributive justice.

As a rule, retributive justice is dual because it admits only two instances: the State and the offender. Among those who are not considered nor found in the process are, firstly, the victim, the person who was assaulted, injured, and secondly, her family. We are not islands, we live in an intimate relationship with our family, therefore when something serious happens to one of the members, everyone suffers in some way out of solidarity.

"One for all, all for one" states the motto of the three Musketeers. In addition to the victim's family, the offender's family is also victimized by him and consequently also suffers, sometimes bearing part of the blame. Finally, we have the community to which the victim belongs with her family and the offender belongs with his.

Comparatively, restorative justice does not separate the individual, be it the victim or the offender, from their family and community environment. The crime takes place within a concrete community, with its social and structural problems. Neither the victim nor the offender parachuted into this world - they are children of families who contributed in some way to what they were at the time of the crime.

Unlike retributive justice, restorative justice is trinitarian or three-dimensional. It puts the victim with her family face-to-face with the offender and his family, within the community to which they all belong. The ultimate purpose is to repair the wrong done, to put an end to the violence. In other words, to reconcile the offender with his own family, with the victim and her family, and finally, with the community within which the offense was committed.

In full contrast to restorative justice, retributive justice does not repair nor restore because it pays someone back in their own coin: it is vindictive, answers back an illegal crime with a legal one, and perpetuates violence. After exercising the legal revenge, the victim feels a certain satisfaction, but does not feel healed or reconciled. The injury does not disappear but turns into a trauma that acts on the survivor’s psyche, as if the crime continues to be committed. Only forgiveness can heal, whereas revenge makes things worse as it turns a wound into a chronic infection. The following story of someone who is held hostage by a past event illustrates this issue well.

A former prisoner of a Nazi concentration camp went to visit a friend who had shared with him the same painful experience. "Have you forgiven the Nazis for all that they did to us?" asked his friend. “No,” was the answer, "l will never forgive them, I still hate them with all my soul." Upon hearing this, the one who asked quietly said, "If that's the case, if you still hate them, then you are still there in the concentration camp, and the Nazis are still holding you prisoner."

Something similar also happens to the offender. At the moment he becomes aware of the wrong he committed, he too will never find peace again, and he will not forgive himself if the victim does not forgive him. The guilt will pursue him all the time, even after serving the sentence prescribed by law. Only the victim's forgiveness will give him health, lead him to reconcile with his past and with himself.

Genesis of retributive justice
Modeled on this aspect of the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, the Bible recognizes that human acts have inevitable consequences. There is a kind of reciprocation law implicit in the universe that says that people reap what they sow (Galatians 6:7). The basic retributive concepts of guilt, expiation and proportionality of penalty are widely attested both in the Old and the New Testaments.

In fact, the Bible even ends with an affirmation of the principle of retributive justice: “See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work” (Revelation 22:12). Therefore, biblical justice is retributive insofar as it revolves around the concepts of moral guilt, reward and respect of the Law.

It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the concept of retributive justice exhausts or encompasses all the idea of justice in the Bible. Justice in the ancient Israel encompassed everything necessary to create, maintain and restore healthy relationships at the heart of the community.

A criminal act was considered wrong, in the first place, because it violated the relational commitments that the society upheld. And secondly, because the criminal acts themselves could lead to a chain reaction of ruins and disasters if they were not stopped. Already in the Old Testament, but especially in the New, believers were urged to give up retribution or retaliation by relegating it to God and, in its place, to embrace the principles of forgiveness and reconciliation (Matthew 5:38-48, Romans 12:17-21, 1Peter 2:21-23).

Retributive justice, as it works today, came about in the thirteenth century. With the implementation of the Social Contract, the King, the State or the Law confiscates the conflicts. From that moment on, the offenses are no longer made against concrete persons of flesh and blood, but against the State by the transgression of its laws. Therefore, the real victims disappear and in their place the State stands as the injured party. Whereas the real victim could even forgive, the penal system does not forgive because the crime is now committed against a collective: the society, the State.

In countries where the death penalty or life imprisonment still exists, the crime that the justice system commits is far worse than the one committed by the criminal, who perhaps acted under the influence of some temporary and volatile strong emotion or passion in a reactive moment, moved, as we know, by his lower reptilian brain more than by his rational neocortex. In comparison, the crime of the criminal system is totally premeditated and not only by one person, but by a large number of people; what is even more cruel, nefarious and barbaric, are the years spent by the offender between the pronouncement of the death sentence and his execution.

By carrying out the sentence, allegedly proportional to the crime, the penal system exists to protect society from crimes, but what it really hides is the fact that it is articulated as an instrument of domination of one class over another. We just need to take a look at our prisons to realize that they are full of people from the lower class who have committed petty crimes, compared to people from the upper class who have committed far worse crimes and yet live in freedom.

How does retributive justice work?
Retributive justice is the type of criminal justice that is practiced throughout the world which consists of paying back to a delinquent or offender, through punishment or sentence, the harm done to another person (the victim). This punishment is imposed by a legislator to compensate for the damage inflicted on the victim and, in most cases, the penalty is the deprivation of freedom.

For retributive justice, an offense is an act of violation of the laws of the State by an individual; the responsibility must be borne by the offender. The crime is a matter between the State and the delinquent, not taking into account the victim who is truly the injured party, or the people indirectly involved, not even the community that has somehow also been harmed.

Again, in retributive justice there exist only two instances: the State that presents itself and assumes at the same time the role of the victim, the legislative, executive and coercive power, and the offender who suffers the consequences of his breach of the law.

The duty of the State is to capture the defendant, charge him, prove his guilt, and apply a sentence appropriate to his crime. The offender’s role is to passively accept and suffer the penalty imposed on him, without a voice in the process. The victim too has no voice in this process, the one who truly suffered the crime, as well as her family, and also the offender’s family and the local community; none of these groups of people exists in the penal system of retributive justice.

The objective of the retributive justice is for the offender to suffer in the flesh the damage he has done to the State; that he is punished according to the seriousness of his act, that the society is protected against him by depriving him the occasion to reoffend, and, finally, that everyone in general, by virtue of this punishment, is deterred from committing that or similar crime. This deterrence was, in fact, the motive behind the Roman crucifixions by the roadside.

