ABSTRACT
A range of safeguards to protect fairness are necessary – procedural, structural and professional. An important dimension of the political and feminist critique of alternative dispute resolution in the 1980s revolved around the debate about justice and fairness, in mediation in particular. Domestic abuse highlights, perhaps in its starkest form, central concerns about fairness and power in all dispute resolution processes, and that of mediation in family disputes, in particular. Mediators themselves consider that the principle of respect interlocks not only with other principles of mediation, but also with central aspects of practice, in particular, the fairness or ‘justness’ of the process of mediation and of its outcome. The field of alternative dispute resolution, and of mediation in particular, has been the subject of research to an unusually large extent since the early 1980s. As a process of consensual, joint decision-making, mediation requires high practice standards and high standards of provision and delivery.
