Why should it concern me? I am after all a woman, a single parent, and if I were to really look at the description of terms, a liberal feminist, since I believe that men and women should be considered equal in terms of law and society. So I should be jumping for joy. But I’m not. In fact what I am, is very worried about our children and the state of our society.
Recently Mr Justice Coleridge stated that "We are experiencing a period of family meltdown whose effects will be as catastrophic as the meltdown of the ice caps." And that judges are witnessing a "never-ending carnival" of human misery, and almost all of society's social ills can be traced back to the collapse in family stability.
Our family law system is a shambles, claiming to have the ‘best interests of the child’ at its heart when in reality it has successfully aided resident parents with their own desires placed at the forefront, and greedy lawyers with huge amounts of money guiding their lack of principles, to legally destroy the lives of millions of children in our country, and leave them not only without one of their parents in their lives but also lacking half of their entire family and identity.
Undeniably some changes in family law were most definitely necessary. After all the traditional system long discriminated against women and gave them no rights to their person, property or children. The balance needed redressing, but no-one should be more equal than others under the law and that is just what our family law system delivers in reality and why the balance needs to be redressed again. It is necessary because our children are suffering and dying as a result of many of its shoddy secretive practices with a winner takes all ideology which causes harm to our children and certainly can not be deemed as being in the best interests of the child
A myriad of research now highlights the fact that children brought up without the influence of both of their parents in their lives are more likely to commit suicide or self harm and suffer from depression or other mental health problems. They are also at much greater risk of taking drugs, behaving antisocially, committing crime, ending up in prison and of underachieving in school and leaving school with no qualifications.
Added to this a new study by researchers at Rochester Medical Centre, New York, surveyed 1,619 children and found that children who have been separated at any point from one of their parents scored significantly worse both on their ability to learn new tasks and their pre-literacy skills. The study, carried out by paediatricians in the U.S., held that children of divorced or separated parents are "at increased risk of learning difficulties".
This new research, and numerous pieces of old research studying thousands of children brought up in single parent households and those brought up by both a mother and a father, brings into question why our family courts so often use the ‘best interest of the child principle’ to reduce the number of parents in a child’s life to one when clearly being parented by two parents enhances their well-being and is ultimately much better for their long term welfare and best interests and society’s best interests too.
A recent report from UNICEF placed the UK bottom of the league of 21 industrialised nations for child well-being and deemed our children to be the unhappiest in Europe, this raises further concerns as to the welfare of our children and we need only to look at our government and its policy on the family to see why.
As a previous Labour voter it distresses me to need to criticise a Labour government, but the evidence of a decaying society where children are confused, unhappy and sometimes out of control and where young people and adults alike fear for their lives as a result leads me to that criticism. It is time to stop the rot and to heal our children and families and thereby improve the lives of us all. Government policy on families will not do that, but then many politicians don’t want it to and so have embarked on a catastrophic crusade to demonise fathers and remove them not only from the lives of their children but from having a beneficial role in society too.
And it’s no wonder they pursue that policy at our peril, after all Harriet Harman, Labour Deputy Leader as well as Minister for Women, yesterday declared in an interview that marriage was 'irrelevant' to public policy and described high rates of separation as a 'positive development', as it reflected 'greater choice' for couples - well what about the children?
Further to this, in 1990 Harriet Harman co-authored a report with Patricia Hewitt and Anne Coote entitled "The Family Way" which criticised the family unit and mothers who stay at home and questioned whether men were an asset to families at all and whether "the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion”