Restorative justice in the Bible
Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live? Ezekiel 18:23

The restorative character of biblical justice is already evident at the macro-theological level of the Bible, from the beginning to the end. In the Bible, the human being was created in the image and likeness of God; with the offense of our parents Adam and Eve, we lost the likeness while still retaining the image. The sole subject of the Bible is the story of salvation or redemption or, rather, the restoration of the human race to the dignity it once possessed, to the likeness of God.

As we saw in retributive justice, the victim, her family as well as the family of the offender and the local community, all disappear, whereas in restorative justice they gain prominence. In the story of salvation, God is the victim who pledges to do whatever is necessary to restore humanity to its former dignity, as the parable of the prodigal son suggests, and to repair the damage done.

In addition to the macro history of salvation, already in the Old Testament, we find elements of restorative justice in Numbers (5:6-7) and Leviticus (6:1-7), those who offend should acknowledge error, feel remorse, confess the sin, and make restitution to the victim, adding compensation.

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian… Galatians 3:23-25

If Cain was avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold (Genesis 4:24) – The objective of the law is to prevent the out of control escalation of violence. But it was not God’s intention that the law be a permanent solution; for this very reason, Jesus, in Matthew (5:38-48), repeals and replaces the law of an eye for an eye with a superior system of unconditional forgiveness and love for the enemy, also replacing Lamech’s declaration of extreme violence, by forgiving seventy times seven (Matthew 18:22).

Is the law then opposed to the promises of God? Certainly not! For if a law had been given that could make alive, then righteousness would indeed come through the law. Galatians 3:21

For Paul, it is Jesus who gives life; retribution and punishment are not life giving because they only offer negative consequences to offensive acts, and they have no power to change hearts, to heal. Restorative justice heals and cures, because in union with Christ, it has the power to transform us. Retributive justice has no capacity to make us saints so it is not, nor can it be, God’s last plan. In fact, after the coming of Jesus, continuing to be guided by the Law is counterproductive and can only hurt.

I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. Romans 7:9-11

Anything good has the potential to become bad; the family is supposed to be a place where we feel safe and loved, but it can also be deeply abusive and leave devastating scars. The Religion and the Law by themselves are also good, but, like the family, they can also become abusive. In the gospel, we witness this sort of abuse in the Pharisees whom Jesus repeatedly confronts. Paul was himself a Pharisee until he converted and followed the way of Christ.

In conclusion: retributive justice has always existed; the Law appeared to prevent the escalation of violence. However, as Paul tells us, the Law was only a disciplinarian. God’s definitive plan is restorative justice in Christ. Jesus does not accuse nor condemn, he restores the spiritual, moral and physical health of the people he meets on the way; like he did with Zacchaeus, the woman caught in adultery, the paralytic, the lepers, and so on.

How does restorative justice work?
Howard Zehr’s 1990 book, A New Focus for Crime and Justice, is considered to be the first to articulate this theory in a systematic way. It is true that this concept trails behind and, as Zehr acknowledges, due credit should be given to the practice of justice in some indigenous tribes in Canada, United States and New Zealand.

The penal system does not resolve problems and in fact, creates others. It fills prisons, creating outcasts and “personas non-grata” in society who, sooner or later, given the opportunity, offend again. The penal system is a system that produces far more pain, suffering, and even violence, than the violence it seeks to combat. Revenge is not justice and the punishment of the offender, however tough it may be, brings no lasting satisfaction to the victim; imposing pain on another person does not make our pain go away, nor does it lessen it.

In restorative justice, crime is any action that causes harm to a person. It is an interpersonal conflict and, more than the breaking of laws, it is a wrong done to the victim and the community at large. If the crime has been committed against the community and a specific person within that community, and not against an abstract entity like the State, it is within the community that the problem must be resolved. As the saying goes, “Don’t wash your dirty laundry in public.”

The place where retributive justice is carried out is in the court and in the prison; whereas in restorative justice, the place is in the community center where the offender, his family and friends meet with the victim, along with her family and friends, and other relevant people of the community to which they both belong. Interestingly, in places where the death penalty is carried out, these meetings also take place, when the victim’s next of kin attend the macabre liturgy of the execution of the criminal, but here the purpose of the meetings is very different and very sad…

The meetings of the restorative justice process are voluntary, and they must take place in mutual respect, in a climate of honesty and humility. The mediator or facilitator should meet with the parties separately first to prepare and coach them for the meeting.

Restorative justice aims to help in the victim’s recovery and to reintegrate the offender into the society, taking into account the community’s participation and mediation. Dialogues and meetings are used as tools between the parties directly or indirectly involved. In retributive justice, there are only two instances, the State and the offender; in contrast, in restorative justice, there are three instances: the victim, the offender and the community.

THE VICTIM
The State ceases to usurp the victim’s role. The victim returns to the center stage, expresses the pain that the crime caused her, and seeks that the damage be repaired and that the crime does not happen again. The victim, the person who really suffered, was injured and is still in pain, has a voice; the State, on the other hand, was not offended and did not really suffer like the victim because pain cannot be delegated. The victim explains, face to face, how the crime impacted her and shows the damage caused.

The aim is to repair the wrong done, giving the victim a voice that expresses her feelings and needs, leading the offender to recognize the evil that he did and to do something for the victim, so as not to reoffend. The objective is to achieve reconciliation and specify what the offender must do to recompense the victim.

Let us see how the victim’s role works in the context of restorative justice in the following example: a child who smells bad becomes the victim of bullying by his peers at school. In the context of retributive justice, these classmates will be punished, which probably will not solve anything, and after some time, they will do it again or others will do it in their place.

Comparatively, in restorative justice, the bully and his victim, as well as other people from their families and the school, and community leaders, will be summoned to a meeting. The offender learns why his victim smells bad; he is a poor boy, from a slum, and there is no electricity or running water at his home.

