Samenvatting

Restorative justice as well as restorative justice practices have mainly been researched from judicial and criminologist perspectives, whereas social work has been remarkably silent in the restorative justice debate. As a consequence, the role of social work in the restorative justice field remains largely unexplored. In this article we report the findings of two focus groups conducted with mediators working in juvenile and adult mediation practices in Flanders to gain more insight into how mediators perceive their role and to analyse to what extent they refer to the individual and structural dimension of victim-offender mediation.