I recently learned about a community legal education campaign for certain minority groups in the U.S. that a major state civil rights organization mounted several years ago. The campaign, a “know your rights” effort, involved materials and workshops that encouraged individuals in these communities to steadfastly assert their rights to police and other authorities. The civil rights group, however, was not prepared to offer legal support to most of those who followed its advice and ended up arrested or harassed for standing on their rights. The result was frustration and increased danger for the minority community; public legal education had led the community into a raw conflict with police.
Several Canadian PLEI organizations that I’ve talked to explicitly recognize that education and information can hurt rather help when it’s limited or not backed up by professional, emergency legal services. Some groups will think twice—or not at all—about producing PLE for audiences or on topics where there is little hope for people to get free legal help or remedy problems on their own. This attitude, as the story from the States illustrates, can go a long way to avoiding frustration and even serious harm. But it also means that latent legal needs stay latent. Those latent needs are then left to private attorneys, funders, and governments to identify on their own, but there’s a decent chance that those groups too will remain ignorant of them.
What role does PLEI have in simply cultivating legal needs—in building community recognition of rights that might ultimately require the attention of better-funded and more politically powerful champions? And, whatever role PLEI has in that, when should it ethically back off in order to prevent the hurt that can come from knowing just a little, but not enough?
March 6, 2007 at 2:46 pm
One of the areas in which I think PLE can hurt as much or more than help is in dealing across cultures.- particularly Aboriginal PLE. I have only read one article on PLE as “imperialism” and that was written years ago in Australia. If anyone is interested, I can probably find the piece. The concern is that in teaching the law of the dominant culture to other cultures, we are helping to devalue and eradicate their indigenous ways of dealing with conflict and behaviours that are socially unacceptable. My view is that while Aboriginals and other cultural groups need to know the laws governing them, this learning should take place in the context of first articulating ways of dealing with “legal” matters in their own cultures. This comparative law approach enables participants to learn more about their own cultures and ways of being and to evaluate the dominant culture’s ways of dealing with problems from the perspective of their own. I think we can all win from this strategy. As we know, some of the most interesting developments in resolving problems are coming from Aboriginal ways of restoring harmony in their communities. There is also interesting work going on in Australia to restore and value Aboriginal ways of determining truth – they are diametrically opposed to the ones used in our courts.
I am also concerned about the problem of creating false expectations in immigrant communities by providing them with translated PLE materials. If the services they must turn to are only available in English, they will have to either function in English themselves or turn to an intermediary for help. Are our efforts better spent equipping intermediaries to help in these situations?