The offender and his family will gain a deeper understanding of the problem behind this conflict, and from this meeting the possibility of mobilizing social forces to seek a solution, at the root of the problem, may arise. In the scope of retributive justice, we would not get so far; it does not solve anything and can create more problems, such as increased violence if there has been an exaggeration in the carrying out of punishment.

In restorative justice, the victim is the central figure in the process and not a mere spectator or witness to the prosecution. If she played a leading role in the crime she suffered, she should then be able to assume the leading role in resolving the conflict or in healing the harm that was inflicted on her. In this process, she has the opportunity to reveal her pain, her suffering, the damage done to her; in other words, she achieves validation.

In the meeting between the victim and the offender within the community, the two have the chance of seeing and acknowledging each other as human persons and not just as a victim and an offender. In this human encounter, the crime is seen in a new light by both the offender and the victim. This new light, which is the crime committed by the offender in the context of his life and suffered by the victim in the context of hers, will lead to the psyche and emotional healing of both.

In retributive system, the victim is ignored, her pain and suffering are contained, repressed, and the wound hidden. In contrast, restorative process is therapeutic for the victim, as well as for the offender – the victim has the opportunity to voice her pain, in a protected space, in front of significant people and not curious strangers. She has the opportunity to express her fear, anguish, malaise, suffering and anger, as well as feelings and questions related to the offender.

THE OFFENDER
In restorative process, the offender has the chance to understand the victim, reconcile with her and repair the harm he caused. The defendant learns the real impact of his action, which does not happen in the retributive justice system. Therefore, he is more easily held accountable, something that rarely happens in the retributive system where he tries to deny his culpability, or to escape justice.

The restorative justice process places great hope in the meeting between the victim and the offender. A crime is always an inhuman and dehumanizing encounter between two people because these are superficially out of context. The meeting seeks to place the people in their vital environment with their relationships. Let us look at the following example of how the offender can change in the face of a deeper awareness of his victim and how his crime has negatively impacted the lives of many people.

A young man who kills a taxi driver is tried under the retributive justice system, never gets to know about his victim and his life, he will just be punished and sent to prison, the end of story. Under the restorative justice system, on the other hand, he gets to know the magnitude of his crime: in fact, he killed a husband and a father, who left behind a widow to raise eight children by herself. The clear perception of the suffering that the criminal caused, has an internal effect of transformation because it obligatorily appeals to his compassion, to the humanity that he surely must possess.

Contrary to retributive justice, in which he neither knew the immensity of suffering caused nor was asked to repair the harm done, in restorative justice, he can actively participate in helping to solve the problem his act created and even change his life in this process. Within the scope of retributive justice, he would have taken an adversarial attitude, spending his time in prison wondering what went wrong in the execution of the crime that he idealized as perfect, how he let himself get caught or what he could have done to escape justice.

In restorative justice, the offender has the chance to get to know the victim, to look her in the eyes and understand the full impact of his crime, and to evaluate her in light of the circumstances - both his as the offender, and hers as the victim. He has the opportunity to repent, to reconcile with the victim and with himself, and to repair the harm he caused.

In retributive justice, the crime is a breach of the law, and responsibility is exclusively individual. The leading participants are the offender who broke the law and the State that judges and applies the corresponding punishment. The whole procedure is adversarial, that is, the offender seeks to defend himself and prove his innocence, all the while knowing he is guilty, so that the Prosecutor cannot find any evidence to incriminate him. The entire process takes place outside the community, in an artificial environment, referring to something that happened in the past; the present and the future do not count.

In restorative justice, however, the crime is not a breach of the law, but rather a conflict between two people. The responsibility is not only individual, but also social, because the offender is not an island but lives in relationship with his family and friends, within a concrete community. The leading participants are the victim, the offender and the community, and the methodology followed is by way of dialogue and meeting between people. The aim is to resolve the conflict, ascertain and take responsibility, and repair the damage. The place where this process takes place is in the community centre and not in the courtroom, and takes into account that the human person is not only about the past, but also about the present and the future.

THE COMMUNITY
It accompanies and facilitates the process, and ensures compliance of the conditions agreed upon between the defendant and the victim. In retributive justice, the State usurps the role of the victim and the community. Only the State acts, only the State plays an active role in the solution of the problem. In restorative justice, the problem is resolved where it arose and by those who created it together with those who suffered it. In dialogue between the parties, the community is the mediator in the reconciliation and facilitates the process.

Put in another way, in retributive justice, the State assumes the role of an abstract victim and punishes the offender. In restorative justice, there is an interaction between the victim, who discloses his pain and harm suffered, the offender, who comes to know the magnitude of his act and undertakes to repair it, and the community, that arbitrates, mediates and facilitates the interaction so that at the end there is healing for both the victim and the offender.

The community is made up of the families of both the victim and the offender, their friends and all those who make up their circles of coexistence because they have all contributed directly to the education of the victim and the offender, and are often, albeit very indirectly, involved in the conflict. In other words, the community is formed by all who share the same geographical space with both the victim and the offender -- work, church, neighbors, service network, doctors and others.

A new social contract
It was said earlier that retributive justice, as we know it, began to work in as early as the 13th century with the social contract which confiscated conflicts by handing them over to the King or the State, who then assumes the role of the victim, the body of the crime being the breaking of a law.

Restorative justice requires a new social contract in which the people, the community, does not give up its right to judge the crimes committed in its midst. In all tribal cultures, there is a council of elders that decides on the conflicts that arise within the community, so that they do not have to reach the courts that are overwhelmed with cases, which makes justice delayed and, consequently, unfair.

Fundamentally, it is about making use of the principle of subsidiarity which is the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution and one of the rules of the European Union enshrined in Article 5 of the Maastricht Treaty. The Principle of Subsidiarity was not born out of politics; it was modeled on the social doctrine of the Church and appeared for the first time in Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical “Quadragesimo Anno”.

This principle basically stipulates that problems should be resolved where they arise, that is, at the local level, by local authorities, and that the State should only intervene when solutions have been exhausted at the local level. Restorative justice which is inspired by the practice of indigenous tribes, in Canada as well as in other countries, is an application of this principle and underlies a new social contract: returning conflicts to the principal participants, within the community where they both live.

