Welcome to this week’s UK Marriage News

 

OK folks, this is it – the 50^th and final edition of the newsletter for 2014! We’d like to wish you all a joy-filled and peaceful Christmas, and we look forward to returning to the fray full of pith and vigour (or at least turkey) on 5^th Jan next year!

 

Happy Christmas from the 2-in-2-1 Team!

 

Headlines

·         Bullying husbands face five years in jail for 'controlling behaviour'

·         Do People Really Understand the Causes of Their Own Divorces?

·         One small baby

 

Government and Political

·         Bullying husbands face five years in jail for 'controlling behaviour'

Bullying husbands who keep their wives downtrodden by banning them from having friends, hobbies and access to money could face five years in jail under a new criminal offence reports the Telegraph. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said the Government is to press ahead with a new domestic abuse offence of "coercive and controlling behaviour" - which will apply equally to men and women. The offence will outlaw behaviour which amounts to extreme psychological and emotional abuse but, crucially, stops short of violence.

 

It comes after the Government unveiled a “Cinderella” law earlier this year which will see parents who starve their children of love and affection being prosecuted for “emotional cruelty”. Both proposed offences mark significant incursions by the State into what have previously been regarded as private affairs.

 

A Home Office spokesman said the law would be drafted carefully so it did not affect "ordinary power dynamics" in marriages and other relationships. "Victims of coercive control can have every aspect of life controlled by their partner, often being subjected to daily intimidation and humiliation," the spokesman said. "There are a number of ways that witness testimony could be supported at prosecution. These include using documentary evidence such as threatening emails and text messages, and bank statements that show the perpetrator has sought to control the victim financially."

 

The type of behaviour the Government is seeking to outlaw includes people who control "minute aspects" of their partner's lives, such as "when they are allowed to eat, sleep and go to the toilet," he added. It will cover not just spouses and partners but other family relationships as well. "The offence will be drafted to ensure that it is clear and proportionate and does not impact on ordinary power dynamics in relationships," he said.

 

Home Office research has previously shown that 16 per cent of men admit to being victims of domestic abuse during their lifetimes compared with 30 per cent of women. The new controlling behaviour offence was floated in a consultation paper earlier this year and ministers will now go ahead with legislation.

 

Mrs May said: "Domestic abuse is a hideous crime that shatters the lives of victims, trapping them in cycles of abuse that too often end in tragic and untimely deaths. Coercive control can be tantamount to torture. In many cases, dominance over the victim develops and escalates over the years until the perpetrator has complete control. Putting a foot wrong can result in violent outbursts, with victims living in fear for their lives. Meeting survivors of domestic abuse and hearing their shocking stories has made me all the more determined to put a stop to this scourge on our society. The government is committed to protecting the victims of this terrible crime and it is clear that this new offence has the potential to save lives.”

 

Polly Neate, chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: "The government’s announcement of a new domestic violence law is a significant first step towards protecting women experiencing domestic violence. “We welcome the Home Secretary’s announcement that the government will criminalise the patterns of coercive, controlling, and psychologically abusive behaviour which lie at the heart of the abuse so many women experience. We hope this new law will lead to a real culture change, so that every woman experiencing control can get the support she needs to break free safely. We look forward to working together with the Home Office to ensure the new law is effective, and that the police get specialist-led domestic violence training so they know how to use it. We are pleased the government has listened to the voices of survivors and professionals contained in the Domestic Violence Law Reform Campaign.”

 

·         Q: How many children won't be with both their birth parents this Christmas? A: Over 4 million

A new report from the Marriage Foundation today shows that one in three children will spend this Christmas without both parents. (See also Blog post)

 

Fifty years ago, only one in ten children missed out on Christmas with both parents. Many more would have had to put up with squabbling parents who remained together. Back then, almost all parents got married before having children. The flip side was that it was difficult to end a bad relationship.

 

Today we’ve gone too far in the opposite direction. One in three children now miss out. While it’s right that there are fewer barriers and taboos to splitting up if the relationship is unhealthy, far too many parents never establish some plan for the future before having children in the first place. Four million children is far too many. For the sake of the next generation, we need to rediscover the importance of prior commitment before having children.

 

·         One in four married couples only stay together for their children ... and a FIFTH plan to split after a final family Christmas

[We have included this since it has been published, even though we think it is possibly the most misguided article we have covered all year – a highly skewed sample, and conclusions that bear no relationship to the academic research! Ed]

 

A quarter of married couples are only together for their children - and plan to split once they grow up, a new study has found reports the Daily Mail. According to a poll of 2,000 married parents, affairs, growing apart and 'becoming more like friends' are among the top reasons for being unhappy in a relationship,  

 

Yet staying in a bad marriage and putting on a front for the sake of the family could do more harm than good for children, a family lawyer warns. Many are too worried about the effect a divorce would have on their youngsters to call it quits, according to the research commissioned by law firm Irwin Mitchell. And almost one in five (19 per cent) are considering staying together over the Christmas period before putting an end to their marriage in January.

