Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

One cannot help but be fascinated … by something that can encourage men and women to sit down and try to just talk. ( Durrell 1990 : 13) Fascination with the potential benefits of family mediation began in the UK in the mid-1970s. Thirty years on this fascination continues, despite the fact that relatively few divorcing couples use mediation. Constructive problem-solving is viewed as infinitely superior to litigation, although there are few studies which robustly test this assumption. Policymakers and practitioners continue to look for ways of promoting family mediation and encouraging couples to settle their differences through mediation rather than in court. There is no doubt that constructive conflict resolution is extremely sensible — it avoids destructive adversarial positioning, in which the needs and interests of the disputants are masked by what William Simon (1978) once referred to as “ritualist advocacy” in which the personal facts of the case are reconstructed to fit within legal rules and a rights-based culture. Yet family mediation struggled for many years to find an appropriate niche in the family law business, being regarded as marginal, as a kind of Cinderella, until it was firmly embraced within reforming legislation in England and Wales in the mid-1990s. Although mediation has come out of the shadows, recent research conducted in the UK ( Davis et al. 2000a ; ... log in or subscribe to read full text