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GAZETTE
JULY-AUGUST
1979
come from the working classes and again research shows
this class to be more at risk in terms of marriage failure
than any other social class. Why this should be so is
impossible to answer with any certainty for no single
cause emerges, but rather one perceives a complex and
intricate social process of action and interaction between
education, conditioning, economic, social and individual
factors in which the vast majority of marriages work well
but some adapt badly. To a large degree this notion is
substantiated by research in both America and Australia
where financial insecurity and economic hardship are
identified with marriage breakdown to a high degree.
3
Ineffective responses to marital breakdown
So we are left with a picture of marriage as a vocation
requiring great input from the partners and which adapts
as an institution to prevailing social and environmental
factors some of which may and do affect it adversely. So
how do we cope? To a large extent we have been content
to smugly congratulate ourselves on the fact that unlike
our English neighbours we have no divorce problem and
to the extent that we have no civil divorce at all, this is
true; but on the other hand we do have the prelude to
divorce, namely unhappy and broken marriages and it is
these which are the real problem, not the rise and fall of
divorce statistics on a graph. It must now be time for us
to ask whether our response to marital breakdown has
been a meaningful and helpful one. Our antidotes include
a prohibition on divorce and a few pieces of legislation
offering limited financial and personal protection to
spouses of broken marriages — nothing more, even
though the problem is growing. Where are the special
support services for families in difficulty, the special
courts with expertise in the sensitive area of intimate
personal relationships. Where is the sex education which
prevents unwanted pregnancies and rushed marriages and
which attempts to rationalise sex as part of a loving
long term relationship? Where are the attempts to alleviate
financial hardship and housing problems, to distribute
more equitably the nation's wealth? Is it not something of
an indictment of our system that we can on the one hand
claim to protect marriage from the many attacks made on
it, by nothing more than the bald assertion that we will
not permit divorce — and by the cushioning in a very
restricted way, of families already on the casualty list?
The traditional concentration of attention upon divorce
and the rights and wrongs of allowing it, has done nothing
more than to obscure the problems caused by marital
failure and has impeded the search for constructive and
effective remedies particularly in terms of presentation. If
our neighbours have spiralling divorce rates it is because
they too have neglected to tackle the problem at source,
by developing new ways of dealing with difficult
marriages, by insisting on proper, preparation for
marriage, by ensuring that the first pqrstbh turned to when
a crisis occurs is not a lawyer, trained in advocacy and
pitched battle techniques which so often militate against
reconciliation. These are some of the things we ought to
be doing if we are really concerned to stop the rot setting
into the entire institution of marriage, that plus a facility
for severing the bonds where there is no hopd of the
parties ever making a success of their marriage
a
facility which is a last rather than a first resort.
We have so little to fear from permitting divorce and so
much to be concerned about in continuing to forbid it.
Anti-divorce lobbyists often argue that divorce damages
children, yet the truth is that what damages children is not
the de iure dissolution of the marriage but the process of
rows scenes, violence, bitterness, recrimination and
upheaval which de facto broke it up. Research shows that
children of violent and broken homes suffer from mental
problems in greater numbers than those from stable
homes, but even without that knowledge it does not
require a Ph.D. in psychology to work out that an un-
happy home is not the best environment for a child nor
the best education for a future spouse and parent. If we
add to this the fact that research also shows that violent
husbands are often themselves the victims of a violence
syndrome learnt from their parents it becomes clear that
by officially encouraging people to stay in unhappy
relationships we are actually putting children at risk and
are helping to perpetuate the syndrome of failed
marriages rather than prevent it.
4
Lack of civil remedy
The counterproductive effects are seen when we
contrast the civil law on annulment and divorce with con-
temporary canon law of the Roman Catholic Church
whose traditional antipathy to divorce our constitution
mimmicks. The Church has itself undergone radical
change in the past number of years and has had to
respond to our changing world. It has, laudably, yielded
to the demands of those trapped in marriages which have
foundered for behavioural reasons; — reasons, tradition-
ally ignored by both Church and State in granting annul-
ments. Nowadays canonical courts regularly decide that a
violent and abusive husband has been too immature at
the time of the marriage to appreciate the nature of the
contract, therefore no real contract could be said to have
been made hence the marriage is void; it never existed. So
despite the home, the children, the shared years there
never was a marriage. In other jurisdictions these same
reasons more logically and honestly found petitions for
divorce rather than annulment, but the canon law courts
in the best legal tradition, resort to semahtic fiction to
achieve a desired objective without diminishing a stated
principle. The moral myopia, not to mention hypocrisy of
this stance which denies divorce on the one hand yet pro-
vides it under a different label on the other, is matched
only by the State's blind indifference to the now numerous
people who fall into the limbo of being free to remarry in
the eyes of the Church but who at civil law are bound by
the legal bonds of a marriage the Canon Law says never
existed. It is ironic that the same Church which so greatly
influenced the decision to prohibit constitutionally divorce
legislation, should now be itself creating a situation in
which the argument of divorce becomes compelling.
This lack of civil remedy is further complicated by the
fact that many people in this no-man's land, do enter new
relationships some of them bigamous, in which new
family units are created and illegitimate children born.
Hence the absence of divorce legislation is itself a causal
factor in the creation of 'illicit' relationships and
illegitimacies. For those who sanctimoniously preach that
divorce laws weaken the attitude adopted to marriage
vows it is quite a comeuppance to realise how many of
our illegitimate children are fathered by married men. Is
our ban on divorce, far from strengthening the marriage
bond, perhaps helping to create a situation in which a
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