 

But it also emerged that of those who have already divorced a partner, one in four (26.5 per cent) stayed in the relationship longer than they wanted to for the children - and almost eight in ten (78.5 per cent) now regret doing so.

 

Martin Loxley, head of the Family Law team at Irwin Mitchell solicitors, said: 'We see many couples in relationships where they aren't happy, or don't really want to be in, but who stick together for the sake of their children. While it is an understandable reaction for parents to feel that it would be better to stay together to avoid the impact of a relationship breakdown on the children, in some cases doing so may only serve to increase the long term adverse effects on them. Children can often pick up on things and regardless of how much of a united front you put on, youngsters, particularly older ones, can sometimes see through it.  In some cases, children feel 'cheated' if, when they get older, they realise their parents were putting on a "front" during their childhoods.'

 

Unhappy couples will mask the problems in their relationship by going on 'date nights', continuing to take family holidays, keep problems bottled up and arguing in another room, away from the children. Mr Loxley said: 'There is help available to parents to work together to ensure that their children are affected as little as possible by a break-up, allowing all to be happier in the longer term. If you are in an unhappy relationship, and if a divorce or separation is handled sensitively by both parents, children can and do prosper more than they might have done, had their parents stuck together, but in an unhappy household.'

 

The study found four in ten are currently in a marriage they aren't completely happy with, with more than a third saying they have too much to lose to get divorced. Many feel trapped by not having the money to live alone, not being able to afford the divorce or wanting more time to make a final decision.  But 37 per cent of married parents admit they have considered asking their other half for a divorce, only to hold off due to concerns about how it would affect their children. More than a third admitted they have stayed in a marriage longer than they would have liked to save their children any distress, with 21 per cent considered themselves as separated, despite still living with their partner and acting like a couple in front of their offspring.

 

Researchers also found 18 per cent have a date in mind to end their relationship, but while more than one in five have set this at a couple of months, one in 20 are planning to wait ten years or more before calling it quits. One in five unhappy parents admitted to waiting until their children reached at least 14 before going ahead with a divorce.

 

Another one in five intend to see out the Christmas and New Year celebrations as a family before making a decision on whether to call time on their marriage. And 27 per cent of parents will be making more effort to hide any marital woes over the Christmas period with most planning to keep their problems bottled up rather than discussing them. Admirably, 42 per cent will make a positive effort to ensure that any arguments take place away from their children or loved ones.

 

Martin Loxley of Irwin Mitchell added: 'Bringing a relationship to an end is a difficult decision and not one to be rushed. We've worked with many parents, all of who want to minimise the impact of divorce or separation on their children. For some, this might result in their delaying a date for separation. For others, working closely with professionals, including mediators, counsellors and therapists, can help the family to address arrangements constructively and positively. There is a wealth of information available to parents - and children (in an age-appropriate way) - to help them come to terms with a huge change and move forward to the next chapter of their lives. There are many ways that an amicable separation can be achieved to have a minimal impact on any children involved. The most important thing is that both parties are prepared to put their kids first during the process and avoid fighting over issues, as involving children in a tug of love can be extremely upsetting and harmful for them.

 

'Studies have shown that if parents are not happy their feelings will inevitably affect the whole family no matter how hard they try to hide it. Parents may be worried about the stigma of divorce or the financial implications, but ultimately people in this situation need to seek specialist advice and endeavour to ensure that what they do is best for everyone involved.'

Research and Public Opinion

·         Do People Really Understand the Causes of Their Own Divorces?

Leah fought with her new husband, Gary, on their wedding night says Family Studies. Within a month, their marriage “crashed and burned.” Leah, then 23, had been in a relationship with Gary since she was sixteen. When they argued before they were married, Leah said they would always fix the problem. “But once we were married,” she said, “we didn’t want to.”

 

What did they argue about? Gary didn’t work—he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and he was uncomfortable in public places. Leah understood that he had a “real disorder” and that it was difficult for him. But she figured that if he isn’t having an anxiety attack, he should be doing something.

 

“And he just never did,” she said exasperatedly. “He was just content with sitting around playing video games. If you’re fine to play video games, you could do something. And I even told him a million times, ‘At least take care of our house.’”

 

To pay her mortgage and other bills (Leah owned the house), Leah worked two jobs. When she got home, Gary would be playing video games, and their house was a wreck. “And I got to where I hated him so much,” Leah said. To make Gary mad, she would get drunk.

 

To add to the stress, Gary invited a friend who was down on his luck, and his child, to live with them for a time. When Leah brought that up in arguments, Gary reminded her that she had let her sister live with them for a while.

 

Then there was his family—particularly his mother—whom Leah said never really liked her. Leah blamed what she saw as Gary’s laziness on his mom: she coddled him, she says.

 

Looking back, Leah wishes that they had been more financially stable before getting married. About half of their arguments, she estimates, were about money. “I’d yell at him for never working, he’d yell at me for drinking, and I’d yell at him over the bills some more,” she said. She added, “Money really does do a lot to stress people out.”

