Victim-Offender Negotiations: An Exploratory Study on Different Damage Types and Compensation

Abstract

The article will discuss the results of an exploratory scenario study on victim satisfaction with victim-accused negotiations in a sample of 242 Dutch university students. The data were collected at the University of Leiden. The main purpose of the research was to investigate the impact of different types of damage on victim-accused negotiations. It was our hypothesis that reaching a restorative agreement and satisfaction with that agreement would be the most difficult for subjects with a high degree of psychological injury. Results confirm this hypothesis. Furthermore the results show that subjects with high material damage were more satisfied with a restorative agreement than subjects with little material damage. Some implications for further research will be discussed.