The Little Book of Victim Offender Conferencing: Bringing Victims and Offenders Together in Dialogue (Justice and Peacebuilding)

Victim offender dialogues have been developed as a way to hold offenders accountable to the person they have harmed and to give victims a voice about how to put things right. It is a way of acknowledging the importance of the relationship, of the connection which crime creates. Granted, the relationship is a negative one, but there is a relationship. Amstutz has been a practitioner and a teacher in the field for more than 20 years.

Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz is Director of Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) Office on Crime and Justice. In this capacity, she provides consulting and training for agencies and communities seeking to implement programs of restorative justice which specifically include a Victim Offender Mediation/Conferencing component. She has provided technical assistance and consulting for numerous programs throughout the United States. She has worked in the victim offender field since 1984 when she began working in Elkhart, Indiana, the site of the first Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP) in the United States. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Judy Mullet is a professor in the psychology department at Eastern Mennonite University. She received her Ph.D. from Kent State University, where her dissertation work focused on context-motivated, conflict strategy choices of middle school students with learning disabilities. A member of the EMU faculty since 1986, Dr. Mullet specializes in restorative discipline in schools, conducting workshops across the USA. She lives near Harrisonburg, Pennsylvania.