Mr v Mrs: Call the Mediator – an instant reaction

Mike Stepan Mediator MiD Mediation & Counselling

I can only imagine that all family mediators are hugely in favour of their professional craft being both explained and promoted to the public via the most intrusive medium available to us – national TV. So congratulations to NFM the BBC and Wild Productions on achieving the giddy heights of three full hour slots on BBC2 at peak-time devoted to family mediation. This is a fantastic step forward.

The difficulties of putting the programmes together working within the inevitable constraints doing justice to both the process and the participants and making watchable as well as informative television are well understood. An enormously complex task.

But as practitioners we are compelled to assess the results through the awkward prism of two ‘success’ questions: did the programme demonstrate that mediation can be and often is crowned with the success of a settlement? And did it demonstrate that even if full settlement is not achieved the magic of mediation can bring significant benefits to the participants and their...

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