 

Within a year of marriage, they had separated. After separation, they did reconcile for a time, though that ended after Gary accidentally texted Leah a message intended for another woman. Leah concluded he was cheating, and soon after their marriage ended.

 

It’s noteworthy that while Leah was sympathetic to the difficulty that Gary’s bipolar disorder presented him, and mindful about their money problems, she ultimately didn’t interpret the essential challenge in their marriage as either a mental health crisis or an economic crisis. Rather, she interpreted it as a crisis of character. “He never worked,” was her simple response to our first question about what contributed to the divorce, before adding later “He refused to do anything.”

 

Leah’s story raises the question, “Why do most people divorce?”

 

When Paul R. Amato and Denise Previti examined 208 ever-divorced people’s open-ended responses to the question, “What do you think caused the divorce?”, they found 18 categories of responses. The most often-cited category, infidelity, was cited by 22 percent of people. Other reasons included “drinking or drug use” (11 percent), “loss of love” (4 percent), and “financial problems” (2 percent).

 

What’s surprising is that, despite the common perception that money is at the root of many marriage problems, few divorced people blamed it for ending their marriage. Moreover, the authors found that only 9 percent of people identified “external factors” (such as lack of money or employment problems) as the cause of divorce. Most people cited a problem with their former spouse or with the relationship itself.

 

That finding appears to confirm something April A. Buck and Lisa A. Neff note in their article on “Stress Spillover in Early Marriage”: “When asked to explain the success or failure of their relationships, individuals rarely acknowledge the role the relationship context may have played in shaping those outcomes.” They also remark on the “common belief in Western society that successful marriages result when both partners ‘work’ at the relationship by engaging in active efforts to behave and think” in ways conducive to a good relationship.

 

Buck and Neff’s view of the research on how stress affects relationships leads them to think that achieving a successful relationship is more complicated than that. As they approvingly quote Ellen Berscheid, “Some very strong relationships dissolve—not because they weren’t close or committed or loving—but because fate … put their relationship in harm’s way.” Thus, whereas divorced people tend to focus on things within a couple’s control, some of the sociological research on divorce emphasizes that the circumstances largely outside of their control—that is, the environment in which relationships are imbedded—matter at least as much.

 

The research on how stress affects married couples is intriguing, and it suggests that a person’s environment probably plays a bigger role than most divorced people acknowledge in surveys. One suggestive finding from this literature comes from a study of 82 middle-class newlyweds. The researchers asked the couples to keep seven-day diaries at three different points over a four-year period about their satisfaction with the relationship, their perception of relationship problems (for instance, problems with “showing affection” or “trust”), and the level of “external stress” that they were experiencing (such as the death of a friend or family member).

 

They found that when wives (but not husbands) reported higher than average levels of external stress, they were less satisfied with the marriage. What is more surprising, though, is the exact way in which the stress affected the wives. As the authors write, “As wives’ external stress increased, they also tended to perceive more specific problems within the relationship.” And as external stress increased, wives were more likely to blame husbands for behaviours that they had overlooked or excused during low-stress periods.

 

The main point here is that stress talks. You can see the dynamic in the couple whose story I described above: whereas before marriage Leah may have been willing to excuse Gary’s unemployment because of his bipolar disorder, after marriage—when she said stress increased—she began to focus on it as a problem.

 

So what is really going on? Did Leah and Gary divorce because Gary didn’t contribute enough to their marriage or because of factors that are largely outside of their control, like his struggle with bipolar disorder? The answer, I think, is a little bit of both.

 

It’s probably true that ordinary people’s focus on non-environmental reasons for divorce at least partly reflects their sense of agency—the reality that we are not mere victims of fate. And research from psychologists like Martin Seligman supports this common intuition. In fact, Seligman criticizes a version of social science which he critiques for assuming that “individuals are no longer responsible for their actions, since the cause lies not in the person but in the situation.” Of course, as a good social scientist, Seligman acknowledges that the environment dramatically affects a person, and that some of us grow up in harsher social environments than others. But he believes that his own discipline, psychology, can do more to emphasize the character traits that empower people to learn from suffering in positive ways.

 

In thinking about how to reduce divorce, then, we need a two-pronged effort. Leaders should recognize how their decisions can contribute to making either a healthy environment for marriages or a toxic one. For instance, political leaders must ensure that poor and working-class people who struggle with mental illness have affordable and quality mental health care. Corporate leaders should strive to form companies in which all adult employees are paid a living wage. At the same time, as the success of organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous demonstrates, there is also great power in appealing to people’s sense of agency, and identifying those character traits that enable people to experience suffering as a pathway to greater character—or in this case, the traits that enable couples to grow closer together, not farther apart, when life becomes stressful.

 

·         Family-friendly policies increase productivity

Employers could benefit from a more productive workforce if they introduce family-friendly policies, a new study has found reports BPS. According to research by the University of Texas at Dallas, published in Public Personnel Management, measures such as offering on-site childcare, restricting overtime and allowing maternity and childcare leave have a positive effect on an employee's state of mind.

