I don’t know why I became a mediator. Certainly my own experience of my parent’s acrimonious divorce must have played a part as must my years of sitting as a family magistrate and seeing parents locked in expensive, stressful and prolonged Court battles. But I like to think it was more than the sum of those experiences. Mediation is simply a better solution for most couples and a mediator plays a facilitating and enabling role rather than becoming a parent to the parents which is what so often happens in court. I have a judicial colleague who starts every private law case about children with the following statement :

There are lots of people in this Court room - only two of them know and love the child/children we are here to talk about - shouldn’t the ones who know and love the child be making the decisions ?

… and that has to be right - but parents involved in the middle of divorce and separation sometimes need help seeing the wood for the trees. Mediators occupy crucial ground in parental disputes, they offer a neutral, informed and safe environment where clients can come and make life-defining decisions with a child-focus and retain the responsibility they hold as parents.

There are so many challenges in being a mediator, after all we see clients who are experiencing one of the worst periods in their lives, they bring a range of emotions to negotiations: anger, guilt, denial, hurt and part of our role is to help them through the tangled maze to see clearly what their options are and then to test those options against four benchmarks :

• Are the proposals best for the children?
• Are they fair to the children?
• Are they affordable?
• Are they sustainable?

Then we work on an agreement which also helps couples begin to communicate in a healthy way, which will work outside of mediation and help them navigate through their new shared parenting arrangements.

My clients teach me more as a mediator than any training could, and we get a lot of training! When I work alongside parents who successfully put their children in the centre of decisions and are able to move away from an oppositional approach and begin looking at what works for their children I am in awe of people’s capacity to care and I can’t help but be optimistic.

Victoria Scott