Editorial Reviews:

Through words and portraits, Howard Zehr presents stories of recovery, rebuilding and transcendence of men and women who have survived violent crime. January 07, 2002

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Washington Post

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"This book is essential reading."

"I came away impressed by the simplicity of Dr. Zehr's approach in presenting the victims as they wish to be seen photographically, and then letting them express their storeis in their own words. I defy anyone who reads this book to remain indifferent to the issues it raises.

"I applaud Dr. Zehr's efforts to bring clarity to this process by offering victims a chance to tell fully their side of the story.

"This book is a powerful wake-up call on so many levels. We no longer have an excuse for avioiding the issues this book raises. I hope it can be used to enlighten, inform, and encourage discourse about the kind of society we want to inhabit."

Tom Kennedy
Washington Post
(former Editor of Photography for National Geographic)

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Longtime criminal justice worker Zehr became a creative exponent of restorative justice, which focuses first on crime victims and their self-defined needs and second on bringing offenders to understand and take responsibility for the harm they have done, after concluding that current U.S. criminal justice systems ignored victims. This book of testimonies and photographs of some direct victims of crime and many spouses, parents, children, and siblings of victims responds primarily to the prime focus of restorative justice, though the secondary focus comes up in the statements of several persons who have met or want to meet their or their loved ones' attackers. Zehr says he hasn't editorially skewed the depositions, and apart from lacking verbal tics and bad spoken grammar, they ring utterly true. Most subjects report how crucial their religious faith was to dealing successfully with the rage, despair, and brokenness that engulfed them, and many remark how poorly the courts, in particular, served them. Moving and awe-inspiring, this is very high-order advocacy literature.

Ray Olson
American Library Association
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Can a book about crime victims be described as “beautiful?” In the case of Transcending, by Howard Zehr, the answer is a resounding yes. Transcending is a beautiful collection of personal essays and striking photography that explores the intimate feelings of victims of violent crime.

Dr. Zehr, an internationally known advocate of restorative justice, proves again with this book that he is a leader in this area. More than many of his colleagues, Zehr holds steadfast to his belief in the importance of victim’s rights and needs. While his contemporaries are inclined to move quickly into the benefits of restorative justice for the offender, Zehr maintains a conviction that victims must always come first.

As I read Transcending, I could imagine Zehr demonstrating acute listening skills with the survivors he interviewed. I suspect he may have squirmed at times from what he heard; such as a resistance to forgiveness by some survivors, an act Zehr advocates as a peacemaker and a proponent of the Mennonite faith. By declining to edit out bad grammar and even strong expletives that may be difficult for some readers, Zehr has maintained the integrity of this project.

Transcending presents the stories of 39 victims. My only criticism of the book is that it doesn’t include more victims of drunk driving crashes. Most of the victims in his book have lost loved ones to murder. As we know, the experiences of family members of drunk driving victims closely resemble those of family members of murder victims. The exception is that families of murder victims frequently are more satisfied with longer prison sentences than are those killed by a drunk driver. MADD families, however, will identify with the thoughts and feelings of the men and women on the pages of this book.

Zehr is fond of quoting Vaclav Havel, who said, “Transcendence is the only alternative to extinction.” Either one moves toward getting better or is slowly killed by the killer, too. The 39 survivors who share their stories here make the choice – sometimes after a long personal war in darkness – to press on and make something meaningful from their experiences. Because their brief stories, usually 3 or 4 pages in length, are direct quotes, the collection is powerful and honest. The integrity of the words, coupled with the artistry of Zehr’s images, result in a sense of having the victims in the same room. As readers, we can almost feel their arms around us and hear their words of encouragement. They seem to be saying, “I think you can make it, too.”

Reviewed by Janice Harris Lord

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December 23 column

We all try to begin again, in ways large and small, each New Year. Few of us, however, have had to muster the strength to begin again after enduring losses and heartbreaks and violent acts so terrible that they are almost beyond imagining.

Few of us -- thankfully -- have stories to tell like those in the recently published documentary book, "Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims," by Howard Zehr, a professor at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., and a proponent of restorative justice, which seeks redress in the criminal justice system for victims of crime.

"Transcending" consists of interviews with more than 40 people, including a son whose 76-year-old mother was tortured and murdered, a woman left paralyzed by an ex-boyfriend who broke her neck, and two fathers who lost daughters as a result of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Their painful stories do not make for easy reading. But there are threads of hope and redemption throughout the book, and there is wisdom in the book’s repeated discussions about forgiveness -- as apt a subject as any for us to explore, as we stand on the precipice of this New Year.

Some in the book say they have forgiven the criminals who caused them terrible suffering. Others say they are struggling toward forgiveness. Some aren’t sure if they’ll ever be able to forgive -- or even want to try. I think they’re courageous just to consider the question. And I think we all can learn something from their struggles and their stories. None of the stories in "Transcending" is more wrenching than the very first one in the book. It is related by Lynn Shiner, whose 10-year-old daughter Jennifer and 8-year-old son David were brutally stabbed to death by their father early Christmas morning in 1994.

The children were on an overnight visitation at the Lower Paxton Twp. home of Tom Snead, Shiner’s ex-husband. Snead killed Jennifer first, then David, then himself.

Shiner and her current husband, Paul, learned what had happened when they came to pick up Jennifer and David on Christmas morning.

In "Transcending," Shiner says that after her children were murdered, she learned that Snead had "had an actual checklist of everything he needed to do. The last item was to kill Jennifer and David. He thought David was the devil and Jennifer was an angel. We found out later that he thought he was God and that he was doing some kind of wonderful thing by saving them from this life."

Shiner’s life as she’d known it ended with her children’s lives. She had constant panic attacks, she says in "Transcending," and struggled with suicide. "The what-ifs were just endless for me," Shiner says in the book. Eventually, her anguish was joined by a resolve to help others avoid her sorrow.

Shocked to learn after her children’s deaths that her ex-husband had been stalking a disc jockey in Lancaster, Shiner led the fight for what is now known as the "Jen and Dave Law," which states that if one parent or guardian in a child custody arrangement is charged with a violent crime or dangerous offense, the other parent or guardian has the right to find out about it. Shiner’s determination to help others also led her to her current job with the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, where she has been credited with dramatically reducing the wait victims have to endure for compensation payments.

Shiner now says she feels as if she has to make the most of her life, to make a difference, on behalf of her children. For her own sake, she has begun -- tentatively -- to broach the question of forgiveness.

She says in "Transcending" that she jokes with a friend that she knows she needs to forgive, "so when I’m on my deathbed and there’s only five seconds left, then I’ll forgive ... I’ll just sneak that in right at the end."

A subsequent passage, dated 18 months later, has Shiner saying this: "Through recent experiences, I‘ve come to realize the darkness and anger that are still in my head, and the amount of energy they take from me. (Snead) has ruined my past. I‘m beginning to toy with the idea of forgiveness so that I don’t allow him to destroy my future as well." I wanted to speak to Shiner about this subject but, for understandable reasons, she was reluctant to be interviewed. She agreed, though, to respond to some questions by email.

Asked where she now stands on the question of forgiveness, Shiner replied that most of the definitions of forgiveness in Webster’s Dictionary -- "to excuse for an offense ... to release the liability for or penalty entailed by an offense" -- "don’t quite fit my feelings or needs."

A little closer, she says, is this definition of "forgive": "to renounce (give up or disown) anger or resentment against."

Finding the dictionary wanting, Shiner decided to write her own definition of forgiveness: "Empowering oneself to rid them of the rage and anger caused by the heinous selfish act of another. This type of forgiveness may allow one to transcend all of the energy it takes to harbor the anger and hatred, and provides the ability to channel energy into more constructive, positive things.

"In essence," she explains, "I'm disowning the anger and resentment, knowing that in the end, the one who is responsible for such a heinous act will be judged and punished by someone much higher than myself."

Shiner says, "To forgive will not bring Jen and Dave back. To forgive is something I must do just for me ... to help me move forward emotionally and spiritually."

No one can, or should, tell a crime victim to forgive, she says. "Everyone is so unique in their experience and how and when they to chose to react is very personal," she writes in her email, adding, "They need to do what they need to do to survive and move forward ... Until we walk in their shoes, we have no right to suggest, second-guess or tell them if and when they need to forgive. If and when it is time, they will know it and act on it."

Forgiveness doesn’t mean letting a crime go unpunished. And a sharp distinction must be drawn between forgiveness and forgetting, Shiner reminds us.

"Forgiveness has absolutely nothing to do with forgetting!" she writes. "I don't believe it is conceivable that a victim/survivor could ever forget." Shiner says for a time, she found it hard to forgive God. "I was angry at God. Why would God ever allow or cause this to happen? Two precious children whose death has affected so many people? In the beginning, I doubted God and his existence. Over time, through listening to my pastor's sermons and much reading, I know that God is not to blame.

"God has chosen to empower each of us with the ability to make choices. As long as God gives us this ability, there will always be those of us who will suffer at the hands of those who make bad choices ... I no longer question God. He has his reasons and someday I will understand why." She has made peace with God, but not with Christmas. She didn’t celebrate Christmas last week. She hasn’t since her children died.

That day, more than any day, is a time of thoughts and memories, unfortunately both good and bad. It is a very quiet and sad day. It's easy to think that I should be able to allow the celebration of Christmas back into my life for me, my family and friends. But ... on days like this I really have no control over my broken heart."

Suzanne Cassidy

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Worth Reading

by Russ Immarigeon
a contributing editor
563 Route 21
Hillsdale, NY 12529
(518) 325-5925

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Howard Zehr, a professor of sociology and restorative justice at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia, started his professional criminal justice life working with offenders, people whom in one form or another have generally victimized others. In this offender-oriented role, a role still played (often appropriately) by many people through the broad criminal justice process, Zehr remembers that he did not pay much attention to crime victims, nor did he really want to do so because it was a difficult thing to do, personally as well as procedurally. Zehr transcended this limited focus when he and others established the first victim-offender reconciliation program (VORP) in the United States. As I’ve heard him say, and as he has observed in Changing Lenses (Herald Press, 1990) and other notable writings, victim-offender mediation, as well as restorative justice more generally, is about both victims and offenders.

In addition to his academic and criminal justice work, Zehr is also a savvy and seasoned photographer. Transcending is Zehr’s second collection of photographs and interviews. In Doing Life: Reflections of Men and Women Serving Life Sentences (Good Books, 1996, $15.95), Zehr simply and sensitively pictures and portrays, many years after their crimes, men and women incarcerated in Pennsylvania for killing others. For each of these persons, Zehr photographs them – in black and white - against a plain backdrop, while printing their reflections – or testimony – about their crimes, incarceration, and lives. The result is a powerful series of vignettes that provides rich details of the complexity of these people’s lives. In reading through this book, it is difficult to view “offenders” or “murderers” casually, caustically, or off-handedly. In short, Zehr’s photographs and interviews really make you stop and think about the experiences of these men and women and, indeed, about the changes that have occurred in their lives.

In Transcending, Zehr takes the same approach and the results are equally as rewarding. Nearly 40 people who have experienced, and been deeply affected by, violent crimes (mostly as family members of murder victims but also as victims of rape and other forms of physical and sexual violence) are portrayed in this eye-opening, engaging volume. The printed interviews in this volume are relatively short, taken from longer conversations with the author. But brevity seems only to enhance the powerful testimony of these victims, who collectively raise numerous issues relevant for victim services or restorative justice programs. As with the lifers Zehr interviewed in his earlier book, the victims in this volume make sure that we – outside readers – do not think of victims in quite the same way again.

The victim interviews frequently raise the importance of seeking justice and they make clear that justice, whatever it is, is not an easily captured concept or reality. Zehr inserts a book-ending essay that, in part, tries to organize an approach to better understand the requirements of justice. He argues that victimization undermines our basic assumptions about autonomy, order, and relatedness. He says that healing, for victims, involves the (re)discovery of their stories, their narratives. “We must create new or revised narratives that take into account the awful things that have happened,” he observes. He locates at least five requirements of justice: the creation of safe space; some form of restitution or reparation; answers to questions; truth-telling; and empowerment. About these interviews, Zehr concludes: “We need to hear these voices if we are to have a real dialogue about crime and justice. We need to hear these voices if we are to do justice.”

Good Books
PO Box 49
3510 Old Philadelphia Pike
Intercourse, PA 17534
(800) 762-7171

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Victims' voices

Lynn Shiner, her two young children murdered by their father, locks away the horror in an imaginary china cabinet.

Leland Kent takes his sorrow over the brutal killing of his half-brother back to North Philadelphia, where he talks about the devastating impact of crime on families and neighborhoods.

Elizabeth Jackson viciously attached by her estranged husband, finds joy amid a constant sense of vulnerability.

In such ways, each is finding a way through the dark, dense fog of violent crime - stories featured in a new book, Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims by Howard Zehr. Zehr, 57, a former Lancaster County resident who is prominent in the victims' rights movement, both interviewed and photographed his subjects.

Taken together, the 39 intimate protraits - drawn with striking black-and-white pictures and the victims' own words - offer what the book calls a "choir of voices," angry, sad, strong, but always moving and inspiring. At a time when the nation has been traumatized by violent crime, in the form of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Transcending offers the possibility of hope - and a reminder of human resilience.

"First you ruminate, you play all of it [trauma] over and over in your head," said Zehr, a professor of sociology and restorative justice at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va. "Then you have to find some way to put it aside and control when you think about it."

He chose the title carefully - picking a word that suggests rising above, triumphing, going beyond ordinary limits. The men and women in his book, he writes, "have faced the abyss and... are in the process of transcending."

Thin and professional with a gray beard and glasses, Zehr spoke in soft, measured tones during an interview at the Mennonite Crentral Committee's headquarters in Akron, Pa., where he used to work documenting humanitarian work of Mennonite volunteers for the organization's publications.

He had paused there after visiting a serial rapist in a Pennsylvania prison. One of the rapist's victims wants to meet the criminal, 23 years after the attack, and Zehr is arranging the encounter - part of his work in restorative justice, a concept that came of age in the 1970's.

