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Friends United Meeting |
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October 1998
Mediation: A Practical Means To Address Conflict
By Wayne Copenhaver
What do you do when
- the guy in the upstairs apartment plays his music too loud and too late and ignores your pleas for quiet so that you can get up for your early morning job?
- your landlady keeps putting off needed repairs in your rented home, complaining that you are not paying the rent, but you're not paying because the repairs are not being done?
- the teenage boy next door has his rock band's practice in their garage too late and too often, but doesn't respond to your requests for changing the situation?
- your daughter has shoplifted fingernail polish at a local drugstore and you're very upset about this first-time offense, but can't "handle" the situation at home?
- your child-custody agreement is not working well, especially around upcoming holidays and you and your ex-spouse don't want to go back to court?
- the neighbor's kids are pressing down your fence and regularly cutting across your newly seeded yard and picking flowers, but nothing changes after several confrontations?
All of these conflict situations are likely candidates for mediation, a process for conflict management on the spectrum with arbitration and litigation, but much more user-friendly than the latter two.
Several Friends in Richmond, Indiana, have joined with others in the development of a conflict resolution center. The effort began in 1994, when it was learned that conflict was on the rise within various neighborhoods and over 20 teen gangs existed in the city.
The local chapter of Fellowship of Reconciliation, of which these Friends were a part, invited presidents of all the city's Neighborhood Associations to a gathering to share their experiences with this rising violence. After this gathering, the F.O.R. chapter donated several hundred dollars for the training of these leaders and others from the Associations as community mediators. Twelve persons-black, white, male, female, younger and older-took this training.
Mediation is a process by which trained, neutral parties sit down with disputants and lead them through a process which helps the disputants to hear each other clearly and generate new options for resolving their conflict so that both feel their agreement is fair, workable, and hopeful. The process is "win-win" not "win-lose."
In 1995 a renewed effort began to establish a more organized mediation service center in Richmond. A survey was sent to 85 community leaders asking them to prioritize a list of concerns regarding conflict in the area. In addition, the Chief of the Richmond Police Department asked all his police personnel to complete the survey. A board of directors was formed and nonprofit status was obtained for the new Conflict Resolution Center (CRC), which was offered a rent-free office at the regional campus of Indiana University in Richmond as part of its "Community Partnerships" program.
Because there was no built-in referral system, it was necessary to network carefully with other area social service and justice organizations. The Richmond Police Department has been very cooperative in referring suitable cases. CRC offered orientation on the mediation process to various shifts at the police department. The police hand out CRC information cards when they deal with neighborhood conflicts, particularly on their second or third visit for the same problem. An arrangement for referrals was also made with the regional office of the Legal Services Organization, which provides services to those who cannot afford legal assistance. Some of the LSO cases can be helpfully diverted away from litigation to mediation. Now CRC is working with Indiana University East to provide mediation services for conflicts within the local university community.
In January 1998, CRC was awarded a $30,000 grant by the Indiana Department of Corrections for the establishment of mediation services to first-time juvenile offenders and their families, in collaboration with the Wayne County Juvenile Court. Via mediation these youth will be diverted away from a court record and, we hope, they and their parents/guardians will be assisted in dealing with problems which brought them to the court. These cases will be court-ordered. This grant also made possible the hiring of a half-time director for the CRC office, indispensable for the organization of the complex juvenile court program and the constant work of networking within the community so that habits of case referrals can be established. The new director is an attorney, who happens to be a Friend.
In winters 1997 and 1998, CRC provided 32-hour training programs for citizens wanting to be community mediators. These excellent training sessions were offered by Robert Gross, coordinator of the Church of the Brethren's national Ministry of Reconciliation. The first was heavily subsidized by a $2,000 grant from the Social Responsibility Fund of Richmond's Reid Hospital. Recently another $1,000 grant from the Gemmer Christian Foundation has given CRC more aid in its work of educating the community and raising the profile of mediation as a viable means of dealing with conflict. Education of the community is a big part of CRC's work, since in our society people do not naturally turn to win-win means of resolving conflict nor to strangers for help in resolving relational problems. To meet this education need CRC established a Speakers' Bureau.
In addition to the primary training offered by Robert Gross, CRC has offered its volunteer mediators specialized training in mediating with juveniles and their parents. CRC is part of a supportive network of community mediation centers in Indiana and works closely with a center in nearby Butler County, Ohio, where a juvenile court mediation program has been in place for two years. The CRC collaboration with the court is patterned after the Butler County program. While community mediation is highly developed in some more progressive states, in Indiana there are now only nine centers in various stages of development and, so far, no general mandate for even partial state funding of such centers.
Among those trained by CRC as community mediators have been teachers, school administrators, social workers, counselors, criminal justice personnel, college students and staff, attorneys, medical and church professionals, retirees, seminarians, a mechanic, etc. Second-stage training includes ongoing role-play practice sessions and specialized training, focusing on particular types of mediation cases.
Role-play practice sessions are invaluable in honing mediators' skills and cultivating imagination and empathy. A recently used role-play gave mediators the chance to work with the sample case of Terri, a 15-year-old runaway and curfew violator, and her very worried, workaholic, controlling mother, Janice. Janice's work included much overtime and travel, so she expected a lot from Terri on the home front with chores and child care of younger step-siblings. Terri's grades had suffered in recent months, as she had discovered boys, particularly one her parents didn't like. Terri had run away and been gone for eight days, until found by police in a neighboring city. Her school was upset because she had missed a week of her two summer school classes. Terri and Janice were diverted to mediators by the local Juvenile Court. The role-play session, as always, ended with a mediator-coach leading a debriefing discussion of what went well and what could be improved.
Gradually the community is becoming aware of the value of mediation as a tool for dealing very constructively with conflict. CRC sees its role as twofold: 1) to make available well-trained mediators to serve as catalysts for resolving a specific conflict, and 2) to demonstrate and model for clients via the mediation process itself a new, nonviolent, healthy way of relating during conflict, so that deeper understanding and a more workable relationship can develop. While mediation is not counseling or advice-giving, it is quite educative and particularly useful for those disputants who will have an ongoing relationship. Nationwide, 90% of mediation cases arrive at an agreement and 80% of those agreements are successful.
Mediation is one practical tool of peacemaking and of educating for a peacemaking lifestyle. It leads disputants to take responsibility for their own lives, rather than turning decisions over to police and the court system. It teaches cooperative problem solving and the relational use of power, rather than power over others. It is, thus, a community building tool. It is future-oriented and amazingly effective in positively transforming relationships for those disputants who approach the process in good faith. It is often remarkable to see the light of discovery in the eyes of disputants, when they experience the respect of being heard fully, both by the mediators and the fellow disputant, and see new options for resolving their differences emerging from their assisted dialogue. The primary goal of the Conflict Resolution Center is to serve as an instrument for this transformation.
Wayne Copenhaver is a mediator and member of the Board of Directors
of the Conflict Resolution Center, Inc., in Richmond, Indiana, and works
as administrative assistant at First Friends Meeting in Richmond.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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