Such a humane way of talking. Victims’ and offenders’ experiences with victim-offender mediation in Flanders.

In the context of a study on perceptions of justice among victims and offenders encountering the Belgian criminal justice system, 54 victims and offenders were interviewed about their experience with victim-offender mediation. In this article, we describe the factors that influenced these victims’ and offenders’ experiences with mediation and as such determined their satisfaction with mediation. In doing so, we pay explicit attention to the theoretical basis of these factors. Impact research on articipation in restorative justice programmes is often limited to quantitatively mapping client satisfaction; in this article we wish to provide an impetus to the theoretical explanation of these quantitative findings. Relating the findings resulting from the in-depth interviews to the theoretical framework of procedural justice, we shed a light on the psychological processes that motivate expressions of (dis)satisfaction with restorative justice programmes.