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THE PESA POST
The latest news, views and announcements from Parents, Educators/Teachers & Students in Action
December 10, 2020
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STOPPING HATE BY EMPOWERING OUR YOUTH
Intolerance may never go away, but Judge Wesley and the SHADES Program aim to head it off early
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One thing we’ll give Covid: It has reduced incidents of bullying. Not because the virus has suddenly made people more kind and accepting, but because kids aren’t going to school where bullying often occurs.
That irony is not lost on Judge David S. Wesley (Ret.), founder of the SHADES (Stop Hate And Delinquency by Empowering Students) Program, in which PESA is an active partner. And just as the virus itself came roaring into existence, so too will the return of bullying and hate crimes, Wesley suspects, once the pandemic is over.
Fortunately, unique programs like SHADES serve as a sort of vaccine against intolerance. Wesley, a longtime proponent of transformative justice program Teen Court, conceived of it almost 15 years ago after learning about a hate-crime that occurred on the campus of his West L.A. alma mater, Hamilton High School. “Someone had smashed the bathroom mirrors and wrote threatening messages about Jews,” he says. With such hate crimes on the rise, he envisioned an early intervention transformative justice program that could offer an intensive, highly tailored and educational experience. “I approached the Museum of Tolerance for some support, and they said, ‘No, we want to [fully] partner with you.’ We brought together a group of judges, teachers and probation officers for three days of training, after which we then said, ‘now let’s design a program for students,’ and it’s been growing ever since.”
Just like the Teen Court program, once a hate crime is referred to SHADES, a jury of teen peers hears the case, but with SHADES, “jurors give a week of their time to go through five days of intensive training at the Museum of Tolerance,” says Wesley. “And there’s an eight-hour remediation program for the accused minor. Then, we have a three-day human-relations camp called Building Bridges up in the local mountains. If the crime involved swastikas or something against a Jewish family, for example, the minor would meet there with Holocaust survivors.” Finally, they are supervised by a judge throughout their diversion.
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“There’s no other place in the country that has a program like SHADES,” says Wesley. “I have judges call and ask me, ‘How do we start one of these,’ and I say, “well, you start by having a partnership with organizations like the Museum of Tolerance and PESA.”
Wesley is passionate about the early-intervention aspect of SHADES. “There’s a close connection between bullying—which is an epidemic—and hate crime,” he says. Though the stay-at-home nature of the pandemic has changed things temporarily, he notes that on average, “More than 160,000 kids stay home from school every day because they’re afraid of getting bullied. There are stats showing that a lot of bullies end up turning to serious criminal conduct by the time they’re 21. There is a connection, and you want to catch it early.”
Indeed, as proof of the program’s effectiveness, Wesley rattles off success stories such as one diverted youth who completed the program and went on to graduate from UCLA, went to work in the White House where he acted as a spokesman for SHADES and is now in business school getting his masters. In another case, two teen girls who had vandalized the home of a Jewish family that included a Holocaust survivor were so taken by their experience at the Building Bridges camp that they ended up becoming counselors there. The list goes on.
“When I work with the kids,” says Wesley, “I like to quote Albert Einstein, who said ‘The world is not going to end by people who do evil, but by people who see evil and do nothing about it.’ Speak up. If you do nothing, when you finally decide to, it may be too late.” ■
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