Borbála Fellegi, Dóra Szegő, Gabriella Benedek, Eszter Posch and Zsuzsanna Z. Papp on behalf of Foresee Research Group together with experts from Central Office of Justice attended a day long workshop titled "Victims and restorative justice: what method to use?" in Vienna in February, 28th 2012. The workshop was part of an almost 2 year research project on ”Victims and Restorative Justice: An empirical study of the needs, experiences and positions of victims within restorative justice practices” with research partners from Belgium, Finland, Austria and the Netherlands.

In the morning the methodological challenges of researching were addressed by psychologist and research coordinator, Daniela Bolivar who emphasized the importance of qualitative research when capturing the complexity of victims’ experiences in the restorative process. Researcher Christa Pelikan (IRKS, Austria) shared the first results of the study followed by presentations on the characteristics of the Austrian restorative justice system.

Later in the afternoon participants got a detailed insight into Austrian mediators’ (Neustart) work and the various methods they use in different mediation cases, for instance the use of direct and indirect mediation, the mirror technique, single talks and synchronized single talks, to name a few.  

Final results of the international study will be presented at the regular conference of the European Forum for Restorative Justice in Helsinki this summer.

You can read about the workshop here.
 
You can read about the related project here.