The judge – who presided over the bitterly fought divorce of Sir Paul and Heather McCartney – blamed 50 years of relationship free-for-all for the spread of divorce on demand. He said the result was that 3.8million children were now left at the mercy of the courts because of the break-up of their parents.
The judge, who sits in the High Court Family Division as Mr Justice Coleridge, has called repeatedly for legal reforms to clear up the mess left by the decline of marriage. He has blamed youth crime, child abuse, drug addiction, binge drinking, truanting and bad behaviour in schools on the 'meltdown' of the family. And he has called for the Government to set up an independent commission to reform marriage, divorce and family laws.
Yesterday he described the problem of family breakdown as 'huge' and condemned the ease of divorce in an interview on BBC Radio Five Live. 'Divorce is easy in the sense that obtaining a divorce is easier than getting a driving licence,' he said. 'It's a form-filling exercise and you'll get your divorce in six weeks if everyone agrees.' He added that the stigma attached to divorce in the past has also disappeared. 'In about 1950 you weren't allowed in the royal enclosure at Ascot if you were divorced,' Sir Paul said. That now would exclude half the Royal Family.'
The judge said there was no sign that the misery of large numbers of children hit by family break-up was diminishing. 'In fact, every indication is it's going up,' Sir Paul said. 'The whole of society is affected by this,' he told interviewer Victoria Derbyshire. 'Everyone in the land, from the Royal Family downwards, is now affected by family breakdown. 'It affects the lives of children themselves, it affects the lives of their parents. The wider family gets caught up in it. 'It then ripples out to the local community, the schools and then into the wider community.'
On the day official figures showed that nearly half of all babies are now born to unmarried mothers, Sir Paul blamed family break-up on social changes including the shift in attitudes towards cohabitation and increasing numbers of children born outside marriage. He said that 50 years ago 'on the whole cohabitation was regarded as something you didn't do, to have a child outside marriage, so that created a framework that stopped very much breakdown. 'We've had a cultural revolution in sexual morality and sexual behaviour,' the judge said. 'We need to have a reasonable debate about it and decide what needs to be done – and I don't mean Government,' he said. 'They didn't cause the problem.'
He added that the change in social attitudes over the past five decades had given people 'complete freedom of choice'. This was 'great' when they behaved responsibly, he added, but some seemed to think it was a 'free-for-all'. Sir Paul said the rate of family breakdown among unmarried couples was far higher than among married ones. It was statistically proven parents were far more likely to stay together until their children's 16th birthday if they were married, he said. Official figures suggest that an average marriage lasts around 11 years, but a cohabitation is likely to break up in three if the partners do not marry.
Divorce levels are currently falling, and in 2009 the 113,949 divorces were the lowest total for 35 years. However divorce boomed following the liberal 1969 divorce reforms which ushered in the current era of 'quickie' divorces that can be arranged cheaply in less than six months. The number of divorces shot up in the early 1970s and peaked at over 180,000 in 1993. Since then the decline in divorce is widely thought to be connected to the decline in numbers of marriages – and the likelihood that couples who choose to get married now are more committed to each other than some counterparts in the past.
No comments:
Post a Comment