"Sexual assault survivors must take the front seat" are the words of Marlee Liss, a victim of rape, whose case we report below. Liss found recovery and healing in the restorative justice process, after experiencing the shortcomings of the conventional retributive criminal system, in which the victim has neither a voice nor a vote on a matter that is entirely hers and no one else's.

The case of Marlee Liss
On November 11, 2019, 24-year-old Marlee Liss gave an interview on CTV News about her organization, Re-Humanize, which she founded to educate people of the benefits of the restorative justice process after having gone through the trauma of being raped and not finding remedy in the retributive criminal justice system.

Liss states that, in her case, the criminal trial process in court was almost as bad and as traumatic as the rape itself. This is what she said:

"It’s so traumatizing to sit on the stand in front of strangers who expressed a morbid curiosity regarding the details of the rape and to be drilled with questions that are so deeply invasive and personal to me. It is a torture that I do not wish on anybody. I felt naked before the inquisitive eyes of so many people and to be met with disbelief and skepticism, and at the end, forcing me to reveal increasingly more intimate details.”

“I think the fact that we’ve equated justice with punishment is a huge disservice to us and I would really like to make [justice] synonymous with healing,” Liss added. In the process of restorative justice, the offender remains free, he is not sent to prison, which leads many people to think that, on the one hand, justice has not been carried out, and on the other hand, it is not safe that the offender goes free because he can reoffend.
 
To these two questions, Liss answers candidly and definitively, “I doubt that all survivors of sexual assault feel healed by the fact that their abusers were condemned to years in prison.” As we have said before, revenge does not equate to health, nor does it give health. With the incarceration of the offender, the victim feels avenged; however, after this initial feeling of satisfaction has passed, the victim continues to be unwell, and the trauma persists.

To this trauma is added the anxiety about the future, when the offender gets out of prison. Revenge is violent and as such, it incites more violence. The victim took revenge, incarcerating the offender, and the latter, after years of imprisonment, can now consider himself a victim of the unjust system and take revenge on the person he violated or on someone else.

Therefore, regarding the safety of the community from the offender, Liss says that "restorative justice, far from being dangerous, it actually enhances public safety, I think there are many statistics that show that incarceration leads to recidivism, more violence and re-offense." In fact, Liss was a victim of recidivism since her rapist had already served time in prison for a previous rape.

If the restorative justice process is well conducted, especially if the offender can empathize with the victim’s suffering and pain, if he can see her as a person, as one of his sister and not as an object of pleasure and violence, and if he is minimally human, that is, if he does not have any serious psychological deficiencies, then he will certainly feel regret and compassion.

When the victim before the community feels heard and understood in her pain, and when part of that pain is shared by the offender, who is genuinely sorry there in front of her, and willingly offer to compensate for the damage inflicted, the victim experiences healing and a great inner peace, so that forgiving the offender is the most natural thing in the world to her. Furthermore, it is this forgiveness that will make the offender forgive himself, close the case and not be pursued by guilt for the rest of his days.

Marlee Liss, in her restorative justice process, sat down before her rapist who looked her in the eyes and acknowledged his mistake. The moment he took responsibility for what had happened, Marlee says she broke down in tears and experienced a great inner peace. At one point, the offender even stated that he wanted to collaborate to end sexual violence in the world.

The restorative justice process for Marlee Liss took place in Toronto in 2019. The indigenous approach to restorative justice was used as an alternative to Canada’s criminal justice system, focusing on reparation rather than punishment. The process would begin with the offender going through months of therapy to ensure he understood the meaning of consent, accept responsibility for his actions, and be prepared to participate in the upcoming restorative circle where he will face the victim. 

The circle was convened at a community center, which Liss called a sanctuary of healing, and was made up of those impacted by the crime. From Liss’ side, there were her mother and sister, her lawyer and herself; from the assailant’s side, his friend and himself; in addition, there were the Crown attorney and two trained, volunteer mediators. The circle process was 8 hours of intensive and extensive dialogue with a happy ending. In contrast, the legal criminal process would have taken many more hours and many more days.

Conclusion – The human encounter and dialogue between the victim and the offender, with the mediation of the community where the crime took place and where a conflict was created, are the only way to heal the past of both, reconciling themselves in the present so that they can look to the future with hope.  

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

 

3 Means of Communication: Sound - Image - Word

The written word -- of newspapers, books, magazines, letters, faxes, emails, SMS and internet chats --, the sound -- from radios, telephones, and internet --, and the image -- on televisions, movie theatres, and internet -- are the means by which we communicate and materialize our thoughts and ideas, making this entire world a global village.
 
Let us look at each of these 3 realities first separately and then in combination in order to understand the means by which we communicate and how they enable and facilitate human life as we understand and live it today.

SOUND
The word “sound" comes from the Latin sonus, which in turn comes from the Indo-European root word swen- which means "to sound, to make noise". Sound is a mechanical wave that propagates in all directions because it is three-dimensional. Graphically its propagation takes place in the form of concentric circles, sort of like the ones that develop when we throw a stone into a placid lake.

Sound is another one of these realities created by the One and Triune God, therefore it is not one-dimensional, nor two-dimensional as are the concentric waves created by the stone thrown into the calm waters of a lake. These waves spread in all directions but in a single plane, that is, on the surface of the water. Sound waves, on the other hand, are three-dimensional because they propagate both back-and-forth as well as up-and-down. As we shall see later when speaking about image, light also has the same characteristics as sound: it is also three-dimensional.

Being a mechanical wave, sound is dependent on the matter through which it travels; therefore, there is no sound in the outer space. The speed at which sound waves propagate depends exclusively on the characteristics of the medium through which they travel. The speed of sound in air is approximately 340 metres per second. In contrast, light is an electromagnetic wave, so it can travel both in mediums like air and water, as well as in vacuum, in the form of sunlight.

Consequently, if something explodes in outer space, we will be able to see the explosion but not be able to hear it because sound does not travel in vacuum. Sound travels faster in solids than in either liquids or gases. It is measured in decibel (dB) which is a logarithmic unit that Alexander Bell, the inventor of the telephone, created to measure the intensity or the loudness of sound.

