Terry Halifax
Northern News Services

Inuvik (May 17/02) - Continued federal funding is bringing a new look to justice in Canada and now the NWT.

The National Strategy on Community Safety and Crime Prevention will fund 27 crime prevention initiatives in the NWT this year, with a focus on early intervention and discipline.

Guenther Laube, director of the Northern Region for the National Crime Prevention Centre said the federal strategy began in 1998, but has just recently established a presence here.

"It's just really expanded in the north," he said. "We will have a strong presence on the ground here that will support communities and organizations that deal with the root causes."

From this initiative, Inuvik has established the youth justice committee, a project that has young people deciding on discipline for their peers.

Youth justice committee director John Nash said the Inuvik initiative began in December 2001 and it consists of six Samuel Hearne students who work as mediators between victims and their offenders.

"The youth justice committee will be there to help a victim and an offender to come to an agreement and what the offender can do, to come to terms with what he or she has done," Nash said.

The group just returned from a conference called "2002 -- Resolve It," held in Toronto.

One of the spin-offs from the conference was the goal to establish a peer mediation group at the high school.

Nash says two young women travelled from the United Kingdom and Ottawa this week, to meet with 20 Inuvik students to train the group. The students are training at SHSS week from Wednesday to Friday.

The majority of the federal funding will go into a program in Yellowknife that will soon expand to other communities. About $1.4 million will go to a program that focuses on early intervention.

J.R. Sissons elementary school will expand the project to 10 other communities throughout the NWT and Nunavut.

"It's a multi-year project that focuses on dealing with discipline in schools," Laube said.

If a child is referred to the restitution coordinator, they discuss the problem and come to a resolution through understanding, rather than punishment.

"They begin to understand what their actions meant to the other people around them at school," he said. "It's a way of dealing with discipline in a non-adversarial way."

The project has been going on at Sissons for over two years and is showing some real progress.

"They have had some remarkable results there in terms of reducing the level of violence and behavioral problems in the school," he said. "It's a great way of shaping their lives forever."