The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > Breaking-up is hard to do > Comments

Breaking-up is hard to do : Comments

By Arti Sharma, published 19/4/2006

Forcing couples into dispute resolution will be counterproductive: we don't need the new Family Relationship Centres

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All
The Family Court has required reports on separating couples with dependent children from Family Counsellors for at least 16 years to my knowledge.

Counsellors role was mediation seeking to reach agreement between the parties prior to Court adjudication.

The Courts put the interests of the child first ahead of parents interests and relied heavily on the Counsellors mediation report.

Unfortunately the original intent of the Family Court to function without Lawyers was not implemented and their presence invariably reinforced an adversarial atmosphere.

I agree, the Government's proposal is mainly symbolic and a waste of money.
Posted by maracas, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 10:39:20 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I share a level of scepticism about the likelyhood of the centers making a real difference. Those who misuse the existing system are unlikely to change their values based on some sessions at a relationships centre while they are not held accountable for their own role in creating their situation.

Even worse is the prospect that these centers will be staffed by existing players with their biases and parents will be forced into their hands without legal representation and possibly with little understanding of their rights in that process. No on site legal advice, no independant record of what occurred and the possibility of staff with significant bias is a very scary prospect. I'm assuming that recordings of sessions will not be available or actionable.

Add to that the likelyhood that performance incentives will include a measure based on the number of cases resolved by the center or staff member involved and its easy to imagine a temptation to get outcomes which favour the person least willing to negotiate (manouver the more reasonable parent to get a result regardless of the sanity of the outcome).

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 12:05:52 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Four months ago, Ms. Sharma wrote an article supporting the proposed changes to Family Law (see CIS website and The Australian, 13 Dec 2005). This article lists the benefits expected from the proposals. The article says the existing legal situation is unnecessarily adversarial, and unfair to fathers and children. Ms. Sharma even argues that taxpayers shouldn't have to compensate women who will receive less money under the improved CSA proposals.

This new article seems a strange follow up.

Surely Ms. Sharma remembers that most of the existing divorce industry argued against these modest and reasonable changes. Many existing judges, lawyers, and community providers of advice and mediation, show entrenched unjustified anti-father beliefs.

Legislators also remember that their previous reform attempt, in 1995, was completely ignored by the divorce industry. This time around, the Government opted to develop new, better controlled, paths for handling the cases.

Ms. Sharma’s comments about the nanny state trying to control the lives of individuals are not appropriate here. Instead the aim is to control behaviour of industry players, thereby allowing individual couples to make free and informed decisions without duress – or the vested influence of lawyers and one-dimensional advocacy groups.

Yes, this is ambitious, and expensive, but necessary. Yes, biased anti-father zealots may still infiltrate the new Centres. Yes, it would have been cheaper, and easier, to legislate for a rebuttable presumption of shared residency in the first place.
Posted by cabbage, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 3:11:42 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Very eloquently said cabbage. And factually correct too.
Posted by Maximus, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 5:04:18 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Keeping lawyers out of divorce or dispute resolution will indeed be a great outcome if it can be achieved. My experience with marriage breakdown was that the lawyers polarised the parties and made communication impossible apart from that through them. This generates further anger and frustration destroying any possible reconciliation or negotiations between the couple. From a lawyers perspective it is more rewarding for them to have the parties totally opposed and as mad as hell.
Posted by SILLE, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 5:09:14 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
SILLE, that may vary from lawyer to lawyer. In my own case my solicitor appeared to look for ways of avoiding the litigation process. That may have been driven to some extent by the feedback I gave as we went but I never saw anything which looked like a desire to keep us at each others throats.

My ex has blamed various solicitors for some of the unethical actions she undertook. The fact that a solicitor advised that a course of action was possible seemingly absolves her of the responsibility for instructing the solicitor to take that action or for her taking a certain action herself. I took the view that I was instructing my solicitor not the other way around and that ultimately I had to live with how we conducted our side of the case.

I think that some do behave as you suggest but they do have a responsibility to advise us of the options available to us, we choose what is acceptable. Something we should not forget.

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 6:33:30 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
RObert, as usual a well balanced, thoughtful and considerate post.

However, at the risk of upsetting our female readers, I believe you have identified very correctly a basic difference between men and women, which I'd say was pretty much the nature of the respective beasts.

In your second post (above) you indicate that you felt that your ex' took some "unethical actions" in Family Court matters, yet yourself, you feel, you took actions based on conscience and not on legal expediency.

Might I suggest that this is evidence to confirm an adage I once heard and have adopted as a guiding generalisation: "A man assumes that the means must justify the ends, but a woman assumes that the ends justify the means". She'll do anything it takes to get her own way, including shifting responsibility to a third party, especially a convenient man if available.

This, of course, is not the case for all men or for all women, but I have noticed that it's quite a wise adage and appropriate for many cases. Yours in particular seems to hold true here.

Perhaps this is one area that mandatory counselling may subdue, depending upon the sex or bias of the counsellor of course.
Posted by Maximus, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 7:07:02 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
It's difficult to comment constructively on this article without knowing more about the UK initiative and why it failed, and what other evidence that Researcher Sharma consulted.

The Wright brothers failed to fly nonstop between New York and London. Does that mean nobody should ever try?

Of course not.

Just because one attempt to solve a problem didn't work, that doesn't mean we should just give up.

From brief investigation it seems that there are successful initiatives similar to the Australian one in a number of US states and in other countries as well. In things that have to do with complex human and social issues, the devil is often in the detail.

