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The Domestication of Violence in Mediation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Sara Cobb
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Abstract

This article, based on an analysis of 30 community mediation sessions, provides a theoretical frame for tracking the emergence and domestication of violence stories in the sessions themselves. Challenging the Cartesian distinction between mental and physical violence, I use Scarry's 1985 work to identify the presence of violence stories as stories in which speakers (1) objectify pain through the discursive production of weapons and wounds, (2) describe the loss of voice itself, and (3) describe attempts to reappear as agents in the elimination of pain itself. Drawing on Minow's 1987 analysis of rights discourse, I offer a definition of the “domestication” of violence as a movement from “rights” to “needs” in the discourse of the session. With this framework, and consistent with Silbey and Sarat's 1989 research, I found that violence stories were domesticated in 80% of the sessions in which such stories emerged. Finally, drawing on Foucault (1979), I describe this domestication process as a function of the “microphysics of power” and track the rules of transformation through which violence is subducted into the discourse of mediation itself. I argue that the mediation process contributes to erase any morality that competes with the morality of mediation and, in the process, disappears violence.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , 1997 , pp. 397 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

The data collection for this research was supported by monies from the Fund for Research on Dispute Resolution. The idea for this project was Janet Rifkin's, born during our collaboration on the practice of neutrality in mediation; I wish to express my appreciation to her for focusing my attention on this issue. I also wish to thank the members of the Amherst Legal Seminar for their comments. My comrade, Kathy Weingarten, also contributed to this project by commenting on earlier drafts. I also give special thanks to Elyse Kutz for her work on the revisions.

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