Face to Face: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis of Victim-Offender Mediation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Restorative justice (RJ) practices have become increasingly accepted as viable alternatives to the retributive justice system in Canada and the world as a whole. RJ has been appropriated from Indigenous knowledge, which is important to recognize. One example of RJ in our present colonial system is victim offender mediation (VOM), which involves the offender(s) meeting the victim(s) in the presence of a trained mediator. I utilized reflexive thematic analysis as described by Braun & Clarke (2022) to study nine cases of VOM in Minneapolis, USA, and Winnipeg, Canada. My analysis aimed to discover what participants say about their experiences with VOM. By analyzing interviews with victims and offenders both prior to and several months following mediation, as well as observing the mediations, I constructed a model of the mediation process. This model consisted of what happens prior to mediation (i.e., what motivates victims and offenders to participate), processes that occur during the mediation, and two types of satisfaction that may be present following mediation. Motivations to participate were found to be of two different orientations: self-focused and relationship-focused. Within the walls of the mediation room, expected as well as unexpected themes were discovered. Participants of course attempted to satisfy their pre-mediation motivations, an apology often occurred, and a healing connection was forged between the parties. However, sometimes a previously self-focused or unengaged offender was able to be pulled into a more relationship-focused orientation by having a compelling experience with the victim. This shift involved the challenging of one’s expectations about the mediation or the other involved party, whereby a corrective emotional experience occurred. Finally, two outcome themes were delineated: simple satisfaction, and healing through relationship. My findings were compared to previous research, and areas for potential future study as well as implications for practice were discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".