Scout,

Women may lose out financially by choosing to divorce. Their children may suffer for the same reasons. Despite that, divorce may well still be the answer. No doubt about that. For whatever reason, people sometimes get it wrong, and should be able to make corrections to their life no matter how painful.

But while family law should not encourage family breakup, it does so simply because it rewards women. If there are children, they’ll get the children and significantly more than 50% of family assets. More often than not, women will be advantaged by such a formula, and find it “empowering” even when the perceived advantages are sure to be short-lived. Then there’s welfare benefits and child support, to ensure that no matter how silly the impulsive decision may have been, how ridiculous her insecurity or perceived injustice of his x hours of housework, compared to her 2x, that she will be taken care of. Whether we like it or not, there ARE women out there who still think all they need to do is have a child.

It is no secret that family law will side with the children’s carer. It doesn’t really care who the biological father is. Hell, in it’s seemingly less rational moments it will award child support from the child’s social father to it’s biological father, just as our American friend dougmrich, is keen to point out. It apparently has no qualms about awarding child support to a mother who’s son is in the total care of the state as a convicted murderer.

But will fathers ever be primary carers, and mothers, through free choice, slaves to paid work and corporate culture to support their home husbands doing unpaid work? Herein lies the challenge for western government policy – how to confuse and subvert so that we become more dependant on the state. The unanswered question for men – who’s to dig the coal and who to mind the children?

Robert,
Shared parenting is the answer you seek.

Seeker, shared care should be the default position but it's not the sum of the answer.

- The current system takes little account of actions people take to undermine shared care such as moving away from the other parents local. There are other ways to make shared care not viable, manipulation of the kids (PAS), silly games at changeover time etc.

- The current system still leaves the parents entwined in each others finances shared care or not.

- The court system does not seem to have any kind of complaints department where a magistrates findings can be reviewed without massive expense to the party concerned about the legality of findings. I'd like to see some system where if you believed part of a decision was outside the authority of the court or had other major flaws you could lodge a complaint and have an internal complaints department check to see if there was a problem.

- People who try and settle things amicably with a minimum of legal involvement seem to find themselves on the wrong end of things if the other party plays dirty. If the government wants people to do this as civily as possible it should support people who try to do so.

I'm guessing that non of this will be news to you.

R0bert

Unfortunately R0bert, none of that is news to me. Time for a proper counter-revolution.

Seeker I don't tend to trust revolutions, they seem to have a habit of replacing one tyrany with a slightly worse one which still hurts those it was supposed to help.

We do need to increase awareness of just how harmful and unjust what is being done is to those caught up in it.

I also think we need to get honest women on side. We need those feminists who do want equality rather than the upper hand to see the damage being done to their cause by maternal preference and by a system that seems to treat women as less responsible for their actions and choices than men. If we are about more than self interest then we need to show that we care about the times that good women suffer injustice in this system. The pain is no less for a woman who loses almost everything to a scheming ex than it is for a man.

What viable changes can we seek to the current system to minimise the harm it does? I've suggested a number of items (which nobody has rebutted yet), are there other items which have a chance of making a difference and which a politicians minder might consider viable enough to run with.

R0bert

'In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act. ... Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.' (George Orwell)

"A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity) and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts ... form the terrain of the 'conjunctural' and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise." (GRAMSCI, Prison Notebooks, 178)

But then again ...

"People can accept the prevailing order because they are compelled to do so by devoting their time to 'making a living', or because they cannot conceive another way of organising society, and therefore fatalistically accept the world as it is. This, moreover, assumes that the question why people should accept a particular social order is the only legitimate question to ask. It can be claimed that an equally legitimate question is why should people not accept a particular social order?" (Strinati, 1995: 174)

RObert, you keep asking for bandaids. "I'd like to get some discussion going on ways to address some of the issues associated with child residency following relationship breakups" and "what do we need to do to minimise the harm to kids and parents?"

This is what I meant by men not being able to see past their own pain. They are looking for relief for their symptoms, but fail to address the cause of the disease. There is no relief from these symptoms of human suffering and hurt. There isn't anything that can be done to minimise the devestation to children. That's why nobody is giving you an answer.

Put it this way - if you get a thorn in your foot, which hurts like billy-o, what do you do about it?

Correct answer - take it out.

Wrong answer - leave it in there, take pain killers, put a bandaid on it and hope it goes away.

That's what you seem to be doing to me. Actively looking for the wrong answer and that's because you're asking the wrong questions.

In solving any problem, the first step is to identify that problem and define its cause. The second step is to create change the things causing the problem. When the problem is overcome, you get relief.

You can put as many bandaids as you like on this divorce and separation issue and it's not going to help anybody. What you have to do is to get rid of the Family Law Act as it stands today, and in particular, no-fault-divorce.

To do that in a democracy, you have to educate the people about the problem and let them figure out how to change it. And that's where I come in - that's what I do.

One day you folks will wake up to what's going on and then YOU can all fix it. I don't assume the position of telling any of you what to do.

Continued...