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The Role Of Mediation In Tackling Neighbour Disputes And Anti-Social Behaviour
10. CONCLUSION
10.1 This study has concentrated on calculating the cost of taking neighbour disputes to mediation or to law. It is clear that, in general, the disputes that are dealt with by legal action are of a different nature than those that mediation services handle as a matter of course. A typical mediation case is likely to involve two households and a dispute over noise, either the noise of domestic appliances that has become highly irritating or what could be termed 'anti-social' noise of exceptionally loud music and parties. Many neighbour disputes tackled by means of legal process are not just neighbour disputes, but problems of anti-social behaviour. They often involve mental health and alcohol or drug abuse, and/or police involvement due to public order offences and crimes of violence. Mediation services do deal with serious and persistent disputes, although none were found in the sample of cases used in this study.
10.2 The dramatic difference in costs between mediation cases and legal cases is therefore a reflection of the seriousness of the disputes, but it also reflects the nature of the processes involved. Most mediation cases involves a small number of hours' work by mediators, whereas legal cases involve tens or hundreds of hours' work on the part of housing officers, investigation officers, solicitors and others to prepare cases for court.
10.3 This is the context in which figures must be understood. Of the mediation cases examined in this study, 61 percent had a 'positive' outcome in terms of agreement or improvement recorded by the mediation service. Mediation is also far less costly than legal action, by a factor of 20 or more. On average, costs of legal measures, although in general far higher, also vary significantly; this is due not only to the seriousness of the dispute but to the local organisational arrangements and policy choices, and in particular the amount of evidence-gathering deemed necessary. Mediation services too work in different ways, with contrasting profiles of referrals, interventions and outcomes. Although it was not the purpose of this study to compare mediation services, it is clear that there are differences between and within the two categories of community mediation and local authority mediation services which merit further investigation.
10.4 It is particularly difficult to compare the effectiveness of mediation and legal remedies, because of the different criteria of effectiveness used by the relevant agencies. Mediation services measure outcomes in a detailed manner, but these measures are not always reliable because services follow up only the cases where an agreement is reached at the end of the intervention. Moreover, mediation services also consider their work to have additional positive outcomes that cannot readily be measured, in terms of education and raising awareness of alternatives to conflict. For local authorities pursuing legal remedies, often what counts is whether an order is granted against the perpetrator. This can be seen as a positive outcome for the neighbours affected, but may not solve the problem in the long term. This is also the case for other outcomes of legal action, such as the perpetrator being re-housed elsewhere, imprisoned or referred for community care services. Very few legal cases have an unequivocally positive outcome, that is, lead to an improvement of the situation. This is because anti-social behaviour orders and evictions do not seek to address the underlying causes of anti-social behaviour, such as alcohol abuse. In future, more detailed research might aim to investigate and track both types of case in detail over a period of at least six months to compare longer-term outcomes.
10.5 This study compared cases that had been to mediation with those in which a decision had been taken for legal action; however, there are 'middle ground' cases in which mediation has been tried unsuccessfully, but which are not deemed serious enough to warrant legal proceedings. A further study might extract from study of these cases some understanding of what the limits of mediation are and the need for alternative forms of intervention.
10.6 This study did not include mediation cases of a very complex or difficult nature. It is likely that there is potential to extend the scope of mediation to more serious anti-social behaviour cases, but how this would be combined with addressing the causes of such behaviour is unclear. The ethos of mediation is to avoid distinguishing between perpetrator and victim; and for most of the anti-social cases studied, such a distinction would be difficult not to make. This does not mean that mediation has no role to play in such cases, and further research into how mediation works in more extreme cases could elaborate on this.
10.7 In general, many people do not wish to take part in mediation because they are afraid of potential reprisals, of an escalation of the dispute or simply of facing the other party. This suggests that in cases involving serious anti-social or abusive behaviour, mediation services may have to do more preparatory work with each side to allay such fears. Some of the reasons why some people refuse the offer of mediation appear to be precisely because of its basic principles: handing responsibility to the parties themselves, opening up communication and refusing to make an external judgement about right and wrong. It is therefore unlikely that most people refuse mediation because they are wrongly informed about it; although the some refusers' fear that mediation will lead to escalation of the conflict may be based on a misunderstanding of mediation processes. These findings confirm the views of mediation services, that part of their role is a long-term educational one to change attitudes towards conflict. There may be scope for mediation services to work separately with parties to disputes even after legal action has concluded, to prevent re-escalation of conflicts, or for consideration of how restorative justice approaches used as an alternative to criminal proceedings could be applied to anti-social behaviour cases.
10.8 From the findings of this study, it can be concluded that there is great potential for the expansion of mediation in tackling neighbour disputes, because it is effective in the majority of cases and inexpensive compared to legal action. Mediation alone is not enough, however, when many serious neighbour disputes are associated with obvious social and health care needs.
10.9 Several recommendations arise from this study, which can be summarised as follows.
a. for housing, police and mediation services to work together to raise awareness of mediation among all staff who may come across neighbour disputes, and to ensure that they have a sufficient understanding of mediation to convey this to potential participants;
b. for mediation services to ensure that they have robust monitoring and evaluation systems in place, which allow for comparison between services, and for accurate medium term measurement of outcomes, including the views of participants;
c. to carry out detailed research into: i. the degree to which mediation can prevent escalation in cases of anti-social behaviour; ii. how mediation is used in disputes that are serious, or complex or involve vulnerable participants, and its potential for expansion in this area; and iii. the medium and long-term outcomes of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and evictions or transfers in anti-social cases.
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