At zero decibel, we hear nothing, normal conversation occurs at 60 decibels. At 85 decibels, we will suffer some degree of permanent hearing loss after four hours at this volume, and 150 decibels is enough to burst our eardrums. In contrast, the normal human hearing frequency range, or the pitch, we can hear is between 20 to 20,000 Hertz; sounds below this range are called infrasound and above this range, ultrasound.

The loudest sound in history
The loudest sound recorded in history of mankind occurred during a volcanic eruption on the island of Krakatoa, located between the islands of Java and Sumatra, in Indonesia, on August 27, 1883. The volcano killed more than 35,000 people who were nearby and the sound generated was clearly heard within a 4,800 km radius. The sound travelled around the planet 4 times and ruptured eardrums of sailors stationed 64 km radius away.

It is thought that this sound exceeded the sound of an atomic bomb explosion by 10,000 decibels! The planet’s climate was altered, cooling by an average of 1.2 degrees over the next 5 years due to the amount of sulfur released into the atmosphere. This explosion gave rise to the famous painting The Scream by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch in 1893.

The sound of voice and speech
Air leaves the lungs and enters the windpipe; when it reaches the larynx, it vibrates the two vocal cords found there and sound is produced. This sound is then modified by the position of the tongue relative to the hard palate and teeth, and by how it strikes them. Finally, it is changed again by the position of the lips as it leaves the mouth.

This is the case in languages that are completely oral like Spanish, Italian and English; for languages that have nasal sounds like French and Portuguese, sound also comes out through the nose. Vowel sounds are made when air flow is not interrupted while consonant sounds are made if there is any sort of total or partial obstruction to the air flow.

Man is thought to have learned to speak around 60,000 years ago. This hypothesis was raised after the discovery of a human hyoid bone – a small U-shaped bone that holds and allows for the articulation of the tongue. It was discovered in Neanderthals found in a cave on Mount Carmel in Israel. The adaptation of the bipedal position would have also been fundamental in freeing the hands and the mouth of the hominids and allowing these two processes to contribute to the appearance of speech.

 Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis found in Ethiopia, who lived three and a half million years ago was already a bipedal, she did not speak and, in fact, she did not have that hyoid bone. In addition to the development of the oropharyngeal apparatus that allows for speech, the development of intelligence was equally important.

Sound and word - Onomatopoeias
To paraphrase the prologue to the Gospel of Saint John, in the beginning there was sound and the sound was incarnated into word. It is likely that the first words that humans uttered were onomatopoeias. Onomatopoeia is a sound that becomes a word, or a word that is the transliteration or imitation of a sound in nature. In Greek, it means creating names in the form of sound. Primitive languages must have been sensory, that is, it is likely that human beings made up words to represent sounds, colors, smells, and textures.

In the learning of a language by a baby, 0 to 3 years of age, a process is revealed that may resemble the evolution of speech that is verified in humanity. The baby begins by babbling, or emitting sounds; many of these sounds are onomatopoeic. For example, in my country, during my childhood, the word ‘bua’ was used to designate ‘água’, or water in Portuguese, because that is the sound a baby, or even an adult, makes when he finishes drinking the water.

The sound of music
The word music is of Greek origin and it means “art of muses”. It is made up of an association of sounds interspersed with pauses or short periods of silence over a given time. Music is, in fact, the art of combining sounds with silence. The history of music goes hand in hand with the development of human intelligence, language and culture. There are also those who believe that music predates humanity, if we consider the melodious singing of some birds.

It is likely that in the human species music appeared 40,000 years ago, judging by the dance scenes found in some cave drawings that suggest a probable musical accompaniment. Over time, primitive flutes and other instruments like the xylophone appeared. Musical instruments are classified into three groups: percussion, strings and wind. The human voice is the most complex musical instrument because it is at the same time both strings and wind.

Word communicates thought, sound communicates feeling, or emotion. In this sense, music having both word and sound is the universal language of communication, used as a way to raise awareness of a cause, for religious purposes, to protest, to accompany films and to intensify a message or emotion. Like language, it is part of the idiosyncrasy of a people and speaks of its culture – that is why there is the so-called pop(ular) music. It translates the attitudes, feelings and cultural values of a people.

Music played a central role in the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Rome. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Church played a key role in the development and evolution of music. It was the monk Guido d’Arezzo who created the musical notes from the initial syllable taken from each of the first six sentences of a hymn to Saint John the Baptist. The lyrics of the hymn goes as follow:

Ut queant laxis,  Resonare fibris,  Miragestorum,  Famuli tuorum,  Solvepolluti,  Labii reatum. Sancte Ioannes – So that your servants may sing the wonders of your admirable deeds, absolve the faults of their impure lips, Saint John. The “Ut” was later replaced by “Do”. It is interesting to note that a musical chord or arpeggio is made up of three notes, and is therefore tridimensional.

Sound recording
In 1877, the American inventor Thomas Edison developed the first sound recording device. The sound was recorded by means of a needle that scratched a wax cylinder. In this system, the grooves made by the needle, when traversed again, revealed the recording made.

Later on, came the LP (long playing) made of flexible vinyl and was more resistant than the gramophone records. Then in 1960s came the magnetic tape, first on big reels, then on small cassettes. By 1978, the CD (compact disk) made its appearance, no longer physically read by a needle but optically by laser beams. In 1995, the technology advanced significantly with the emergence of DVD and later the Blue Ray. Finally, the digital sound of our days, in MP3 format, was developed.

Invention of radio
This was the first significant means of communication for long distance use. It uses electromagnetic waves to send out a signal, which is amplified by electrical impulses, via an antenna; it then travels in the air and is received by a receiver, also called a radio. In 1888, the German scientist Heinrich Hertz made the first major practical contribution to the invention of the radio: he proved the existence and functioning of electromagnetic waves. The unit of measurement of frequency of these waves is named after him – Hertz (Hz) or one cycle per second. These waves were originally called hertzians, but since they were electromagnetic radiation, the term radio waves were later adopted universally.