 

This, it stated, in turn improves their productivity, as well as job satisfaction levels and people's commitment to their job.

 

Kwang Bin Bae, lead author of the study, commented: "I was interested in family-friendly policies because my mother is a working mom. She has to balance her job in the workplace and raising a family." He added that being able to benefit from family-friendly policies is good both for families and society in general.

 

The team behind the study is now keen to investigate the impacts of each individual family-friendly policy.

 

Professor Suzan Lewis from Middlesex University Business School, a Chartered Psychologist, comments: "While this is an encouraging finding  there is much evidence that the impact of so-called family-friendly policies tends to depend largely on how they are implemented. Not all formal family-friendly policies are reflected in actual family friendly practices.  These policies are most likely to have  positive organisational outcomes in contexts when there are supportive managers and a supportive culture. Most research looks at large organisation but a recent international review of research on SMEs also suggests links between largely informal  family friendly practices and productivity."

 

·         Early caregiving experiences have long-term effects on social relationships, achievement

Do the effects of early caregiving experiences remain or fade as individuals develop? A new study has found that sensitive caregiving in the first three years of life predicts an individual's social competence and academic achievement, not only during childhood and adolescence, but also into adulthood reports Science Daily.

 

The study, by researchers at the University of Minnesota, the University of Delaware, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, appears in the journal Child Development. It was carried out in an effort to replicate and expand on findings from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which showed that early maternal sensitivity has lasting associations with children's social and cognitive development at least through adolescence.

 

"The study indicates that the quality of children's early caregiving experiences has an enduring and ongoing role in promoting successful social and academic development into the years of maturity," notes Lee Raby, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Delaware, who led the study.

 

Sensitive caregiving is defined as the extent to which a parent responds to a child's signals appropriately and promptly, is positively involved during interactions with the child, and provides a secure base for the child's exploration of the environment.

The researchers used information from 243 individuals who were born into poverty, came from a range of racial/ethnic backgrounds, and had been followed from birth into adulthood (age 32) as part of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. Observations of interactions between mothers and their children were collected four times during the children's first three years of life. At multiple ages during childhood and adolescence, teachers reported on children's functioning in their peer groups and children completed standardized tests of academic achievement. During their 20s and early 30s, participants completed interviews in which they discussed their experiences with romantic relationships and reported their educational attainment.

 

Individuals who experienced more sensitive caregiving early in life consistently functioned better socially and academically during the first three decades of life, the study found. The associations were larger for individuals' academic outcomes than for their functioning in peer and romantic relationships. Moreover, early caregiving experiences continued to predict individuals' academic, but not social, functioning after accounting for early socioeconomic factors as well as children's gender and ethnicity. Although families' economic resources were important predictors of children's development, these variables didn't fully account for the persistent and long-term influence of early caregiving experiences on individuals' academic success.

 

"Altogether, the study suggests that children's experiences with parents during the first few years of life have a unique role in promoting social and academic functioning--not merely during the first two decades of life, but also during adulthood," according to Raby. "This suggests that investments in early parent-child relationships may result in long-term returns that accumulate across individuals' lives. Because individuals' success in relationships and academics represents the foundation for a healthy society, programs and initiatives that equip parents to interact with their children in a sensitive manner during the first few years of their children's life can have long-term benefits for individuals, families, and society at large."

 

·         The Uncertain Legal Basis for the New Kinship

This article from Family studies addresses the legal regime that affects donor-conceived family communities. It shows how these new relationships both reinforce and complicate the social, cultural, and economic meanings of family, where the law fits into all of these relationships, and why—based on the strong interests and emotional connections between members of these new communities—we might consider broader legal protections. It provides a typology of legal approaches to these new familial relationships created through donor conception.

 

·         Are Americans Becoming Less Secure?

We were intrigued by this from Science of Relationships. We’ve written extensively about attachment styles in romantic relationships (for example, read here and here for more on this topic). In a nutshell, people who are anxious tend to intensely desire connections with other people and are worried that their partners will abandon them whereas those who are avoidant tend to be wary of closeness to others and often feel that their partners want to be closer to them than they would like. Anxiety and avoidance are forms of insecure attachment, and those who do not have these characteristics have a secure attachment.

 

Research on attachment styles in romantic relationships began in the late 1980s; more than 25 years of research on the topic has shown the importance of attachment for many aspects of relationship functioning. And now with two decades of data on attachment researchers can ask, and answer, interesting questions about whether adult attachment styles have changed at the population-level over time. In other words, have American young adults become more or less secure since the late-1980s?

 

In a recent meta-analysis (read more about meta-analysis here), researchers combined data from 94 different samples, involving more than 25,000 American undergraduate students, collected between 1988 and 2011. In 1988, 49% of people said they had a secure attachment style (51% were insecure in one form or another). By 2011 there was a 7% decline in security, with 42% reporting that they were secure (vs. 58% insecure).

