Resources on Victim Offender Dialogue

Oregon Department of Corrections.
This webpage defines facilitated dialogue and describes the victim/survivor centered approach.

The table that follows lists state statutes that provide for Victim Offender Dialogue (VOD). VOD is a victim-centered, offender-sensitive facilitated preparation and dialogue process typically involving a victim, his/her/their offender and a trained volunteer mediator. The table surveys the states’ laws to determine which explicitely provide for confidentiality in the statements made during VOD.

Restorative justice conferences including Victim Offender Mediation (VOM) are rapidly increasing. Due to a lack of participants’ accounts on their experiences, gaining knowledge on how restorative justice works from their perspective is critical, especially to further development of justice policy and practice. In this exploratory qualitative study we interviewed 37 participants in a VOM operating in a mid-sized Midwestern city in the United States. In this article, we examine some youths’ experiences in their VOM to deepen our understanding of how and why restorative discourses work.

This study represents the first major assessment of the impact of victim offender dialogue upon both victims and family
survivors of severe violence, as well as upon the specific offender/inmate.

Umbreit, Mark S. , Ph.D. and Ted Lewis, MA. University of Michigan, Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking.

This 2015 manual edition is designed to be a large composite of
materials that cover restorative justice and victim offender dialogue work. It is not designed to be a fully reproducible edition for a single training purpose. Secondly, while restorative conferencing and victim offender mediation in the realm of criminal justice are the primary models covered in this manual, much of the content has wider applications for other work involving restorative dialogue.