This Didactic Unit outlines the general reference framework for mediation and introduces the issue of juvenile penal mediation emphasizing questions and problem areas common to the whole study path.
The path develops along a twofold direction and with two largely converging aims. The first direction is a description of mediation as social phenomenon for a mainly scholarly interest: understanding its nature and its forms. The second is the promotion of the culture of mediation with an "operational" purpose.
If a descriptive interest in mediation is quite obvious, we wish to mention here right away the reasons for promoting a culture of mediation. Social change and the growing role of the institutional systems (first of all the State) in managing community life led to the weakening of many social ties and at the same time to the decline of "traditional" forms of mediation (those practised by the so called "natural mediators"). On this background, the culture of mediation aims at strengthening social bonds by encouraging consensual conflict management processes as an alternative to the dominating judicial-institutional system. Promoting the culture of mediation also means "re-discovering" the value of mediation by encouraging the development of new mediation "settings" (compensating the decline of the "traditional" ones now and forever past) and creating the conditions for them to gain strength and credibility. Besides, the culture of mediation offers an alternative, though unspecific, model to the malfunctioning of formal-institutional systems of conflict resolution (thus meeting also the deflationary needs arising from the judicial system itself in its most recent developments).
end of main content section.
Tools in Network is a project of the Department of Juvenile Justice - Ministry of Justice of Italy in the framework of the Leonardo Da Vinci Education and Culture Lifelong Programme