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Conflict Resolution: A Powerful Weapon Against Youth Violence

© Joan Fumia

More than a year ago, before Pearl, MS, Jonesboro, AR, and Springfield, Ore., I sat in on a few planning sessions for a conflict resolution program that the high school in my town had decided to establish. At the time, my interest was primarily academic, although the fact that my own daughters attended the school did increase my personal involvement. I listened intently as teachers and administrators discussed how they wanted to structure the proposed peer mediation program in which disputes between students would be referred to student mediators for resolution. There had been no precursor of violence for the program, so most of the discussions among the planning committee members involved bureaucratic matters such as how to fit the program into the school schedule, how to assign credit for the time the students spent working on the program, and how the faculty advisers would interact with the peer mediators.

That mediation program, originally conceived as a kind of enrichment activity, is scheduled to start this fall, and I'm sure I'm not the only parent who feels it couldn't have happened soon enough. Our local high school has yet to be scarred by violence of the Jonesboro-Pearl-Springfield sort, but we've all learned only too well the dangers of complacency.

Apparently, a common element in those three widely reported cases is that the perpetrators of the violence were known, at least by the other students, to have personal problems. Would those troubled youths have found their way to a conflict resolution program, such as peer mediation, if one had existed at their school, and if they had, would it have gotten them to the help they so desperately needed? Who can say for sure? We do know that conflict resolution is no substitute for therapy, but it undoubtedly has therapeutic effects when done properly.

I think back to a mediation I co-mediated some time ago in which the disputants were six or eight girls, all students from an urban high school. They had been fighting and harassing each other for weeks, and the high school counselors, unable to produce a truce, turned to the community mediation center for assistance. I am sorry to report that the mediation did not produce a contract with detailed behavioral expectations, the result the counselors had wanted. However, the mediation did succeed in getting the girls to talk to one another again, and through their talking, the long-forgotten core reason for their fighting was identified. At the very least, the mediation became a mechanism for establishing paths of communication among the students and between the students and staff, thereby preventing the kind of separation and isolation that often precede violence.

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