For example, in the present English scheme apparently couples can be required to attend a lecture on the benefits of mediation, but I have not found a report that use of mediation was ever compulsory.

Even if it is, there are exclusions needed to deal with cases where violence or mistreatment are significant factors.

Perhaps Researcher Sharma would favour us with access to her full report.

I assume there will be links to research material in the full report on the Centre for Independent Studies web site. However I cannot find the paper there. There is a media release, http://www.cis.org.au/Media/releases/releases%202006/M120406.htm dated 12 April, which states the paper is to be released on that day and provides a URL, http://www.cis.org.au/IssueAnalysis/ia70/ia70.pdf but that simply produces a "The page cannot be found" message.

If Arti Sharma's objective is to stimulate reasoned discussion, it might be helpful to rectify this. Apparently none of the previous commentators chose to go back to the facts.

So what are we doing here - simply fuelling prejudices?
Posted by MikeM, Wednesday, 19 April 2006 9:19:50 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Maximus, thats not the first time I've heard a view along those lines. I've never seen the results of any research on the topic.

If there is any truth to the idea I suspect that it would have a lot to do with the different expectations placed on kids as they grow and a tendancy in parts of society (paternalism and some parts of feminism) to treat women as less responsible than men. To somehow view women as less capable of making informed decisions for themselves than men and therefore less responsible for their actions. Not a view which I share.

Anyone whose training as they grew up included the idea that they were not responsible for their actions will have a difficult time assuming responsibility for their actions as an adult.

Likewise those raised to believe that their wants and needs are all important will have a difficult time understanding that the end does not necessarily justify the means.

That does not excuse those who avoid accepting responsibility for their own choices or who see their perceived needs as overriding all other factors but it does help us find a way forward.

R0bert
Posted by R0bert, Thursday, 20 April 2006 5:26:40 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
This sums up the problem for me:

"should they expect to be working on repairing their relationship or ending it amicably?"

There are two mutually exclusive objectives at work here. Is the system strong enough to distinguish between them when faced with an often angry and resentful couple?

If the intention is to protect the interests of the children, to what lengths is the state prepared to go to in order to achieve this? Does separation from both parents feature in the mix, if the situation warrants it, or would it stop short of such decisive action? In which case, can it reasonably be described as "in the interests of the children".

It is easy to say "just because one attempt to solve a problem didn't work, that doesn't mean we should just give up", but we should at least try to make sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. After all, it was only seventy years ago that it was decided that a cure for chronic mental disorder was a frontal lobotomy - gee, that was progress.

Trying to solve the problems between two people by throwing money at it will never work until the source of those problems is identified and understood. Until then,it will just be a knee-jerk political stunt.
Posted by Pericles, Thursday, 20 April 2006 6:58:45 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Continuing from my initial post....

Mediation takes place in the "shadow of the Court". Although there will be some differences, mediated agreements will be close to what would be achieved in the Court - but arrived at faster and more cheaply. If outcomes weren't similar, one party would simply walk out of mediation and take the Court option.

MikeM raises valid questions about Ms. Sharma's assertion that the UK model failed. But you can’t really judge alternate dispute resolution, without considering whether the underlying laws, and legal interpretations, are good enough.

Ms. Sharma suggests 95% of Australian couples didn’t need dispute resolution to make agreements. Perhaps she is suggesting these agreements indicate a successful process. But just because parties reach agreement outside the Court, doesn't mean they are happy. They may be accepting they aren't going to get a better deal, and cutting their losses. Many people, who reached this type of agreement, later told the Family Law Inquiry they were disadvantaged, and are among the most vocal advocates for change in the Laws.

Since UK Family Law is even more anti-father than the old Australian laws, one wouldn’t expect mediation to be particularly successful there. But that may not tell us much about mediation.

Instead of the FRCs, I suggest there is a bigger Achilles heel in the Government’s reform of Family Law – i.e. Property Settlements were excluded from the initial terms of reference for the Inquiry. The outdated practices and unjustified interpretations for Property Settlements are still in place. These will continue to influence behaviour around Child Residency and Child Support decisions.

In another earlier article (Sept 2005), Ms. Sharma suggests that Fault should be re-considered in individual divorce settlements. This is controversial and many say “we don’t want to go back to the days of private detectives taking photos through bedroom windows”. No we don’t. But unjustified bias in existing Property Settlement practices is the mechanism by which defacto Fault is sheeted home to fathers on a generic basis. This will be the biggest hand brake on short-term progress.
Posted by cabbage, Thursday, 20 April 2006 8:18:34 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Please add me to the list of sceptics.

As exemplified most recently by his Menzies Research Centre speech, the PM appears as paternal as they come and a relativist to boot. Claims that tax cuts hurt women, or that Australians enjoy their tax deductions and resultant refunds too much, to want a reduction in churning (let alone tax reform), come to mind.

As a number of commentators have already expressed, understanding the underlying issues and motivations would be prerequisite to any serious attempts at resolution. Unfortunately the many conflicting objectives of politicians (add to that, extreme short-sightedness and short-termism), consistantly result in policies that are in disarray.

A cartoon in The Australian had the PM proclaiming that no child shall live without a plasma TV by 2007. Seems satire is sometimes a credible alternative to vision.
Posted by Seeker, Thursday, 20 April 2006 10:05:58 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
actually it isn't very hard.. in my parents case it was get out and a tiny bit extra, followed by madeline and maccas of-course..
Posted by brown_eyed_girl, Saturday, 22 April 2006 5:07:29 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy