Opening up Victim Offender Mediation/Dialogue: An Analysis of Victims ' Initial Statements1

This paper reports on the communication that occurs in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Victim Offender Mediation/Dialogue (VOMD) program, which brings together victims of violent crimes with their convicted offenders for face-to-face dialogue. The cases in this program all involve severely violent crime, including murder. The victims are best characterized as “co-victims ” of a crime; that is, they are the remaining family members of the actual victim. To begin, victims initiate the process by requesting to participate. This request usually is made about nine and a half years after a crime occurs (Umbreit, Vos, Coates, & Brown, 2003). Once victims have requested the mediation, offenders are asked if they would like to participate. The offenders ’ participation is voluntarily and does not have any impact on the offender’s prison sentence. Victims and offenders meet individually with a mediator for about six months before the face-to-face meeting. In the Texas VOMD program, mediators work through grief inventories with the participants to help them discuss how the crime has affected them and what they would like to accomplish with the mediation session. When mediators feel that both victims and offenders are ready, a one-day mediation session is scheduled to take place most often in