INTRODUCTION

Court systems across the country have focused for some years on increasing and enhancing access to justice. This focus has also led to a significant evolution in the understanding of family-related disputes and the development of processes to resolve them.

Case management approaches have changed over the last couple of decades to supplement the traditional rights-based, adversarial processes with interest-based and cooperative processes such as mediation, which emphasize communication and collaborative problem solving. This change requires a paradigm shift in system culture to accommodate new values and approaches to dispute resolution as when utilizing mediation to resolve child welfare cases. Successful implementation of child protection mediation programs, as they are known, is thus as much about managing culture shift as it is about sound program and process design.

In addition, in a new era of fiscal austerity, dispute resolution system designers and stakeholders must increasingly be able to manage the complexities surrounding child welfare cases with limited resources. The large funding models of ten or fifteen years ago do not exist. Local budgets are shrinking and court-annexed mediation programs are either being dismantled or asked to do more with less. This article explores the new era of child protection mediation programs and how they are overcoming the challenges of their predecessors.

Over the past 20 months, we have been engaged in a dispute resolution design process to create two new child protection pilot mediation programs in Wisconsin. We have been mediating in one county since March 2013 and since September 2013 in another, although each design process started several months prior to beginning to mediate. This article is based upon both those experiences, in addition to our previous work in other mediation programs.

Child protection mediation refers to the use of
mediation in cases involving alleged abuse, neglect,
or abandonment of children, child guardianship,
and/or termination of parent rights. This is a collab-
orative problem-solving process involving a neutral
mediator and multiple participants, such as parents
and other family members, attorneys, child welfare
professionals, possibly children, and others.

RESEARCH AND BEST PRACTICES IN PROGRAM DESIGN

Research and evaluation efforts of existing programs have confirmed that child protection mediation produces noteworthy benefits. In most programs, 60 to 80 percent of the cases end with agreements that address all of the issues before the court. Mediation resolves issues more quickly and less expensively, although exact numbers are elusive and hard to quantify. The mediation approach also results in increased parental engagement, extended family participation, opportunity for candid conversations, and parental compliance with plans.

Importantly, research has shown that child protection cases can be successfully mediated at any point in the life of the case, beginning from pre-filing on a child abuse and neglect case to post termination of parental rights. This is important for designers because it allows for increased flexibility to address the needs and problem areas that are raised by the stakeholders in each jurisdiction.

Experience and scholarship over the past 30 years on dispute resolution system design has shown the importance of working collaboratively with stakeholders. This allows designers to hear what stakeholders want, identify their underlying needs, uncover barriers to achieving their goals. educate them about dispute resolution options, and allow them to create a clear vision of their goals.

In 2012, a set of Guidelines for Child Protection Mediation were collaboratively developed by leading professionals in the field across North America and endorsed by the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. The stated goals of these Guidelines are to:

n articulate the principles and philosophy that guide effective child protection mediation;

n provide program developers and managers

Designing a Child Protection
Mediation Program in a New Era

About the Authors

PERRI E.
MAYES, JD

is a dispute resolution practitioner and educator based in Milwaukee. Her practice includes mediation, arbitration, system design, and program administration. She is a past president of the Association for Conflict Resolution and the Wisconsin Association of Mediators.

DONNA
EREZ-NAVOT

is the Director of the Mediation Clinic at University of Wisconsin Law School, where she has been instrumental in setting up several mediation programs in Wisconsin over the past 5 years.