Mediate a Peer Conflict

Eric and Joaquin were “frenemies.” They enjoyed joking around but also got on each other’s nerves. Eric wanted a friend, but somehow the way he tried to connect seemed to annoy Joaquin. At break times they played dodgeball, and it seemed like they were always on the border between fun and conflict. Sometimes they would end up screaming at each other.

One day it finally broke open. Eric threw a dodgeball that hit Joaquin square in the face. Joaquin roared with rage, his face flushed, and started to run after Eric, looking ready to brawl. Luckily students intervened before anything else could happen. But it was clear that a fight was only a matter of time, unless some mediation could take place. 

Mediation is a super-power. It gives you the ability to resolve conflicts, whether you’re in the conflict personally, or helping to resolve someone else’s conflict. It means that when a friendship is damaged, it doesn’t have to be thrown away. It can be repaired and often becomes stronger as a result.

There are powerful tools to help people in conflict. We’ll use the real-life story above as an example to understand one tool. What would you do if you were a peer mediator, called on to help resolve Eric and Joaquin’s conflict?

1. Getting Started: As you go through each step of the mediation that helped Eric and Joaquin, you’ll learn a process that can be applied to almost any form of conflict. You can use this for your own conflicts or to help others resolve theirs. Here goes:

   1. Write down the 6 parts of the situation. It’s easy to mix things up in a conflict. Emotions might feel like facts, and people in conflict often make some assumptions about each other that are not really true. To help get through this, try this fill-in-the-blank activity below for the conflict in question:

      1. The specific facts are ____________. (objective facts, like what time of day it was, where they were when the conflict happened) 

      2. The story I make up in my head is ____________ (this is for all the thoughts and assumptions about why people acted as they did)

      3. The emotions I feel are __________ (the feelings that came up in the conflict, like mad, sad, scared, angry)

      4. The physical sensations that I noticed in my body are ___________. (what I felt like during the conflict, like feeling my heart beating fast, my fists clenching, etc)

      5. My part in contributing to this conflict is ____________. (how might I have contributed to creating this situation) 

      6. What I want is ____________. (how do I want to relate to this person in the future)

   2. Make sure the right information is in the right place. This is where it’s really helpful for a mediator—someone not directly involved in the conflict—to look things over. They should make sure, for example, that only true facts are in the first category. Saying “you were grouchy” is not an objective fact, but saying “It was Tuesday and we were talking after lunch” is a fact. For each of the six sentences above, make sure just the right material is in there: this sets the conversation up to be a positive, healing one, rather than making things worse by making people defensive.

   3. Find a place and time for an honest conversation. Once the people in conflict have written out their six-sentence statement, it’s time to share it. A mediator is very helpful here as well, to make sure the conversation flows smoothly. One person goes first, and should share their six parts, reading from what they had written. The other person listens, does not speak or argue, and only repeats back (using their own words) what was said to them. You can remind them that no one has the official “truth” — this is just about listening to each person’s experience. By repeating it back, you are not saying the other person’s story is more true than yours; you are just showing that you have listened. Then, switch turns and have the other person share their six parts and have that repeated back to them.

   4. Ask: is there more? Sometimes, after the sharing of the six parts, the people in conflict realize that something deeper is going on, or that this all happened because of a previous conflict. That’s why you should always ask, after the six-sentence statements have been read, “Is there more?” This is an opportunity for either person to share more about why they think this is happening. If it gets into a longer story with another conflict situation, make sure to use the six parts again to keep it clear.

   5. Go deeper if needed. Often this process above is where the conflict resolution process ends. Not necessarily with big hugs right away, but at least two people (or more) feel that they have heard each other and understand a little more about the other person’s motivations, which almost always are not as bad as they imagined. Sometimes, the conflict still lives on, and then other tools are needed. If that’s the situation, you could use restorative justice for a deeper resolution. Restorative justice is a process where instead of just punishing someone, you look for ways to restore or fix things. In this mode, the people involved, with a mediator and maybe adult help, identify the harms that were caused by the conflict, whether to each other or to the community. Then, for each harm, the mediator helps them choose a specific step that will fix the damage. 

   Here is how the conflict resolution went in the example above of Eric and Joaquin, which was a real-life situation between two middle school students, successfully resolved by a fellow student acting as a peer mediator. They sat down together — Eric, Joaquin, and the mediator — after preparing their situation statements, and began:

   Eric began speaking to Joaquin:

   “The facts are that I threw a ball which hit you in the face during dodgeball, last Tuesday after lunch. Then you chased me until some students separated us.”

   “The story I make up in my head is that you have never liked me and always get hot-headed when we play sports. I didn’t mean for the ball to hit your face but I knew you would get furious when it happened. I know we keep getting into conflict and when it happens sometimes I cry because I feel like I have no friends here.”

   “My emotions were surprised when the ball hit your face, then scared and angry when you chased me.”

   “My physical sensations were that I was getting hot and sweaty, my heart was pounding, and my stomach felt twisted up.”

   “My part was that I know we’ve gotten angry at each other before and I haven’t said anything or asked for help.”

   “What I want is to be comfortable in school, not scared when we see each other in the hall, to be at least neutral with you.”

   After Eric shared all of this, Joaquin took a breath and repeated each back in his own words, sometimes pausing to ask Eric for a reminder. When he had finished, he asked Eric, “Did I get all of that? Is there more?” Once Eric had said he felt heard accurately, it was Joaquin’s turn to share what he had written to describe the conflict, and Eric’s turn to repeat back. 

   After this conflict mediation, the two boys had a cooling-off period, trying to avoid contact with each other for a time. Their frustrations gradually went away, and bit by bit a friendship restarted. By the next school year, they had become close friends - much closer than before the conflict - and often spent time walking around the gym at lunch, deep in conversation.