The first experiments with radio were carried out by Nicola Tesla, in the United States, when he held the first public demonstration of a wireless transmission. Guglielmo Marconi, basing himself on Tesla’s studies, repeatedly sent out the letter S from one port to another along the English Channel between France and England. He thus proved that electromagnetic waves were resistant, as they covered enormous distances at a fast speed. Meanwhile, other inventions, such as the valve before the transistor, were improving the operation of the radio.  

How does the radio work? – Sound, which is a mechanical wave, is received by a microphone which transforms it into electrical impulses. These are amplified and sent to an antenna which changes them into electromagnetic or radio waves and sends them out. These waves are then captured by the antenna of any radio receiver which amplifies them, and transforms them back into electrical impulses that, as they leave the speaker, are again changed into mechanical waves that reach our ears.

IMAGE
“Image”, from the Latin imago, means the visual representation of a person or object or landscape; it also means an imitation, portrait, photograph, printed graphic reproduction of reality or imagination, or mental representation of an object, person or landscape. The image can be still or moving as with video which basically is composed of many photos reproduced so quickly that they create the illusion of motion.

The image is not the reality, but a representation of the reality: we cannot open the window and say, “What a beautiful image”, but rather, “What a beautiful view”, because in front of us we have the reality and not a representation of it. However, the image that we have of a person cannot be confused with the actual person – one thing is the person and another is how we represent him to ourselves, that is, our subjective view of him.
 
History of the image
There are no old sound recordings that go back to the beginnings of humanity to show us what life was like for our ancestors; but there are image recordings: the cave paintings that illustrate so well the prehistoric man, his life, his customs and even his feelings.

These Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic engravings or artistic manifestations often show hunting scenes, but also dance and other scenes of everyday life, cosmic phenomena, religious myths, customs and military campaigns. Ever since man started painting, he has never stopped. Much of what we know of the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece were transmitted to us by these engravings, images, drawings, graffiti that these civilizations left behind.

The image was the first form of expression of the human being, and it was the evolution of this form of expression through images that led us to the small drawings that translated ideas, that is, the cuneiform pictographs of Mesopotamia along with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which are the predecessors to the Roman and Greek alphabets.

Some languages, like the Chinese, still maintain to this day a pictorial form of writing, that is, each letter is a small engraving or drawing to represent a concept, an idea; in this way, thousands of drawings are needed to be able to express oneself fluently. If we consider that human beings started using images 40,000 years ago and that writing was only invented 3,500 years ago, the image can be viewed as the prehistory of writing.

Since the beginning, the image was born out of communication and for communication; in other words, it was born from our need to communicate and also as a form of communication. It reached its peak in the second half of the 20th century with the invention of photography, that is, the fixation or recording of images in photographs. In our visual society, it is often heard say that “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

Invention of photography
Two processes contributed to the invention of photography: the camera obscura image projection and the chemical substances that reacted on light exposure to fix the image. The earliest known surviving photograph was produced by the Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce with a pewter plate coated with bitumen and it needed 8 hours of sun exposure to produce the image.

In 1835, British scientist William Talbot created the negative/positive process by preparing a sheet of paper coated with silver chloride. He managed to produce a negative image in the camera obscura, that is, the dark areas became light and the light areas dark, just like the photographic negatives that we knew until recently.

Photography was reserved only for the professionals and the wealthy until George Eastman started a company called Kodak back in 1880.  But it was only in 1913 that the 35mm film was introduced, which we used until the invention of digital photography. The time it took to develop a roll of film could take up to one week, and for this reason, in 1940s the instant Polaroid camera gained fame with its famous photograph that was revealed seconds after being captured, which came out in the front of the camera. Then in 1975 the first digital camera was invented which stored photographs electronically, but the first consumer digital cameras were not marketed until late 1990s. This type of photography is closely linked to another invention and would not have existed without it: the computer.

Invention of cinema or motion picture
It was at the end of the 19th century, in 1895, in France, that the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière invented cinematography. However, as with photography, before reaching the final product that we know today, many research processes on the fundamentals of optical science were necessary.

In the 19th century, many devices were developed to study the phenomenon of retinal persistence; this phenomenon keeps the image on the retina for a fraction of a second after seeing the image. Joseph-Antoine Plateau was the first to measure the time of retinal persistence, concluding that an illusion of motion requires a series of still images succeeding at a rate of ten images per second.

WORD
If the human being were a solitary being like the tiger, he would never have developed the language. Language was born within society, within community, as a way for human beings to communicate with each other. This need occurred when humans became bipedal and managed to look each other in the eye.

Language probably began by expressing needs, as when we travel to a foreign country where we do not have the command of its language, and we try to communicate our needs by sounds and gestures. At a later stage, humans began to express in words emotions, feelings, and later, thoughts.

We have already touched upon the spoken word when we talked about sound. We said that it allowed human beings to communicate with each other in the present moment, and through oral culture, to pass the knowledge, traditions and customs from one generation to the next. However, it was a technique that did not allow everything to be collected, and depended too much on memory to retain great amounts of information.

Despite facilitating the transfer of knowledge from generation to generation, it was not this need that gave rise to writing, but rather from a more mundane need: the registration of people and goods in the cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt 3,300 years before Christ.

It was the need of registry that led the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Egypt to resort to the use of pictorial images, that is, drawings that resembled the physical form of their representation.

The first writing were coded signs made of clay; each object was a coded sign that represented a reality; there was one to represent a woman, another to represent a man, a sheep etc. Small objects of different shapes or signs were used to represent most of the things traded at that time, such as oil, slaves, or cereals. This took place in Mesopotamia and later throughout the Middle East before the invention of writing.

With the development of cities and trade relations, the system became impractical as people accumulated many of these symbolic objects, having jars full of them. Therefore, instead of making small clay objects, they began to draw on clay tablets the symbolic representation of the objects.

