News

Spotlight on our Service

The Glasgow City Council Mediation Service is a small experienced team sitting along with the Community Relations Unit (ASB investigations) within Neighbourhoods Regeneration and Sustainability. The service deals with mainly low level neighbour disputes referred in by a mix of self-referrals, CRU, housing associations and occasionally Police Scotland.

There are also a small number of diversion from prosecution cases. The service seeks to resolve disputes and improve situations at the earliest opportunity.

Details can be found on this link https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/article/3972/Mediation-Service

Being Impartial

A definition: “not supporting any of the sides involved in an argument”

A few weeks go we were training a group of farmers and talked about mediator impartiality. This led on from a conversation about whether someone could be impartial while mediating within their own family. Discussing impartiality and exploring what it means, reminded me how complex the language can become.

In simple terms, mediators don’t take sides. Just as they are not there to judge who is right and who is wrong, they are not there to support one party over and above another. This in itself can be a difficult message to get across. Often a client will want to be believed, want their perspective of what has happened to be supported and reinforced. This is when a mediator needs to carefully set out their role, in helping both clients to air their issues and together work out a way to move things forward.

Curiosity II

Yesterday we held a workshop on the subject of Advanced Questioning. In this workshop, one of the things we did was to highlight the need for questions through an exercise. Provided with a scenario, a mediator listened to a client talk about their conflict, but the mediator was not allowed to ask any questions. The exercise itself did not just prove the need for questions, but highlighted the varied reasons why questions can be helpful. But something else emerged from the feedback after that exercise. Several learners commented on how awkward it felt, how being a mediator they are used to asking open questions and as an exercise it felt strange. One of them said “I’m naturally curious and this exercise stopped me from being curious”

I know that I have written before about curiosity and its part in the role of a mediator, but this reflective comment yesterday reminded me how important having that curiosity is in the work of mediation. One of the essential starting points for curiosity, is accepting that we do not know everything. In our mediation training sometimes I say - and I know that this sounds very odd to the ear - that we do not know what we do not know. So often in life and conversations we are faced with choices - choices of what to ask, how to ask and when to ask a question. And often we choose where those gaps in information are, where those areas or topics we need to explore are.

Restorative Practice - trying something different

When we look at restorative practice in Scotland, we find that awareness of the term and access to a restorative service is patchy. This is also true of restorative justice services - in the  Scottish Sentencing and Penal Policy Commission report  published earlier this month access was described as “fragmented and not universally available”. 

In recent years, some progress has been made in developing pilots and best practice, and yet there are still many people who are unfamiliar with the term ‘restorative practice’, let alone knowledgeable about what is involved. Perhaps it may be useful to provide some terminology here:

1) in its most simplest form, restorative practice is a technique for assisting one party to help repair the harm they caused to the other party. 

2) restorative justice is restorative practice within the criminal justice system - i.e. where a criminal offence has or has allegedly taken place.