Case Study-Mediation Service

8.
1 Case Study—Mediation
Service
Crossing the Line Between the
Roles of Traditional Welfare
State Professionals and Citizens
as Voluntary Mediators
Sanna Tuurnas
Introduction
Mediation service is offered in criminal and certain civil cases, offering an
opportunity to seek conciliation between the offender and victim of the
crime. Mediation gives a chance to ‘discuss the mental and material harm
caused to the victim by the crime and to agree on measures to redress the
harm’ (National Institute for Health and Welfare, 2016).
Mediation can be described as a unique public service in the Finnish wel-
fare state model that substantially relies on trained professionals. In this
context, the mediation service makes an exception: the service relies on the
efforts of citizen-volunteers as mediators. Being a service based on citizen co-
production, mediation is also intriguing in a sense that it is a legally regulated
public service that is obligatory to organize. Therefore, municipalities across
Finland are required to offer mediation services for their resident-citizens. For
the citizens as parties of mediation (the victim and the offender), the media-
tion is a voluntary and free service. Rather than obliging, the service creates
a chance for the parties to reconcile the occurred offence in the presence of
non-party mediators (National Institute for Health and Welfare, 2016.)
The mediation service is aimed especially at preventing reoffending of
young people, and it has in fact proved to be an effective way to stop the
undesired path of criminal activity among the young. Especially in the case
of young offenders, the idea is to give them a chance to face the conse-
quences of their actions, and thus to understand the harm caused to the
other party. Therefore the function of mediation is also social and educative.
Finally, the underlying idea is to speed up criminal and civil proceedings
(National Institute for Health and Welfare, 2016.)
Background
To give an overview of the service, mediation service is supervised and guided
by regional state authorities. A regional mediation office organizes mediation
94 Sanna Tuurnas
activities; they train and coordinate the volunteers for their assignment as
mediators. Mediation service is also based on inter-sectoral cooperation:
the mediation office staff work together with, among others, the local police
authorities, prosecuting authorities and social welfare authorities. As for the
process, the initiative for mediation may come from the police, the prosecu-
tion, social workers or even from the parties to mediation, the offender or
the victim. Finally, the court decides whether a mediation process should
be started. After the decision is made, the mediation office staff contacts
the volunteers, who, for their part, contact the parties to the mediation.
The professional staff of the mediation office also take part in the media-
tion process with the volunteering mediators. After the mediation process is
completed in the mediation office, the case returns to the district court for
final resolution (National Institute for Health and Welfare, 2016.)
Mediation illustrates co-production between civil society and traditional
welfare state professionals. The National Institute for Health and Welfare
(2016) describes the role of the volunteering mediators in the following way:
‘trained, impartial volunteer mediators, bound by professional confidential-
ity, help the parties of mediation to negotiate and resolve the offence.’ Here,
the role of the professional social workers working in the mediation office is
rather to coordinate the process in the background, whereas the volunteer-
ing mediators are the ones who encounter the clients.
Reflecting the case to the conceptualization provided by Brandsen and
Honingh in this book, the case illustrates co-production in the design and
implementation of core services, as the voluntary citizens as mediators man-
age the service processes. They organize the meetings with the parties of
mediation, but they also use discretion to create solutions for the mediation.
By acting as mediators in the actual mediation process, they provide sub-
stantial input for the implementation of the service, as well.
Experiences
The case of mediation is especially interesting from the viewpoint of
accountability relations and the emerging roles of citizen-volunteers and
trained professionals. At first sight, the accountability relations seem quite
straightforward by the definition of the National Institute for Health and
Welfare (2016): ‘The mediators act in the mediation offices under the con-
trol and supervision of the professional staff.’ Yet in reality, the accountabil-
ity relations can become ‘messy’ in service arrangements where actors with
different backgrounds cooperate. In these kinds of arrangements, the basis
of accountability is not simply legal compliance or professional expertise,
but rather the shared process where each actor has his/her own part to play.
From the point of view of the management, this notion brings out the sig-
nificance of the careful planning of a co-production process. It is important
for all the parties to understand that they are a part of the wider process,
Case Study—Mediation Service 95
and that they understand their role as accountees (Tuurnas, Stenvall and
Rannisto, 2016).
In mediation service, the process is coordinated by professional social
workers, but the relations with the volunteers are based on partnership
rather than manager-subordinate relations. This composition requires new
skills from the professionals, as well. They have to learn to operate with vol-
unteers and respect their expertise that differs from their professional exper-
tise. This way, the mediation service model brings ‘experiential expertise,’
gained through life experience of the volunteers alongside the professional
expertise, gained through professional training. This diversity of expertise
can be used to solve the complex problems that often arise in mediation.
Finally, the volunteers, as opposed to public service professionals, can be
more approachable for the parties of mediation (especially the offenders),
who might distrust authorities. This in an essential point also for wider
debates about the role of citizen-volunteers in public welfare services. Espe-
cially in highly professionalized public service systems, such as in Finland,
the new solutions of human-to-human service solutions may complement
and enrich the welfare services provided by officials and professionals. In
fact, this is already a growing trend in Finland: the newspaper Aamulehti
(Ahonen, 2016) reported that already a majority of social services are being
completed by services provided by citizen-volunteers.
References
Ahonen, H-M. (2016). Vapaaehtoisten rooli kasvaa SOTE-palveluissa [The role of
volunteers is growing in social and health care services]. Aamulehti, A18–A19.
December 16.
National Institute for Health and Welfare. (2016). Rikos- ja riita-asioiden sovittelu
[Mediation in Criminal and Civil Cases]. THL, Helsinki.
Tuurnas, S., Stenvall, J. and Rannisto, P-H. (2016). The Impact of Co-Production
on Frontline Accountability: The Case of the Conciliation Service. International
Review of Administrative Sciences, (28, 1), 131–149.

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