ABSTRACT
The use of volunteers to work alongside the professionals with people convicted of sexual offences is the unique feature of Circles. This chapter tries to give a voice to those volunteers to see how they got started in this field, what motivated them, how they experienced recruitment and training, and what they thought of the actual Circles meetings - both good and bad. The relationship volunteers had with the coordinator was also identified as important and provided a link to the project as a whole. Volunteers had a realistic assessment of what they could achieve with Core Members. They felt they could not completely change their behaviour but they could nudge them in the right direction through pro-social modelling, and acceptance of the Core Member as a fellow-citizen rather than a stigmatised 'outsider'. Accountability is a central concept of the Circles model and perhaps needs to be more clearly defined for volunteers at an organisational and individual project level.
