“You don’t have to say straight out …”: Directed Impression Management at Victim–Offender Mediation Pre-meetings

ABSTRACT

Based on a study of two mediation centers in Sweden, this research shows how mediators encourage victim and offender impression management, regarding looks, attitudes, and speech. It shows how they supervise the emotion work of participants, preparing them for mediation encounters. The author investigates how mediators try to create a “balanced” interaction (e.g., preventing expressed prejudices or irresponsible attitudes between the parties). The mediation meeting is seen as an institutionalized interaction with a particular desired outcome. The suggested impression management can be seen as a corrective strategy, implying social control. This article aims to present new ways to understand the mediation process from a micro-sociological and dramaturgical viewpoint. Even if the encounter between offenders and victims is seen as the essence of restorative justice practices, analyses of the process are rare and needed. This process-based approach offers new insights for research in the fields of social science and restorative justice.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Malin Åkerström, Veronika Burcar and David Wästerfors, as well as the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments.

Notes

¹ However, I am also including another kind of preparation work done by the mediators, as well as mediation meetings.

² For example through reintegrative shaming (see Braithwaite 1989). The intention is also to include the victim, who, like the offender, is seen as marginalized in the legal process (Christie 1977).

³ It differs from, for example, restorative conferencing (or circles), initiated in New Zealand and currently used in many countries, where representatives of the community, as well as family members, take an active part. In mediation, the victim and the perpetrator (as well as the mediator) are the only indispensable participants.

⁴ The empirical material was collected by Veronika Burcar and the author.

⁵ In Sweden a little more than half of the mediators are laypersons: 217/ 360 (Jacobsson et al 2013), but none were taking part in this study.

⁶ This includes some basic points that should be included in the conversation at the pre-meeting, such as, for example, conveying information about mediation and obtaining information of the participants’ intentions.

⁷ In Sweden, for example, there have been public discussions concerning whether caps should be allowed during school hours in high schools. Also, according to our observations, university students often have to take their caps off to be allowed to attend legal proceedings.

⁸ O’Brien (2011) describes a similar practice of stigma management. The stigmatized (Muslims in the USA in his case) are taught “tricks of the trade” for managing the stigma, by like-stigmatized peers or professionals and spokespeople from organizations, and are given specialist advice on how to answer questions that may be asked to present themselves in ways that minimize the social costs of meeting with stigmatizers.

⁹ In this article, I focus on the pre-meeting and not the actual mediation meetings. The pre-meetings are held to let the participants be the main actors at the mediation meetings; as one mediator put it: “We try to do as little as possible, it’s between them, you know … [we] hold the balance in the room. See to it that both get equal space.” On the contrary, in the pre-meetings, the mediators explain that they do take control. They are expected to deal with power and moral imbalances to create trust and to ensure the success of the upcoming “real” mediation meeting (compare to Rossner 2013).

¹⁰ If the perpetrator is suspected of a minor crime, the prosecutor can recognize that that he or she has participated in mediation. Yet, this is rarely used by prosecutors (Jacobsson et al. 2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Rypi

Anna Rypi is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology/School of Social Work, at Lund University. Her research interests include victim offender mediation, restorative justice, sociology of deviance, symbolic interaction, crime victims, and critical victimology.