The traditional justice system, he said, asks: "What laws are broken? Who did it? What do they deserve?"

Restorative justice looks at harm done. "And if what really matters is the harm that's done," Zehr said, "then what is central is, what are the victims' needs?"

Shiner, 41, who lives in Harrisonburg, manages the Pennsylvania Victims Compensation Program - a job she took because of her own yearlong wait for funds to cover the cost of burying her children. Under her tenure, she said, that wait has shortened to eight to 12 weeks.

"My life is my job," she said last week.

Shiner has moved on, in part because she uses that imaginary china cabinet with glass doors and a lock.

She keeps the good memories with her, always. But she said she must have a place to store what happened on Christmas in 1994, when her ex-husband picked up their two children and then, following a checklist he had written, stabbed Jen Snead, 10 and Dave Snead, 8, before killing himself.

"Fairly often I open my china cabinet, and I take out Jen and Dave," Shiner says in the book, which reads like journal entries of survivors. "I go through what happened, but in order to be okay I put them back in... but I'm only closing the door on that tiny part, the murder. I have such good memories..."

Across the page, Zehr displays a simple black-and-white portrait of Shiner, her eyes a well of sadness.

The book is full of sorrow, with page after page of faces of those who have survived great pain.

But Shiner, like others, found something else in the words and pictures:

"The strength that comes out of this book just amazes me and feeds me. I can go on."

Zehr grew up in the Midwest hearing about justice, especially from his father, a Mennonite minister. He aimed to turn the talk into action.

He studied history at Morehouse College in Atlanta, becoming the first white student to graduate from the traditionally black school. Later, he earned his doctorate in the history of crime from Rutgers University, taking up the rights of offenders.

At first, Zehr was a relucant participant in the notion of victims' meeting with offenders.

"You don't sit for long and listen to victims until you start to see where they are coming from," he said. "Then you take these people who are enemies and put them together... So often at the end, they will shake hands. You think, 'Whoa, something is happening there.' "

Zehr ended up directing an early victim-offender reconciliation program.

Transcending isn't a case for restorative justice, though some in the book have gone as far as to write to or meet with offenders. "My interest is in using people's words and images to bridge gaps, to help people connect who wouldn't normally connect," Zehr said.

Mary Achilles, the governor-appointed victim advocate for the state, helped Zehr find many of the 11 Pennsylvania victims in the book. "it so describes for me in many ways the incredible personal experiences... and uniqueness of victimization and the journey afterward," she said.

Leland Kent, 30, of East Oak Lane, was reluctant to share his grief so publicly. But he changed his mind, intent on helping others by talking to Zehr. It was "a beginning of a journey for me," he said.

Kent grew up in North Philadelphia with his mother and stepfather, blocks from his father and a half-brother who together ran drugs.

Kent didn't meet his half-brother till 1991, when his father died from a heart attack. The half-brother "was real proud of me," Kent says in the book. Five years later, Kent's "brother" was stomped to death over $10 he owed a dealer.

Kent, who worked in the Victims Services Unit in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office and has risen to assistant director, was unsatisfied with the outcome of the trial.

"I've had some anger that one of the offenders walked," he says in the book. "I work in the system. I can find where they hang out, so if I didn't have convictions, I would take justice into my own hands. But I would be no better than they are. And I have a family... I have too much to live for."

Since being interviewed by Zehr, Kent has spoken at schools, neighborhood rallies, and prisons about his experience with crime.

"We who have a voice must always speak for those who have no voice," he said.

Elizebeth Jackson, 51, an addictions counselor, was choked and stabbed by her ex-husband and left to die in 1991. But she survived, returning to the scene to clean up her own blood.

"I experienced a lot of shame," Jackson, who relocated from Berks County to the Philadelphia area, says in the book. " 'You were a counselor. You should have known better...shame, shame.' I don't care about that anymore, but I should have listened to my gut. That's my message to others: If your gut says it's unsafe, pay attention to that."

The events of Sept 11 triggered a lot of the old, scary feelings for Jackson. "It reminded me of the terror and uncertainty and distrust of the world," she said. "It's important to feel safe, and the whole nation didn't feel safe."

She thinks everyone in America now knows how it must feel to be a crime victim, she said.

But Jackson also held out hope, like that found in the stories of Transcending.

"There is nothing so dark," she said, "that you can't enjoy being alive."

By Lini S. Kadaba
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, January 16, 2002

Resources for crime victims can be found at:

• Office of the Victim Advocate for Pennsylvania, 1-800-563-6399
• New Jersey Office of Victim-Witness Advocacy, 609-588-7900
• National Center for Victims of Crimes 1-800-394-2255 or www.ncvc.org
• National Organization for Victim Assistance, 202-232-6682 or www.try-nova.org

 

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