life
INTERVIEW
The real answer to the question is that she won’t
attempt to try to “follow that”. “He’s a lovely man
and has done the Office of High Sheriff a great
service. A lot of what I am going to do will not be
high profile at all: meetings that no-one gets to
know about.”
She explains her agenda thus: “You know when
you drive and somebody waits for you, you put
your hand up – chances are you’ll get a thank-you
back. So in everything you do for someone else,
there’s that little tiny ripple of something nice.”
Sending ripples sums up Gay Edwards’s
intentions for her year as High Sheriff. She wants
to raise the profile of organisations which work
with young people who are on the margins of
breaking the law, to catch them before they hit the
downward spiral.
“I think it’s a pity we can’t spend more energy
and resources keeping them out of the court in the
first place.”
She had just met a team of fire fighters who
run a project called LIFE, which trains young
people in fire-fighting skills, giving them a sense
of responsibility they’ve never had before. What
Gay notes particularly is that “these fine men are
beautiful, good looking young guys. Which is
important: children respond to the idea of a fine
upstanding guy, a hero. “
This is no naïve over-the-rainbow stuff. Gay
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Edwards’s ideals are firmly routed in years of
observation in the criminal justice world. Children
misbehave for all sorts of reasons – bad parenting,
bad experience at school, or even behavioural
problems which remain undiagnosed. But if they
are not sorted out at a young age they become an
expensive problem for us all.
One of her favoured projects, Catch 22, uses
restorative justice to bring young offenders back
from the brink before they are sucked too far
into the criminal system. It involves meeting the
victim of the crime they have committed, to help
them connect the consequence to the criminal
act. “If your house has been burgled, you can say
‘why?’ and they can say ‘sorry’.
She uses a lovely expression, “stuck naughty”,
to describe adults who have never been taught
to collaborate with one another. “As human
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