Victim-Offender Mediation - A Brief Overview

Victim-offender mediation is a process through which a trained community-based mediator prepares and provides interested victims and offenders with the opportunity to meet in a safe and structured setting. During these meetings, victims often tell the offender about the crime's physical, emotional, and financial impact on their lives, receive answers to lingering questions about the crime and the offender, and participate directly in developing options for trying to make things right. The offender is afforded opportunities to make apologies, provide information and to develop reparative plans and gain insight for personal growth.

Program models may vary, but they all have certain features in common: voluntary participation at all stages of the process; extensive preparatory work (sometimes taking years); detailed procedural guidelines and rules to safeguard victims' safety and offenders' legal rights; strict confidentiality, to avoid influencing parole board decisions; and highly trained mediators, who are perceived as neutral by both parties. Many encounters are face-to-face, though other options, such as exchanges of letters and videotapes, are also used to good effect. This approach differs from conventional mediation in that the parties are not "disputants" in the usual sense; one is an admitted offender, and the other is clearly the victim. As well, the process is not focused on reaching a settlement, but rather on open communication.

Victim Offender Mediation and Federal Corrections

In the Pacific Region, all mediations are being managed through the the Victim Offender Mediation Program (VOMP) operated by the Fraser Region Community Justice Initiatives Association (CJI) in Langley, British Columbia. VOMP was created when research with inmates in B.C. federal institutions and the victims of those offenders revealed a strong interest in the development of a mediation program designed for those affected by the most serious crimes in the criminal code.

According to its directors, VOMP focuses, at a post-incarceration stage, on addressing the issues of accountability, healing and closure those involved in or affected by traumatic criminal offences. While the program can and does involve face-to-face mediation in many cases, the 'mediator' is not an intrusive intervenor. VOMP staff see their roles as that of respectful, supportive facilitators of therapeutic dialogue. The cautious (and often lengthy) assessment and preparation processes are therapeutic in nature, and informed by current theory and clinical practice regarding offender treatment and victim trauma recovery.

The purpose of the Victim Offender Mediation Program is to assist people affected by serious crimes by:

• empowering them to address issues and concerns surrounding the crime and its consequences;
• providing the parties with a process which can lead to new insight, thereby reducing levels of anxiety, and contributing to therapeutic gains;
• addressing questions and concerns regarding the offender's eventual release into the community;
• providing access to sensitive staff who are committed to being agents of healing and restoration for those who suffer the effects of crime.

The program accepts both victim-initiated requests and, when appropriate, referrals from institutional staff who recommend offenders for the program. Participation is limited to victims who are living in B.C. or the Yukon and to offenders who are incarcerated or paroled there. Strong working relationships with CSC and NPB staff in the area as well as word of mouth among victims has resulted in a balance between victim initiated requests and institutionally generated referrals.

A formal evaluation in 1995 established that VOMP is highly successful in achieving its goal of providing a healing experience for both victim and offender This success, in itself, generates new referrals. Until recently, VOMP was the only program in Canada that offered mediation/dialogue processes to victims and offenders in cases of serious and violent crime.

For the rest of the country, requests for victim/offender mediation have been administered through the Restorative Justice and Dispute Resolution Unit who engage the services of individual mediators on a contractual basis. These requests have come to NHQ through victim self-referral as well as through institutional staff (VLCs, IPOs), community Parole Officers and community agencies, such as the police or victim serving organizations.

The list of individual mediators recognized by CSC as having the requisite experience to handle cases of serious and violent crime is very limited.

In 2002, the Collaborative Justice Project (CJP), a demonstration project in Ottawa, to which CSC provided project funding, broadened its mandate and began to accept post-sentence referrals in cases of serious and violent crime. CJP has been working in the courthouse for 4 ½ years with victims and offenders of serious and violent cases at the pre-sentence stage of the criminal justice process. Although the Collaborative Justice Project is the second program that CSC can now call upon, this change will not significantly increase CSC's post-sentence capacity. For five years the lead staff person for this work within the Project, has for been one of the primary individual mediators with whom CSC was contracting for services.

Due to increasing interest in victim offender mediation process, CSC is curently exploring strategic directions to advance this work.