 

While this research shows a downward trend in attachment security, it doesn’t indicate why security may be declining. The authors speculate that changes in parenting styles (since attachment is thought to arise from interactions with parents), media content and consumption, or economic uncertainty may be related to this change; however, these explanations are still speculative since they have not been empirically tested.

 

·         Hugs help protect against stress, infection, say researchers

Instead of an apple, could a hug-a-day keep the doctor away? According to new research from Carnegie Mellon University, that may not be that far-fetched of an idea reports Science Daily.

 

Led by Sheldon Cohen, the Robert E. Doherty University Professor of Psychology in CMU's Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the researchers tested whether hugs act as a form of social support, protecting stressed people from getting sick. Published in Psychological Science, they found that greater social support and more frequent hugs protected people from the increased susceptibility to infection associated with being stressed and resulted in less severe illness symptoms.

 

Cohen and his team chose to study hugging as an example of social support because hugs are typically a marker of having a more intimate and close relationship with another person.

 

"We know that people experiencing ongoing conflicts with others are less able to fight off cold viruses. We also know that people who report having social support are partly protected from the effects of stress on psychological states, such as depression and anxiety," said Cohen. "We tested whether perceptions of social support are equally effective in protecting us from stress-induced susceptibility to infection and also whether receiving hugs might partially account for those feelings of support and themselves protect a person against infection."

 

In 404 healthy adults, perceived support was assessed by a questionnaire, and frequencies of interpersonal conflicts and receiving hugs were derived from telephone interviews conducted on 14 consecutive evenings. Then, the participants were intentionally exposed to a common cold virus and monitored in quarantine to assess infection and signs of illness.

 

The results showed that perceived social support reduced the risk of infection associated with experiencing conflicts. Hugs were responsible for one-third of the protective effect of social support. Among infected participants, greater perceived social support and more frequent hugs both resulted in less severe illness symptoms whether or not they experienced conflicts.

 

"This suggests that being hugged by a trusted person may act as an effective means of conveying support and that increasing the frequency of hugs might be an effective means of reducing the deleterious effects of stress," Cohen said. "The apparent protective effect of hugs may be attributable to the physical contact itself or to hugging being a behavioural indicator of support and intimacy." Cohen added, "Either way, those who receive more hugs are somewhat more protected from infection."

 

Overseas News

·         Hungarian victory at UN

On Friday, December 5, CitizenGO joined Hungary at the United Nations to sponsor the Political Network for Values' Transatlantic Summit on the role of the family in sustainable global development!

 

Mr. Zoltan Balog, the Hungarian Minister for Human Capacities, told participants that "family is the most important national resource of Hungary.” He said that the Hungarian constitution is committed to marriage between one man and one woman, since it is the best structure for children. Mr. Balog also told the Summit that Hungary is working to defend the personhood of all human beings, from the moment of conception. He quoted from the new Hungarian constitution, which says: "Human dignity shall be inviolable. The foetus shall be protected from the moment of conception."

 

This was a major international victory, as we were able to join Hungary in bringing together so many policy-makers who support family and life! It was a breath-taking success! More than 60 parliamentarians from 20 countries in Africa, South America, North America, and Europe came together to sign the "Declaration on the Rights of the Family," which affirms that "family is the natural and fundamental unit of society” and that "everyone has the inherent right to life, commencing from the moment of conception until natural death.”

 

Partner News

·         Men and early labour: study seeks participants

What was it like being with your partner in the first few hours of her labour? asks the Fatherhood Institute

 

Fathers are often the main support for women during the first hours of labour when they are typically advised to stay at home.  Research shows that this can be a difficult time for some women but we know much less about men’s experiences. A researcher at the University of Nottingham is studying ‘Men, Masculinity and Early Labour’, and is looking for men to take part in research interviews and focus groups and to share their experiences of being with their partner in early labour.

·         Is your youngest child 3 months old or younger?

·         Were you with your partner in the first hours of her labour?

·         Did your partner’s labour start spontaneously? (she was not induced)

·         Was the birth in a hospital or birth centre? (not a planned home birth)

 

If your answer is ‘yes’ to all these questions, Dr Julie Roberts would love to hear from you. You can contact her to find out how to take part, or just for more information about the study, by telephone on 0115 8230243 or by email at Julie.roberts@nottingham.ac.uk .

 

New Books, Resources and materials

·         Relationship education programmes for adults: a policy briefing from the Relationships Alliance

Not sure if this is new, but we only just found it (thanks to Bill Coffin in the US!) Anyway, since the briefing actually cites work by 2-in-2-1 we thought it really ought to be here!! Below is just the opening section, so to read in full click on the link as ever!

 

“Relationship education programmes form a key element of the framework of relationship support (see diagram) which the Relationships Alliance has described in separate publications. Such interventions sit “alongside interventions at key stress points in people’s lives and more commonly known specialist interventions like counselling that seek to protect people at times of identified relationship distress.”

 

The Relationships Alliance has explored elsewhere a number of activities – including those which promote relational capability through skills, training and information (Meier, 2014) ((Coleman and Stoilova, 2014)) – which comprise this part of the relationships support framework.

