Soap in our eyes

I'm still unable to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Not that you'll catch me practising, of course – please don't look for me hopping hopefully next to the Birmingham Rotunda.

However, when I pass back a successfully mediated case to the local housing office, I am often received as if I have just stopped a speeding bullet with a casual wave of the hand. "Really? A complete agreement?" – I sometimes wonder if I should take offence at the disbelief often shown towards my work.

Mediation is not magic. Every day, across the country, hundreds of well-trained paid and volunteer mediators help disputants to find solutions – more often than not. In areas such as mine, a success rate of eight out of ten cases is not uncommon.

Maybe in a few more years the disbelief will change to accompany only those few cases that fail – although somehow, I think not. Allow me to explain why, by way of a case study.

A man in the North-west recently described how his neighbour had been carrying out a "reign of terror" against people in his local community. Apparently, this neighbour had killed his ex-wife, tormented his mother-in-law into a spiral of mental anguish and finally bludgeoned to death one of his neighbours in a bungled attempt to rectify his family's finances.

OK, he was on the telly, but I wasn't the only person watching: 19.4 million other people were also hooked on the latest storyline in Coronation Street.

Those of you who do watch soap operas will be familiar with this sort of plotline. Those of you who don't watch them will also be familiar – they are probably one of the reasons you choose not to tune in.

The episode I've just watched has shown how this chap's wife is, understandably, utterly distraught when she discovers what her husband has been up to. The idea of her children finding out, let alone the local community, is completely paralysing – and, judging by my TV guide, the after-effects of this story will continue to fascinate me and my fellow Corrie fans for some time to come.

At one level, it is a heartbreaking story of deception, loss, incomprehension, misery and social exclusion. But at another, as the most keenly watched piece of television this week, it's highly entertaining.

In much of the training I deliver, I get people to talk about where they learn to argue. Alongside answers such as parents, siblings and school, TV is always raised, and soap operas are the most commonly cited example. They are full of arguments and fights.

Soaps would be boring if they called in mediators when an argument started – 20 million people wouldn’t tune in to see Peggy Mitchell and Pauline Fowler undergoing conflict management

In fact, soap operas would be boring if everyone just got on with each other, or if they called in the mediators when a dispute started – you wouldn't get 20 million people tuning in to watch Eastenders' Peggy Mitchell and Pauline Fowler resolve their differences through positive conflict management.

In a way, it is rather worrying that we find badly managed conflict entertaining. Once you accept this, then it becomes quite daunting to even comprehend an alternative, positive approach to managing community and neighbour disputes.

That's why on the one hand we still have under-used mediation services in some areas of the country – some are even closing – while on the other we have services being very well used by agencies even though they are somewhat bemused by our conflict management "magic".

I believe one of the reasons so many people are surprised by what mediation can achieve, is that they've become so conditioned to expect even the most minor difference to turn into all-out war that they are simply unable to conceive of any other possible outcome.

Our mediators are trained to respond differently. At a human level they may expect the dispute, if untreated, to evolve into something you'd see on Brookside, but as mediators they learn to react in a very different way to tales of harassment, annoyance and intimidation.

Mediation encourages a fresh focus on future behaviour: to abandon expectations formed from perceived patterns of behaviour based on past events. The future has yet to be written.

And yet, mediators do not view the future through rose-tinted spectacles. Agreements reached through mediation are realistic – they do not presume there will be no more conflict. Instead, they plan for future disagreements, empowering individuals to deal with them without the help of other organisations, or making sure they use an appropriate support service if they cannot resolve it alone.

It sounds simple; and it is. And there, maybe, is the reason behind the disbelief I face every week. After all, how can a single session of mediation provide a long-lasting solution to a 10-year-old dispute?