Victim-offender mediation and youth offenders: The italian experience

Abstract

In the 1990s Victim-Offender Mediation (VOM) practices with youth offenders arose spontaneously in the Italian juvenile criminal justice system. Thus, the development of the first VOM units, groups and centres was undertaken in the framework of the youth criminal proceeding. The idea of introducing VOM as a new approach to youth crime originated in the wave of innovation brought by the introduction of the médiation pénale1 in France. The French experience strongly influenced a small group of Italian juvenile magistrates2 in Turin (close to the French border and culture), who became the promoters of VOM in Italy (Bouchard and Mierolo, 2000). The results of a long-term study on the application of probation in a Southern juvenile court in the period 1991-96 showed that the Restorative Justice (RJ) model was used within the institute of probation (Mestitz and Colamussi, 2000)3. In fact, RJ strategies were part of the probation projects for the large majority of the sample (81.1% of 190 probation cases). Direct mediation through victim-offender meetings began to be applied (9.1% cases) but, in most cases, the mediation was formal and indirect4. An exploratory study on mediation experiences stated that until 1993 social workers were the only professionals conducting mediation, but they were not trained for the job (Baldry, 1998; Baldry, De Leo and Scardaccione, 1998). Some articles published in the period 1992-1994 opened the new scenario for VOM but mainly two articles published in the same 1994 issue of the official journal of the juvenile and family magistrates association were crucial to the implementation of VOM because general operative guidelines were included (Bouchard, 1994; Juvenile magistrates of Turin, 1994). In particular, an article by magistrates of the juvenile court and prosecution office of Turin was quite unusual because the authors did not sign the article with their own individual names but with the collective name "Juvenile magistrates of Turin"5. The article proposed not only the guidelines and the norms to apply RJ strategies, but also declared the creation of a "mediation section"6 inside the juvenile prosecution office in Turin. It also established that the lay judges in service at the Turin juvenile court were collaborating as "experts" with the prosecutors and both court and local social services in the new "mediation section". If one considers the journal in which the article was published, the absence of the authors' names and the fact that the authors were probably the most representative and authoritative group in the juvenile justice arena, the article may be considered as a true manifesto for the application of RJ and VOM in Italy. Starting in 1995 with the group in Turin, VOM groups gradually and spontaneously arose within other juvenile courts and prosecution offices. In 1997 five of these mediation groups (hereafter "mediation centres") operated on the national territory. In the same period mediation was also implemented to address different kinds of conflicts, such as parental disputes in divorce and separation, and conflicts among students at schools or among neighbours (mediation in these circumstances is generally defined as "social mediation"). The first two empirical studies on VOM, conducted in 2002-2003 by the authors of this chapter, showed that the present diffusion of VOM still appears quantitatively scarce and some relevant problems must be faced to extend the use of mediation in Italy7. Information presented in this chapter is largely based on the findings from both studies. © 2005 Springer.