 

This briefing therefore focuses on relationship education programmes for adults as an area of the relationship support framework which this set of briefings has hitherto not explored.”

 

Forthcoming conferences and events

·         Forthcoming conferences

Details of all forthcoming conferences can always be found under our listing at 2-in-2-1

 

Consultations and Campaigns

Below is our running list of current and recent consultations and campaigns. New items or those requiring action are highlighted. The Reference numbers are to the newsletter where we covered the subject.

 

·         Commission consultation on offences against the person

The Law Commission is conducting a scoping consultation, exploring the options for reforming the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. It asks whether a new statute should include a new offence of minor injury and a dedicated offence to tackle domestic violence.

 

In respect of domestic violence the scoping paper asks (at para 5.144 et seq) whether consultees consider that there is benefit in examining whether reform of offences against the person should include specific offences of domestic violence. The paper sets out arguments for and against the establishment of new offences.

 

Closing date 11th February 2015

Soap Box!!

·         One small baby…

OK – presents bought, larder stuffed with food, tree up and decorated – must be nearly time for Christmas!

 

About 2000 years ago the birth of a small baby to an unmarried mother marked the start of a movement that has spread to every part of the globe, has shaped our calendar, and yes, is marked with some peculiarly materialistic habits. Amazing what one birth can do!

 

As we draw to a close on this year’s news it is interesting to me that there are at least two articles above charting the impact that parents have on the next generation – first is the paper which notes "The study indicates that the quality of children's early caregiving experiences has an enduring and ongoing role in promoting successful social and academic development into the years of maturity." The second is the research that shows that in just under a quarter of a century US adults reporting ‘secure attachment’ has fallen from 49% to 42% - that is a very rapid change.

 

The relationships we form as adults have a profound effect on the life chances of the children we bear; and embedded in those life chances is the capability (or otherwise) in turn to form secure and well founded relationships as the next generation of parents.

 

If we want to understand why it seems that on average adults are now less likely to enjoy stable couple relationships, we may well have to look no further than the declining proportion of adults who now enjoy the fruits of secure attachment as children – we have bred (probably through three generations now) a whole cohort of people who are the victims of parenting that has left them permanently relationally scarred.

 

Almost every reader here will have their own stories and experiences of the challenges of trying to stem this growing tide, and we salute your efforts (even if we don’t always agree with the means!).

 

In 2015 no doubt we will rail against the darkness some more, cheer on those chinks of light, and generally do our best to keep you informed and thinking about how to reverse this huge trend.

 

And let’s remember who the true beneficiaries of each life we are able to touch really are – the generation of children as yet not even conceived who deserve the chance to grow up with their two natural parents in an environment marked by love, commitment and stability where they will develop the patterns of secure attachment.

 

Every one of those young lives has the possibility that they may truly change the world – just as one small baby did 2000 years ago.

 

Celebrity, Human and Fun stuff

·         A Politically Correct 'Merry Christmas'

As this is our final email for the year, we bring you this ‘POLITICALLY CORRECT’ Christmas Greeting from our friends at Families First in NZ (with their tongues firmly in their cheeks) ...

 

“Best wishes to you for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, politically correct, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the summer holidays, practiced within the most joyous traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, but with respect for the religious persuasion of others who choose to practice their own religion as well as those who choose not to practice a religion at all.

 

Additionally, we wish you a financially successful, personally fulfilling, and medically uncomplicated recognition of the generally accepted calendar year 2015, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures or sects, and having regard to the race, gender, religion, age, marital status, disability or impairment, sexual preference, family responsibilities, status as a carer, political beliefs or gender status.

 

(Disclaimer: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and no responsibility for any unintended emotional stress these greetings may bring to those not caught up in the holiday spirit. Any references in this greeting to “The Lord”, “Father Christmas”, “Our Saviour”, “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” or any other festive figures, whether actual or fictitious, dead or alive, shall not imply any endorsement by or from them in respect of this greeting.)”

 

All of which we think is a really fitting end to this year’s newsletters!

 

Huge thank to all of you for reading, occasionally commenting, even more occasionally correcting or complaining, oh and also for your financial contributions!!

 

Have a peaceful and blessed Christmas – and we’ll be back as ever on 5^th Jan 2015 to start the process of delivering the next 50 editions!!

 

 

Best wishes,

The 2-in-2-1 Team

 

Technical Stuff

 

Keep us informed - Do keep us posted on your news, and in particular please let us know details of your project(s), either present or planned.  Either post it at the forum, or e-mail us and we'll put it out there for you.

 

Subscribe  - If this email has been passed on to you by a friend, you can request your own copy by replying to this email with 'subscribe' in the subject line and your name in the body of the email and we will then send further information about the UK Marriage News and access to the Forums to the address you reply with.

Unsubscribe - If you have received this message in error, or do not wish to be contacted by 2-in-2-1 using email in the future, please simply reply to this message with 'unsubscribe' on the subject line of your reply.

