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Maria’s story
Maria Oke and her family have lived in their terraced council house for twelve years. Last year a new family, the Dubbers, moved in next door, and since then the Okes have been subjected to noise, including loud music and shouting, and verbal abuse. Maria agrees to try neighbour mediation as a way of sorting out the problem.
My problem
We’d been very happily settled here for years, until those Dubbers moved in. Since then it’s been a nightmare – lots of shouting, rudeness, loud music late at night, that sort of thing. The Dubber kids are dreadful – they’re making our lives a misery with their racist insults. One time they put dog mess through my letter box. I suppose they think it’s funny. I’m at home most of the day, and I was beginning to feel really frightened. I phoned the council loads of times, and all they did was send a letter to the Dubbers asking them to “refrain from anti-social behaviour” – I don’t suppose they even knew what that meant. The really annoying thing was that the council sent the same letter to me – and I wasn’t doing anything anti-social at all. Nothing changed, of course, so then the council told me to keep a record of all the anti-social things they did. They haven’t done anything to stop it, though.
My options
Last weekend my washing was taken off the line and thrown into the street. I didn’t see who did it, but those Dubber kids were laughing outside my garden, so I know it was them. I went to see my housing officer, but she says nothing can be done because there’s no proof – nobody saw them. I really lost my rag, and started shouting about how useless the council was, and how they had done nothing at all to help. So the housing officer started telling me about something she called neighbour mediation. Apparently a couple of do-gooders from some local mediation service will come and talk to me about the problems I’m having, and they’ll also get in touch with those Dubbers and offer to visit them as well. Good luck to them, I say! Anyway, if both families agree, we could all meet together with the mediators, face-to-face, and try to make some agreements about how to get along better.
You can get referred to a local community mediation service for neighbour mediation by a housing officer or an adviser, or you can get in touch your self to talk about whether it might help in your situation. Neighbour mediation is provided free of charge, as it is usually funded by local authorities of housing associations. You can find out more on Community mediation page of ADRnow, or on the Mediation UK website.
Well, I didn’t think the situation would be helped by a meeting with that scum, and so I told her. I think the council should be doing something properly to sort it out. Those Dubbers are racist and abusive, and they’re ruining our lives. Talking won’t solve it. Still, she asked me to go and discuss it with my husband, and get back to her.
I phoned her the next day, and said I’d give it a try - at the very least I could look those neighbours from hell in the eye and tell them what I think of them.
The housing officer phoned the mediation service to give them my details, and told me someone would be in touch in the next couple of weeks. That seemed like rather a long wait to me, but what could I do?
What happened
Two weeks later the mediation service manager rang me one morning to arrange for the mediators to visit. We fixed a date the next week, one evening when my husband would be home from work.
The mediators were great – not at all the do-gooders I’d imagined. One was a young guy with scruffy jeans, but he lived on one of the neighbouring estates and knew the sort of thing I was talking about. I got the impression that he understood what was going on. They spent an hour with us, and it was the first time I thought someone was bothering to really listen to all the details of what had happened over the last year. They explained that the next thing they would do would be to ask the Dubbers if they could visit them, and hear what they had to say. After that, if we all agreed to meet up, it would be up to us to find a solution. They wouldn’t tell us what to do. I must say I wasn’t at all sure this would work. In my view, that’s exactly what those Dubbers need, someone to tell them what to do.
A few days later the mediation service manager phoned again to say that the mediators had been to visit the Dubbers, and that they had agreed to a mediation meeting as well. We fixed a date a couple of weeks later in the local community hall. I said to the manager that I was a bit nervous about being in the same room as that family, especially since they know that we’ve been complaining about them. She said that there would be a couple of spare rooms where we could sit separately, and go and talk independently to the mediators if things got a bit heated.
When I got to the hall with my husband, Mrs Dubber was there with her sister, and the two mediators were there as well. The mediators told us that at the end of the day how we got on as neighbours was up to us, and the meeting was a chance to talk about all the things that were causing problems, and try to find a way to sort them out.
