Medling vid anledning av brott: En behandling i skymundan : En kvalitativ studie om medlarnas erfarenheter kring samarbetet med polisen samt möjliga lösningar för verksamhetens utmaningar

Sammanfattning: Victim-Offender Mediation (VOM) is a common measure to handle criminal behaviour among the youth. The treatment has however encountered some difficulties in Sweden given its inefficient implementation and organisation. Swedish mediators must collaborate very closely and continuously with the police authorities, which many mediators are unable to do due to budgetary reasons and the work hours allotted for inter-agency cooperation specifically. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the experiences of VOM-mediators in what amounts to a vital collaboration with the police. 11 mediators were interviewed using a thematic analysis. Two main themes emerged from the interview sessions. The first theme showed the challenges associated with mediator-police cooperation, such as separate institutional theories between the two agencies. The second theme indicated how some mediators had managed to find a different approach to maintaining and cultivating a functioning cooperation with the police.The framework of new institutional theories was applied in order to explain the causes behind inefficient collaboration. The interviews showed that mediators and municipalities had handled these said difficulties in different ways. One successful measure was to integrate the social service mediator in the police building, causing friction to lessen and VOM to integrate more effectively within the police.The possibility to spend valuable work hours on collaboration mattered significantly. Municipalities which had provided mediators with sufficient time for mediation supported the development of a frictionless inter-agency collaboration. There was a vast difference between mediators who were actively supported by their organizations in this regard than those who were not.