 

Contribute to costs – Although we don’t charge for the newsletter, we do invite you to contribute to our costs. You can do so online or by sending a cheque made payable to 2-in-2-1 Ltd to 11 Lamborne Close, Sandhurst, Berks, GU47 8JL.

 

Change of Address – If you change e-mail address please let us know! We automatically delete addresses after two weeks of unsuccessful delivery attempts. Simply reply to the Newsletter using your new address with the words change of address in the subject line and we will update your records accordingly.

 

Access the forums - To start using the system for the first time simply go to http://www.2-in-2-1.co.uk/forums/. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see a Login box. Put in your username and password as above and then press the Log in button. You will only need to do this login the first time you visit - from then on the system will recognise you each time you return (unless you use a different computer).

 

This Newsletter is published by 2-in-2-1 Ltd, Company No. 3792423   Registered office:- 11 Lamborne Close, Sandhurst, Berks, GU47 8JL, © 2014. All rights reserved.

 

Welcome to this week’s UK Marriage News – a double edition this week after our Internet problems last week – so a big cup of coffee needed – it’s a long one!

 

Headlines

·         Bleak prospects for teens who never marry, finds The Marriage Foundation

·         For a Lasting Marriage, Try Marrying Someone Your Own Age

·         The next 35 years!

 

Government and Political

·         Bleak prospects for teens who never marry, finds The Marriage Foundation

A report from the think tank dedicated to building stronger families, The Marriage Foundation, has found a stark division between teenagers predicted to marry and those who will never tie the knot. Overall, two thirds of women who get married and have children remain with the father for life. Among women who never marry, just one in ten will avoid splitting from their partner.

 

The huge variance in odds of family breakdown between married and unmarried is even clearer with the younger generation. Far fewer 20 year olds are predicted to marry than the previous generation. Only 52 per cent of 20 year olds will marry compared to 68 per cent of 40 year olds.

 

This is despite the fact 75 per cent of teenagers want to get married at some stage. Of the 52 per cent of 20 year old women predicted to at some stage marry and have children, 34 per cent will have avoided the break-up of their family by their child’s fifteenth birthday. This compares starkly to only 5 per cent of the 48 per cent of 20 year olds who will never marry staying with their partners until their child hit their mid-teens.

 

Author of the Marriage Foundation report, Harry Benson, commented: “This is bleak news for the next generation. Despite the fact that the huge majority of teenagers want to get married, only half will do so. They themselves will miss out of the greater stability marriage provides, but the ramifications will be felt most by their own children, who face high odds of growing up without a mother or father at home. Single parents do an astonishing job, bringing up children single-handedly, but I think few people would choose this situation for themselves or suggest that it is easier for the children. Moreover the process of family breakdown is very damaging for all concerned. Children from broken families are more likely to be involved in truancy, juvenile delinquency, joblessness and depression. Currently family breakdown costs the Exchequer around £46 billion a year. That’s the equivalent to the entire defence budget. I don’t see how the country will afford the steep rise of this bill that this increase of broken families will bring over the next few years.”

 

The previous generation, now in their forties, were much more likely to get married. They have remained in an intact couple throughout their children’s adolescence in far greater numbers. Of the 68 per cent of 40 year olds who have married or will marry at some stage, 45 per cent will still be married to the father when their child completes their GCSE exams. For the 32 per cent of forty year old women who will never marry, only 3 per cent who have children will remain with the father until their child reaches fifteen.

 

Sir Paul Coleridge, Chairman of the Marriage Foundation commented: “I am profoundly saddened looking at these forecast outcomes for the next generation. “Forty years spent working in the family courts has shown me the sheer pain and human suffering of family breakdown for everyone concerned – the children and parents obviously, but also aunts, uncles, grandparents and friends. I fear it will only get worse as fewer and fewer children will know what it is to have stable, married  parents at home as they grow up. We are facing a crisis of confidence in the institution of marriage. We must do something to stem the tide of family breakdown. A boost to the currently pitiful married tax allowance in next month’s Autumn Statement would be a good start.”

 

·         Marriage becoming 'preserve of the wealthy'

Marriage is rapidly becoming the preserve of the wealthy, twice as common among those safely in the top tax bracket as among the least well-off says the Telegraph. Since 2001 those in the top social class, which includes company directors, military officers and university lecturers, have gone from being 24 per cent more likely to be married to 50 per cent more likely, figures from the Office for National Statistics show. By the time they have children, nine in 10 of the wealthiest Britons are married. However, for those on the minimum wage or less, the figure is about half.

 

Last night Christian Guy, director of the Centre for Social Justice said: “Marriage has become a preserve of the better off. That means we have much less stability throughout the population. “We have had a benefits system which says not just don’t get married, but don’t bother getting together. You are better off financially if you live apart. The cost of getting married is also putting people off having a wedding.”

 

He said parents are children are now more likely to be co-habiting than married, which led to less stability and meant children in those relationships were less able to flourish."