The mediators said I could start off by making a statement, so I went through all the things that had happened, and said how it had made me feel. I got a bit tearful at one point, but at least that Mrs Dubber knew how upset I was. Then she had her say. She said she thought I was much too strict with my kids, and claimed I was always telling her how to raise her own children, which made her furious. But I think she could do with some advice! She also said her kids were no angels but she hadn’t brought them up to be racist.
Anyway, after that the mediators wrote down the main things I had said – the noise, the dog mess and the washing, the racist shouting. Mrs Dubber denied that her children had anything to do with the dog mess and the washing, and said we had been trying to get them evicted ever since they moved in. She said I was just looking for evidence, so I always blamed her family, but there were loads of other kids on the estate who do that sort of thing. She said the council ought to do more to identify the real trouble-makers on the estate, and I suppose I agreed with her about that.
We talked about the noise late at night – she said ten o’clock wasn’t late, but I said my husband has to get up at five in the morning for work, so he needs his sleep. She actually said sorry at that point – she hadn’t realised about getting up so early. She’d hate it, I know, she’s so lazy! Anyway, she agreed to try to get the kids in before ten, and not to play music after that except on Saturdays, and I said it wouldn’t be such a problem on Saturdays as there’s no work the next day.
There was quite a bit of shouting, and a couple of times we had to go into that other room to calm down, but at the end of it I felt I’d had my say, and she’d had to listen.
The outcome
At the end of the meeting, the mediators wrote down what we’d managed to agree. There was the ten o’clock rule, and we both agreed to tell our kids to just keep away from each other. She said I should stop accusing her family of all the things that went wrong, and I agreed that I’d get proof first. But I know the kind of things I’ve heard her kids say to me and my family. We both said we’d write to the council about anti-social behaviour on the estate. Then the mediators told us that they’d let the council know that we’d had a mediation meeting, but they wouldn’t tell them what we had said, or what had been agreed. So what was the point of that?
Well, things were a bit better for a while, and I will say that she stuck to her bargain about getting the kids in by ten most nights. In fact it was really quiet at one point. But one morning there was threatening racist graffiti painted on our door, and I saw a paint pot in their garden. Same colour paint.
One of the things we had agreed to in mediation was that when there was a problem, we should talk to each other first, before going to the council. I was nervous about this but later that morning I saw Mrs Drubber coming home with her shopping and so I stopped her and showed her the graffiti. She was shocked – I could tell by her face – and when I said I’d seen the paint pot in her garden, she was really upset. She said someone else must have put it there to make it look like her family had done it, but actually her kids were away – they’d been at their Nan’s the past few days. When we got to talking a lot of things fell into place – the washing, the dog mess – and we thought that perhaps other kids on the estate must have been doing this and making it look like the Drubber kids had. They are a noisy, obnoxious lot so maybe they had a lot of enemies around the estate, I don’t know.
So I went to the local CAB, and told them the whole story. They said the council should have got involved much earlier, because of the abuse and harassment claims, and helped me write to the Local Government Ombudsman to complain about the council’s lack of action. Mrs Drubber wanted to be in on the letter too because as she said, her family had also been affected by the council not doing its job properly. The ombudsman said they’d investigate, which they did, but it took over six months. After that the ombudsman sent us both a letter saying that the council hadn’t followed its own procedures on dealing with complaints of harassment, because they should have fully investigated all my complaints, and the complaints that Mrs Drubber made back about me. The ombudsman said neighbour mediation was a ‘positive step in most cases of neighbour dispute, but it should not be used instead of formal enforcement action by the council.’ Well, it was a lot of words, but the ombudsman said the council had to pay us each £300 compensation for all the delay, and that they should do a proper investigation now. I’ve no idea how long that will take, and meanwhile, we’ve still go to go on living on this estate not knowing who’s doing what.
I think doing the mediation and ombudsman thing together made me and Mrs Drubber understand each other better and not keep blaming each other. We’re not best of friends or anything, and I think that’s ok with both of us, but at least we can be civil to each other.
June 6th 2006
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