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Victim-Offender Mediation: Three Decades of Practice and Research (2004)

The current findings suggest that to the extent that specific programs are confined to offering VOM relatively early at the pre-sentence stage (as a formal part of the criminal prosecution), this may pose an impediment for establishing mediated contact in (very) serious cases in which victims experience high levels of harm. Conversely, VOM programs operating at later, post-sentence stages only may be associated with lower levels of contact for offenses that inflicted relatively low levels of harm among victims: they may consider the offense too long ago and/or too trivial at that stage to participate.