THE DOMESTICATION OF VIOLENCE IN MEDIATION

This article, based on an analysis of 30 community mediation sessions, provides a theoretical frame for tracking the emergence and domestica tion of violence stories in the sessions themselves. Challenging the C artesian distinction between mental and physical violence, I use Scarr y's 1985 work to identify the presence of violence stories as stories in which speakers (1) objectify pain through the discursive production of weapons and wounds, (2) describe the loss of voice itself, and (3) describe attempts to reappear as agents in the elimination of pain it self. Drawing on Minow's 1987 analysis of rights discourse, I offer a definition of the ''domestication'' of violence as a movement from ''r ights'' to ''needs'' in the discourse of the session. With this framew ork, and consistent with Silbey and Sarat's 1989 research, I found tha t violence stories were domesticated in 80% of the sessions in which s uch stories emerged. Finally, drawing on Foucault (1979), I describe t his domestication process as a function of the ''microphysics of power '' and track the rules of transformation through which violence is sub ducted into the discourse of mediation itself. I argue that the mediat ion process contributes to erase any morality that competes with the m orality of mediation and, in the process, disappears violence.