Judy Shepard
Judy Shepard
Mother and Executive Director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation
The story told in Beyond Hatred is in many ways similar to what my family experienced in our grieving process. The viewer sees the family's confusion surrounding the attack on their son and the ultimate understanding of the family that the process will change them forever. Their worldview will no longer be one of isolation and innocence.
The story reminds us all that this kind of hatred and violence is universal in its expression and scope. No part of the world is immune from the kind of bigotry and hate described in the film.
When our son Matthew died, Dennis and I started the Matthew Shepard Foundation, hoping that we could provide some kind of help to those experiencing the kind of hate discussed in the film. It has become a clearinghouse of information and education for people trying to make changes in their communities. Please remember that one person can make a difference.
In October 1998, Judy and Dennis Shepard lost their 21-year-old son, Matthew, to a murder motivated by anti-gay hate. Matthew's death moved many thousands of people around the world to attend vigils and rallies in his memory. Determined to prevent others from suffering their son's fate, Judy and Dennis established the Matthew Shepard Foundation to carry on Matthew's legacy. The Foundation is dedicated to working toward the causes championed by Matthew during his life: social justice, diversity awareness & education, and equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Under Judy's leadership, the Foundation has become a well-established, highly effective and much respected institution in the civil rights community. She has spoken to over one million young people about the impact of hate speech and violence, the importance of understanding and appreciating diversity in all of its forms and has inspired countless individuals and communities to play a role in making the world a safer place for all of us.
David Anderson Hooker
David Anderson Hooker
Expert on Restorative Justice
Restorative justice is a philosophy of justice in which the needs of those harmed are placed at the center of the inquiry. In the standard (retributive) justice philosophy, the process is designed to determine what type of violation has occurred, who is at fault and what the appropriate punishment is. These processes often exclude the harmed parties and their needs during final determination of the outcome. Restorative justice, by contrast, determines who was harmed, what types of harm were done, what it would take to put right the life of those harmed and whose responsibility it is to put things right. Typical restorative processes involve the harmed parties (often in some form of dialogue or direct engagement with those who have done the harm), those who have done the harm and representatives of the community in determining an appropriate way forward.
Beyond Hatred is a beautiful portrayal of one family's journey from tragedy and loss toward recovery. The film's pace is deliberate as it captures acts of day-to-day life after a violent crime, without cinematic sensationalism. The film occurs at the pace of realization, the pace of acknowledgement and the pace of the forgiveness process.
From the perspective of a student of trauma healing and restorative justice, the power of Beyond Hatred resides in the way that it depicts an unnamed family, itself caught in a web of victimization and violence, that tragically draws another family, the family of François Chenu, into that web. After the death of François, his family members realize that they, too, are capable of unspeakable violence and the desire for revenge. Faced with this realization, they must choose between revenge and redemption.
The Chenus' reactions to the trauma are classic: numbness, loss of meaning, strain on family relationships and a sense of being stuck in time. Yet they choose to take the following steps on the pathway to healing:
- choosing to see the perpetrators in a different light in order to "move on";
- seeking to understand the perpetrators' stories without offering excuses for their choices;
- honoring François with a memorial and services holding a view toward the future;
- urging prosecution and defense counsel to consider redemption when framing the events of the crime during the trial process;
- using the media during the aftermath of the trial to involve the entire community to right the harms they experienced and prevent similar events in the future;
- continuing to reach out with hope for redemption of the perpetrators.
The trial was a quintessentially retributive process that employed no restorative justice practices: No victim-offender dialogue, reconciliation, restitution or creative justice memorials were employed. Only the family's continued insistence on seeking restoration of the perpetrators, even after the trial, made possible the vision of a redemptive and not merely punitive justice process.
The film ends in a place of realism: The long pathway to recovery continues for the family; the door to reconciliation remains ajar for the offenders; and the prosecution and defense are left to ponder the value of imprisonment, retribution and isolation as the model for responding to violent hate crimes. Beyond Hatred depicts one family's journey as it reveals the potential for victims, offenders, managers of the legal system and the community at large to overcome the devastation of violent crime through restorative justice.
Questions to consider:
- Does a "life-for-a-life" model of justice continue the cycle of victimhood and violence? Explain your response. If yes, what alternatives are there to this approach to punishment? How do your proposed alternatives address the needs of the victim?
