ABSTRACT
Family mediation has been established as a method of resolving family conflicts within the counselling system. Unfortunately there existed only rare information about the real presence and efficacy of family mediation services within this system. 726 counselling centres from all over the country participated at the present study, which was outlined to evaluate their supply of family mediation and the use of it. The results show that nearly one third of the centres are offering family mediation as a regular service to their clients, and that mediative skills are quite frequently used by the counselling professionals. Centres, which offer a regular service of mediation, have an obviously higher percentage of honorary staff, indicating that this service might have a more fragile status. Each centre, which conducted mediation, had an average mediation caseload of 32 in 2003, which means a percentage of 7 percent of all counselling cases treated in this year. These mediations needed an average treatment of 7 hours. Most frequent cases in mediation are separated married or separated non-married parents with 2 children. In most cases, family mediation was used to regulate conflicts in separation, divorce or post divorce, mainly concerned with issues of child custody. In contrast to the researchers' expectations, children were introduced at the mediation process only rarely. The need for mediation in the local population was rated much higher than the factual demand for and the factual supply of mediation. Based on the outcomes of the study, some recommendations are made: for the improvement of the supply of family mediation, for the expansion of the issues to which mediation is offered, and for strengthening the approaches to include children into the mediation process.