The Sumerians invented the triangular cuneiform writing. This was recorded on clay tablets and was used more for trades of goods and registration of property than for cultural purposes. When records were important, as with property records, the tablets were baked in ovens to withstand time. Later on, the Egyptians began to make records on papyrus sheets which were sheets of paper made from the papyrus plant.

Hieroglyphics were functional for registering simple subjects, but almost useless when it came to recording complex entities like ideas and thoughts. This is how centuries of evolution ended up transforming hieroglyphics into phonetic alphabets. In this way, words ceased to be represented by drawings and began to be represented by symbols: with each symbol corresponding to a sound. With the invention of writing, man began to leave the mark of his existence, deeds, feelings and thoughts in a reliable way.

Conclusion – Sound, image and word are different realities of different nature. However, as we have seen, the image has carved for itself only one path independent of the other two realities; even so, it is also part of the prehistory of the written word. The mixture or combination of these realities resulted in the means of communication that we know today: the newspaper, radio, telephone, television and internet, among others.

Books, magazines, newspapers
During the time when writing was done on papyrus, it was difficult to bind these sheets together to form a book. When it began to be done on parchments, that is, on goat, lamb or sheep skins, this task became easier. The first books were in the form of scrolls, and they took on the form we know today in the middle of the Middle Ages. It was the task of the monks to make successive copies of books in order to preserve them. Both in the time when they were written by hand and after 1454 when Johannes Gutenberg invented printing, the function of books has always been to be a storehouse of culture and knowledge. Privilege of some at first, of scribes, copyists and intellectuals, they became accessible to virtually anyone nowadays due to the drastic reduction in their price.

The book has not yet completely lost its lustre as a means of transmitting culture, although in recent times it has been replaced by the magazine. Magazines nowadays are themed; in virtually all human activities – the various sciences, philosophy, psychology, theology, sports, fashion etc. – there is a magazine where progress on this subject is reported.

In this sense, the magazine has become more common than the book, as it takes less time to write it and to read it. When a scientist makes a discovery, he easily writes an article that comes out in the next month’s issue of a magazine. A book takes more time to write and with the exception of school and university textbooks, there are almost no published books on various subjects because advances in any science or area of human knowledge cannot wait for the next edition of a book: it can be made public in a magazine within a month. Novels and works of literature continue to be published in book format.

While the book and the magazine are more formative than informative, the newspaper is more informative than formative. Proof of this is by looking at the type of paper on which the latter is printed, it ages in a short time and is very difficult to preserve. Newspapers exist and will continue to exist for some time, but they are being replaced by the radio, the television and the internet. Nowadays, there are already newspapers that are published only on the internet, no longer having the printed version, which is good news for the ecology as it lessens the devastation that forests have suffered since the sixties with the proliferation of paper as a means of information and formation.

Radio
It has been said that the radio would disappear with the introduction of the television, but it is more likely that it will continue to exist while the television will be absorbed by the internet. This is because unlike the radio, the television requires a person’s full attention. In contrast, one can listen to the radio while driving to work, ironing, cooking, knitting or embroidering, or as background music in offices or shopping malls, in addition to an infinite number of other activities or situations. Because of its versatility, we believe that the radio is here to stay, and although it came before television, it is very likely to die out after it, if it dies out at all.

Telephone
Telephone continues to be an important means of communication between people, having remained fixed-line for a long time. Today, being mobile, the communication between people has increased exponentially. Ironically, the sound and image on the telephone allows us today to be virtually with someone who is geographically distant from us, and, at the same time, can distance us from those who are right beside us.

The cellphone has become a true intruder, interrupting at any moment conversations between friends, classes, masses, meals, activities, and the driver’s attention even to the point of causing accidents. If on the one hand, it is an intruder, as at any moment or situation it can ring and invade, it is also an evader, on the other hand, as it allows the person to evade any situation, end any activity or conversation.

Television
As a means of formation, the television is inferior to the book; studies have been carried out which prove that a person learns more in 10 minutes of reading than in 2 hours of watching television. Most people watch the television at the end of the day, when they are tired and lying on the couch; for many, it works as a lullaby and, in fact, they wake up suddenly when the device is turned off. Currently, its main function is to be an advertising medium.

Its sound breaks the silence in the house and replaces family dialogues at the dinner table. A few years ago, it was ubiquitous, it was always turned on even when there was no one watching it. Many people, afraid of silence and loneliness, turn on the television as soon as they enter the house. TV channels are so numerous today that there are some who find enjoyment simply in changing from channel to channel, stopping just a few seconds at each.

Internet
The internet is the most complete and complex means of communication. It replaces or encompasses all the others. Through the internet, we can read the newspaper, listen to the radio, watch TV, make phone calls, watch a movie, attend a parliamentary session, participate in meetings, conferences and even take a university course.

The great revolution of the internet, in other words, what is truly unique about the internet is the fact that it allows for two-way communication. For all other media, we are always the public, spectators or audience. On the internet, I can be the author of a blog, I can post a video, spread an idea, send out invites, or transmit in real time an event in which I am participating or hosting. In short, on the internet I am an author and a broadcaster, and not just a passive recipient, as happens in other media.

Social and cultural media
Understanding culture as the idiosyncrasy of a people, as its way of being and living in its environment, its traditions, customs and tongue, we can say that the social media, in general, strengthen the culture, once they disseminate and stimulate it, and they are a factor of union among the people in a given locality.

However, they can also have the adverse effect of killing the regional cultures and creating a single uniform national culture. Certain states, for fear of regionalism and self-determination in some regions of their countries, have used social media to grow national identity at the expense of the regional one, and national language at the expense of regional dialects or languages.

What happens at the level of a country has been happening at the global and universal level. In this case, the Western culture with its powerful media has invaded national and regional spaces, and made certain local traditions, uses and customs obsolete, and imposed its fashion standards, way of dressing, and its diet on the global community.

Globalization does not occur only commercially; it also occurs culturally. There are languages that are disappearing and at this rate, the world of the future will speak only one language. In this sense, the means are perverse because they put an end to cultural diversity and richness.

The individual, the society and socialization
The human being is essentially and intrinsically social. It takes two (a man as a father and a woman as a mother) to generate an individual of the human species. Once engendered and born, living together in a climate of unconditional love is indispensable for this offspring of the human species to eventually become a human person.

