My son came up for breakfast in the morning and the first thing he said before I even had chance to look up from the newspaper was, “Don’t be mad”. I looked up to see that he had a swollen black eye and a very swollen, slightly out-of-joint, nose. He had gone to a party the night before and one of his friends, who wasn’t in town, asked him to watch over his girlfriend. My son just turned 18 in January but most of the other kids at the party were drinking underage including a boy who was supposedly flirting with the girl. My son said the boy wouldn’t stop hitting on the girl. My son tried to distract the boy on several occasions and finally he asked him to go outside to get some air. The boy got angry and punched my son in the face. My son’s nose started bleeding profusely so that quickly ended the confrontation.
My initial reaction after hearing his account of what happened was relief. After all, it could have been worse (he made it home, he was safe, he was alive). My second thought was to assess the physical damage and determine whether he needed any medical attention. He has a history of concussions and we need to be vigilant about addressing potential problems early on. He needed more icing but didn’t seem to have any other symptoms to speak of. Next was to figure out what to do about this situation.
What I quickly realized was that I didn’t have a lot of information at that point. I had my son’s version of what happened and nothing else. Then my ‘parrot’ (inner voice) started chirping on my shoulder. What hasn’t my son told me? What was his role in all this? Why didn’t the hosts of the party contact me? What kind of boy sucker punches another kid at a party? What if he had had a knife or a gun? What about his parents? Do they condone that kind of behaviour and do they even know? Do they want to know?
Can you see what was going on for me? I was trying to make sense of what happened and I had a lot of questions and very few answers. It would have been easy for me to come with my own conclusions about the situation and I can say that I went there a few times. I wanted to be angry that my son was assaulted for ‘no reason’ but I didn’t really know. I wanted to believe that the other boy was just a goon who got drunk and lashed out the only way he knew how but I didn’t really know that either.
I thought about it a lot throughout the day and shared what I knew with my husband when he called from out of town. His initial question surprised me because I hadn’t even thought about it. He wanted to know if I had called the police. What surprised me about the question is that my husband and I are avid champions for restorative justice over punitive approaches. At first I thought he was being over-protective of our son. Then I realized that he was just stating the facts in a non-anxious, non-judgmental way. The boy committed a violent act that caused injury which, in the legal world, is assault causing bodily harm. That needed to be addressed regardless what approach we decided to take. His argument persuaded me to act.
As a first step, I decided to reach out to the boy’s parents. I put aside any assumptions or judgments and approached it in the way that I would want to be approached if the roles were reversed. Here is an excerpt of my email to the parents:
I held my breath for a few seconds before sending it because I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction I was going to get, if any. The response came one hour later (after talking to their son) and I was once again relieved. They started by apologizing for the situation (not for their son) and asking how our son was doing both physically and emotionally. They invited me to contact them directly by phone to discuss further (which I did). In that moment, I knew I had made the right decision.