- If no, recognizing that the vast majority of those imprisoned will return to society someday, what, if any, goals should there be for rehabilitation of the offender? How are those accomplished within the punitive responses to crime? Do pain and shame make it more or less likely that a person will re-offend?
- Other than a sincere apology from the offenders, what did the family and communities need to set things right in this case?
- The father described this event as a "failure of society." The family used the post-trial press conference to call the larger community to awareness and action to prevent future acts. What action would it take to prevent a François Chenu event from occurring in your community?
David Anderson Hooker (J.D., M.Div., M.P.H., M.P.A) teaches at the Eastern Mennonite University Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. He has been a mediator and facilitator since 1982 and has practiced law since 1994. As a mediator and facilitator, he has worked with communities and local and state governments in structuring and implementing community dialogue around issues of environmental justice, post-riot community reconciliation, prejudice reduction, community visioning, health care services and other issues of public policy and social concern. Hooker is also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC) and currently serves as the minister for local and global missions at the historic First Congregational Church (UCC) in Atlanta.
Human Rights First
Paul LeGendre
Director, Fighting Discrimination Program
Human Rights First
On a dark night in 2002, three young men, believers in a supremacist neo-Nazi ideology, waited in a park in the French city of Rheims to "do an Arab." Instead, they settled on attacking a gay man, who was just as foreign to them and therefore just as suitable as a target. Francois Chenu was brutally beaten and murdered because he was gay.
Beyond Hatred is a haunting portrayal of the immense damage caused by one violent hate crime in one city in France. Yet tens of thousands of violent hate crimes motivated by a wide range of prejudice occur every year across Europe and North America -- indeed all around the world. Most are never reported, often due to mistrust of the authorities. Among those that are, accountability is unfortunately rare. While still relatively few hate crimes end in death, as occurred in the case of Francois, each of them -- especially when a swift government response is lacking -- chips away at our societies' professed values of equality and nondiscrimination. Francois's family members are courageously seeking to live "beyond hatred" in the film. The quest for justice -- before the law -- plays a key role in that process, as it does everywhere there is hate crime.
Reports indicate that homophobic violence is a significant portion of hate crime overall. Violent acts motivated by homophobia are also characterized by levels of physical aggression that in many cases exceed those for other forms of reported hate crimes. But all such acts -- whether motivated by bias based on the victim's ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or another similar factor -- have far-ranging consequences. Apart from having a profound impact on the victim and the victim's family and friends, hate crimes send a message of hatred to the larger community that may identify with the victim -- precisely because such crimes attack a person's very identity. Even further, as Francois's parents so poignantly articulate, hate crimes collide with the republican values of France (and those of other democratic societies) that represent first and foremost an open and pluralistic society where individuals of different backgrounds can coexist peacefully.
The intolerance that drives hate crimes is deeply disturbing. Beyond Hatred demonstrates how the beer-guzzling, Hitler-chanting, neo-Nazi youths who murdered Francois were trapped in a vacuum of ignorance where the act of hating those who were different gave meaning to their lives.
Addressing the intolerance at the root of violent hate crimes is no easy matter and requires action on many levels. The criminal justice system has a major role to play in ensuring society's condemnation of such crimes. The film takes us on a journey in which the process of bringing the perpetrators to justice becomes an important step in the family's grieving and recovery. Accountability before the law -- while it cannot bring back a life senselessly lost -- can help to reassure communities and society at large that hate violence will not be tolerated.
For more information on Human Rights First's work to combat hate crime across Europe and North America, visit our website.
Human Rights First is a non-profit, non-partisan international human rights organization based in New York and Washington D.C. We work to strengthen the response of North American, European, and Eurasian governments to racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, homophobic and similar forms of bias motivated violence across all 56 OSCE countries. Human Rights First believes that building respect for human rights and the rule of law will help ensure the dignity to which every individual is entitled and will stem tyranny, extremism, intolerance, and violence. We advocate for change at the highest levels of national and international policymaking. We seek justice through the courts. We raise awareness and understanding through the media. We build coalitions among those with divergent views. And we mobilize people to act.
As director of the Fighting Discrimination Program, Paul LeGendre leads Human Rights First's effort to combat discrimination by reversing the tide of antisemitic, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim violence and reducing other bias crime in Europe, the Russian Federation, and North America through research, analysis, and advocacy. Prior to joining Human Rights First, Paul worked for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the International League for Human Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists and for CAF-Russia, a Russian non-profit resource center.