It is this interaction with his fellow human beings that allows the individual to materialize and develop the elements received genetically, and to transform them into talents or cognitive, affective, social and cultural skills. Without this coexistence, the offspring of the human species would not become a human person, instead he would be a Tarzan, incapable of walking and speaking, with a diminished intelligence, being human only in theory because he is an offspring of humans.

Through parents in the family, teachers at school and social media in general, the society forms, informs and ‘formats’ the human person in all aspects of life in order to make him a member, a mirror or reflection of the society itself. Socialization is the process by which the individual integrates into the social group in which he is born, acquiring customs and traditions, attitudes, beliefs and the most significant normative values that define this group and identify it among others. This process is a type of ongoing formation because it begins with the birth of the individual and never truly ends.

Socialization and public opinion
Social media not only contribute to our basic formation or socialization, but they also act as engines of change in the course of our lives. Their pervasiveness and the constant hammering of their messages, end up forming or modifying the way we face the world, how we view ourselves and others, our tastes, our preferences, and what we consider most intimate and most personal.

E pluribus unum – Social media make a set of individuals into a people. In this sense, their influence is clearly positive. However, they can also lead a society to a singular or unidimensional way of thinking, to the “Mary, go with the others” thinking. This aspect is no longer so positive, because there is always someone waiting in the wings who wants to manipulate the masses.

In this article I was careful not to ever use the expression ‘mass media’, because people are always people and I don’t want to look at them as a mass where individualities, differences and diversities are lost. Social media are aimed at the people who are their audience, and their audience is not a mass of people, it is a people.  

Socialization and fashion
The media for the people, as agents of socialization, highlight the importance of the visual, the physical appearance, and exhibit a thin body type that emerges as an ideal because it is constantly advertised.

In recent years, the influence of the social media on body image has deserved the attention of several communication scholars due to the growing development of eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia in adolescents, especially in females.

Certain standards in the world of high fashion have been modified; models must now have certain minimum weight and measurements. But despite widespread debate in this regard, the gauntly thin as fashionable remains the standard followed by both female and male models.

Social media and religion
They serve to form faith, strengthen faith, but not to raise faith. If we were to unload thousands of bibles by air to a lost Amazonian tribe and the natives were to read them, this would not make them Christians. Faith is like a powerful, good and positive “virus”. For it to spread there must be personal contact, corresponding to the physical contact for the spread of bad viruses.

The book of the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26-39) recounts the episode of an Ethiopian eunuch who was returning from his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and who, sitting in his chariot, was reading the book of the prophet Isaiah. Philip the evangelist approached him and asked him if he understood what he was reading; the eunuch replied that he did not. It is one thing to read, and another to interpret, to understand what is read.

The same happens with seeing; many had seen the events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth in Jerusalem in the last days, including the two disciples of Emmaus (Luke 24:13-25), and yet few or none had understood what they had seen. For these two, it was necessary for Jesus himself to explain the scriptures to them so that they could understand what they had witnessed in Jerusalem.

Pope Francis had said that the internet is the sixth continent and it was this idea that led me to write this blog to which I have been faithful since 2012. But I do not do it with the intention of leading someone to the faith. It serves foremost as a tool of re-evangelization, to bring back to the flock those who have lost or faltered in their faith; to make this faith more reasonable, more plausible and credible (1 Peter 3:15). It is used to form, inform, make more humanly credible and update our faith, but not to raise it. Social media are used for this.

In order to arouse faith, we need the witness and proclamation of the evangelizer, and above all, of his personal intonation of the magnificat or, better said, his magnificat. We need to see and hear someone who can tell us the wonders the Lord has done in his life. This is what leads people to open themselves to this Lord and to have faith that He will also do wonders in their lives. This same testimony, seen on television, does not have the same credibility, because television and movies, with their special effects, have accustomed us to think that what we are seeing is not real, that it is a fantasy.

Social media and the economy
In speaking of social media and the economy, two words immediately come to mind: advertising and propaganda. Both the communication and the economy need each other: the social media are kept alive thanks to the money they receive from the economy which without it, they could not do other more noble things. On the other hand, to be able to dispose of its products and services, the economy needs the social media to make them widely known to the general public.

Through the media we are exposed to various different types of advertisements for the same product and each one of us has the ability to make his or her own value judgments regarding the product shown. But most of the time, we are driven to buy this product only by what is presented to us at first sight, that is, by appearances, or simply because we are too busy to make that critical assessment.

At all times, in all places, we are bombarded with advertisements, some being quite subliminal as we are not even aware that we are being exposed to them. Many of these ads do not appeal to our neocortex, that is, they do not appeal to our reason, but rather to our most basic instincts by taking advantage of our flaws. It is abusive advertising that exploits fear, superstition, sexuality, children, gender discrimination or ethnic group.
 
Social media and the politics
The political and party system of the Western world is only possible in the West. I lived in certain places in Ethiopia where people did not even know who their prime minister was. Where there are no roads, electricity, radio, television, it is not possible to have a representative parliamentary democracy.  Without means of communication this is absolutely impossible.

These developing countries are keen to emulate the Western political party system but they lack sufficient development to carry it out effectively. In fact, where there are political parties, we find that all of their members are from the same tribe – therefore voting for this or that party is irrelevant.

A skilled politician is the smart person who knows how to manage his country’s economic and human resources well and can solve the problems of governance. In the West, however, there is a tradition that the skilled politician is not so much the one who does best but the one who speaks best. Therefore, as long as the politician is synonymous with a good speaker who masters the art of rhetoric, as it happens in most Western democracies, social media is of the utmost importance as they are the ones that provide him with the platform that will make him known, popular and win votes.

Conclusion:  the human being is born from communication, grows by communication and live in ongoing communication. Of the five senses that we have, two (smell and taste) are individual in nature, and the other three (hearing, vision and touch) are eminently social. Through hearing we hear the spoken word and music, through sight we see the image and the written word, and through touch we enter into intimate communication with others.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC