Senior Peer calls for change in family law and public attitude towards divorce

A senior Peer has addressed the family situation in the United Kingdom and called for a change in public attitude towards divorce.

A senior Peer has addressed the family situation in the United Kingdom and called for a change in public attitude towards divorce.

Baroness Deech of Cumnor, an academic, lawyer and bioethicist who also chairs the Bar Standards Board, spoke in the first of six Gresham College lectures on family law, Divorce Law: A Disaster?

She outlined the cost of divorce in financial and emotional terms and called for a ‘new debate on marriage and the family under the umbrella of moral and civil renewal’.

(Click here to watch, listen and read the lecture)

She said that public attitudes towards divorce have to be changed, ‘just as they have been in relation to environmental issues and smoking, with greater or lesser success’.

‘Divorce is not a private matter, it is of real public concern and cost, with a ripple effect on the family, the community and the whole country,’ Baroness Deech said.

She recommends divorcing couples should be made to endure a 12-month waiting period in order to hold or reverse the rise in divorce.

‘My own remedy would be an introduction of a waiting period to stop divorce being so quickly granted, even where the ground is one of the speedy ones.

‘I would add to the present grounds of divorce a provision that no decree shall be granted until at least 12 months have elapsed from the service of the petition (the start of the formalities). This would ensure that no petitioner would be free to remarry for at least one year after the beginning of the process, regardless of the reasons for the divorce,’ she added.

Baroness Deech also mentioned that divorce has a lasting impact on children, yet this is not taken seriously by politicians.

‘Despite all this, and I have only scratched the surface of the depth of research, it seems to be an unspoken political decision that attempts to make divorce more difficult are totally unacceptable. Any other situation that is known to harm children, sometimes not nearly as much, for example school food or paedophilia, attracts legislation and extensive public campaigns without dissent. But even when public debate focuses on the plight of single parents and their children, the fact that over half of them are created by divorce and separation is overlooked.

‘It is astonishing that no government seriously considers divorce as an issue while expressing anxiety about single parents, their children and society’s health. How silent is this issue compared with environmental protection, smoking, drugs, obesity, exercise, driving, supermarket plastic bags and so on,’ she said.

In November 2007, Baroness Deech co-authored and published IVF to Immortality: Controversy in the Era of Reproductive Technology, a book that addressed serious bioethical questions. She is currently the Professor of Law at Gresham College in London, where she presents a series of public lectures on family relationships and the law.

In July this year, a report by the Centre for Social Justice called Every Family Matters demonstrated how family breakdown is deeply detrimental to children’s life chances and to the wellbeing of adults. The report made several recommendations to reform the law so as to strengthen the family and called on the Government to resist asserting legal equivalence between cohabitants and married couples.

The Centre has suggested similar reforms, such as compulsory ‘cooling off’ periods for couples to set upon annulment and a ‘more narrow definition’ of what constitutes a party’s ‘reasonable needs’, if a case proceeds.

An earlier report on the Centre, Family Law Review: Faster Divorce and Foreign Law, condemned the attitude that marriage is little more than a 'lifestyle choice' and said that there is overwhelming evidence that marriage is good for couples, children, the extended family and society as a whole. The authors of the report warn that the annual economic cost to the taxpayer of the average family breakdown is up to £820 or £24 billion for the country as a whole.