Two out of five of the whole year’s family break-ups are in few days after Christmas and New Year. Probably, that is more the time when they are announced, rather than because of events during the festivities. There is another, lesser, surge after the summer holidays.
There is, of course, a delay before this has an impact on ‘services’ including our own.
We are, to an extent, an ‘emergency service’ and can expect it to arrive anytime soon. A bit later still, lawyers will be rubbing their hands and getting out their glossy holiday brochures. Later still, the surge will hit the family courts and another wave for us, for support.
Even since the liberalisation of the divorce laws nearly two generations ago, wife on husband petitions have been twice or so more than those the other way around. It says nothing about whose decision it was, but who needed to formalise the situation. Or to put it another way – to whose advantage it was to get a divorce. But self-reports since, have corroborated that the decision was the female partners not the males by roughly two to one.
Both women and men agree on this, though it is in practice impossible to ask both partners to a single relationship. Still less to establish with decent evidence whether the decision ‘had to be’ because of, for example, abuse. Or whether it was ‘simply’ – as if it could ever be that the party making the decision thought they would be better off in all the various ways that could be.
This charity would say, on the basis of experience, but without being able to prove it, that many fathers wanted the couple to stay together because otherwise the children’s relationship with them would be under threat.
We now have ‘no fault’ divorce. No need to prove the ‘other party’ did anything wrong. Supposedly to make the separation less bitter. We see no sign of that happening. Indeed, there is speculation along these lines. Did the accusation of misconduct of some sort actually give the instigator some sort of emotional release? And without that, they need to discharge their feelings in another way – namely using the children to ‘get even’? We, of course, see the worse cases. But there has been no noticeable reduction in the savagery and cruelty shown in the situations brought to us.
Is there scope for an easing, even a solution? In theory, and on paper, obviously. That decisions about the arrangements for children in families in which the parents live apart should be based on what is best for them. So, the children are centre stage. Not on the conflict between the parents, with the children used as weapons and their welfare being collateral damage.
When we see our children fighting over a toy, we break them up. We try to come to some arrangement, usually sharing it, and leave them with the plea ‘Play nicely together’.
The family courts, however, say this. ‘Have a good punch up. We will just stand by and watch. And declare as the winner the one who hurts the other the most’.
JB 14.01,23
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