Organised Crime & Crime Prevention - what works? - Scandinavian ...

Jukka-Pekka Takala, Researcher
National Research Institute of Legal Policy
POB 1200, FIN-00101, University of Helsinki
e-mail: Jukka-Pekka.Takala@om.vn.fi
NSfK’s 40. forskerseminar, Espoo, Finland 1998
Mediation and moral emotions II: observing mediation sessions
1. Introduction
This paper is the second one describing the findings of a study on mediation or victimoffender
reconciliation in Finland. The first one was presented a year ago. The present paper
will concentrate on the observations of mediation sessions and discuss their meaning for the
position of mediation.
The Finnish mediation system gets most of its clients from the police and the prosecutor and
deals with them before their cases are sent to the court. Although it is permissible and even
commendable to retrieve cases from the community at large, without the intervention of the
authorities, few cases appear this way. This is an agency-based system, using one vocabulary.
Some of the basic elements of the Finnish mediation system were given in the paper a year
ago, and a more comprehensive charting of the system is being prepared in NRILP by Ida
Mielityinen.
Observation of mediation and court sessions
In our contacts with the mediation agencies and mediators we expressed a wish to observe
and possibly audiotape mediation sessions. Some mediators disliked the idea; one person held
that the presence of outside observers would jeopardize the whole idea of mediation; another
could allow an observer in some cases but rejected the idea of tape-recording. However, most
mediators were willing to let us in if the parties would agree.
The observed cases were ones that mediators suggested to us either directly or through the
mediation agency. There were no particular attempts to make the selection of sessions
representative. Because of this self-selection, it is likely that the observed sessions were
chaired by mediators who were more experienced than the average. After having witnessed
several sessions dealing with vandalism in which the victims had been corporate entities we
expressed one wish: to see sessions with individual persons as victims.
The processing of eight cases were observed in nine mediation sessions. Three of the
mediation sessions were tape-recorded; of others, extensive notes were made. In addition,
mostly after the mediation sessions, a few parties to mediation were briefly interviewed.
The types of crimes the observed sessions dealt with include examples of the most important
crime categories in Finnish mediation. Four cases dealt with assaults; a man had kicked his
ex-girlfriend in her apartment; another man had kicked his girlfriend in the head in a public
park; a man had hit another one in a bar and the victim’s teeth had broken; the fourth assault
by two teenagers against two other teenagers involved also the robbing of a small amount of
money and other property. Two sessions dealt with vandalism; a group of schoolboys had
painted graffiti; a man is his twenties had broken an expensive shop window at a shopping
mall. One case involved the theft of the wallet from a pupil at a school and use of the stolen
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