 

Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, which obtained the latest figures, said that half of British babies were now born to unmarried parents. “A marriage gap that barely existed a generation or two ago has managed to double in the last decade with a minimum of public debate. Somehow marriage, with all the advantages that it confers, is becoming the preserve of the rich,” he writes.

 

The ONS divides workers into seven social categories. At the bottom comes “routine occupations” such as cleaners, builders and waiters. There is also an eighth category for the long-term unemployed.

 

(See also this comment piece from the Daily Mail which suggests root of problems lie in Welfare State)

 

·         Free relationship counselling for parents to rescue marriages

New parents will be given relationship counselling by health visitors under government plans to instil “basic concepts such as love, compassion and trust” and prevent marriage breakdown, Iain Duncan Smith has said reports the Telegraph. The Work and Pensions Secretary said ministers would next year announce guidance for all health visitors on how to “recognise and respond to the signs of relationship difficulties”. It is part of a drive by Mr Duncan Smith to prevent marriage breakdown and divorce, and give children “the best start in life” by ensuring they are in a “stable family”.

 

Mr Duncan Smith said that since the Coalition was formed, more than 48,000 couples had participated in relationship counselling and nearly 160,000 people had taken up preventative relationship support, which tries to help couples understand what hurdles they may face together. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said health visitors were “well-placed to identify signs of relationship distress and signpost to appropriate support”.

 

“Couples might be reluctant to seek formal support when they first experience relationship difficulties but may approach trusted professionals they are already working with such as health visitors,” a source said.

 

Mr Duncan Smith hailed the Government’s “social justice” reforms in a speech on Tuesday. “For too long, family breakdown, debt, educational failure, addiction and worklessness have been carried as intractable problems,” he said. “Working together, social justice breaks this illusion, instilling basic concepts such as love, compassion and trust. Above all, it is underpinned by the belief that no one is beyond our reach and that no one should be written off.”

 

In a report released on Tuesday, the DWP said the Coalition wanted to ensure it was supporting “sustainable and healthy parental relationships”. “We have re-established families as a vital priority for this Government and signalled our commitment to strong and stable relationships. Through the breadth of support available we will do all we can to support sustainable and healthy parental relationships, and to help parents give their children the best start,” it said.

 

As well as the health visitors giving counselling, all antenatal services will include relationship advice on the potential stresses of having children. “Achieving meaningful change in this area is no small task,” the DWP report said. “The causes of relationship breakdown are complex, and the decline in the stability of family relationships over the last four decades is the result in part of changing demographics, and long-term economic and social trends. “However, given the role that stable families play in giving children the best start in life, government cannot ignore the implications of family breakdown, and has an important role to play in supporting strong and stable family relationships.”

 

·         Key online safety vote likely in the Lords this week

The current self-regulatory approach to protecting children on-line is not working.  Baroness Howe of Idlicote has tabled an amendment to the Consumer Rights Bill, based on her Online Safety Bill, which addresses the current failings.  The amendment is hugely important.  The key issues addressed by this amendment are outlined at safeonline.org.uk which has been produced by Mediawatch-UK. 

 

You may also be interested to read a speech given this week by Baroness Howe in which she raised some of her concerns about the protection of children online and urges the Government to take action.

 

·         £19 million support fund set up for adoptive families

The Department for Education has established a £19 million support fund for adoptive families reports Family Law Week. The new funding will be available to help adoptive families across the country settle their children into their new home. The Adoption Support Fund – to be rolled out nationwide from May 2015 after pilots across 10 councils – will help pay for essential therapy services for adoptive families as and when they need it.

 

The DfE says that many adopted children have experienced difficult and traumatic experiences before being placed with their adoptive family, which can prevent them from settling into their new home and can create difficulties at particular stages such as adolescence. Services such as behavioural therapy, play and music therapy, and family support sessions can help children come to terms with their difficulties, giving them the confidence to build strong relationships with their new family.

 

Minister for Children and Families Edward Timpson said: "I know as much as anyone that children adopted from care have often lived through terrible experiences which do not just simply disappear overnight once they have settled with their new families. The new Adoption Support Fund will be a vital lifeline for many adoptive families, helping them to access specialist support services when their family needs them most. I also hope today's news reassures all adoptive families, from those who have been adopting for years to those just at the beginning of the journey, that if challenges do arise they will not be left on their own to muddle through – support will be there every step of the way."

 

Support from the fund will be available after the adoption court order and can be used to purchase services from the private and voluntary sector, as well as councils and Child and Adult Mental Health Services (CAMHS). The government will fully fund the Adoption Support Fund in the first year, whilst committing in the long term to the pot being jointly funded by councils and government.

 

Hugh Thornbery, CEO of Adoption UK and Chair of the Adoption Support Fund Expert Advisory Group, said: “Adoption UK welcomes the minister's announcement of the rollout of the Adoption Support Fund from 1 May 2015. We are pleased that the government has risen to the challenge and we are now in a position where we better understand and can meet the challenges faced by adoptive families. Because of their early childhood experiences, many adopted children may have additional needs. The role adoptive parents play in re-parenting these vulnerable children is massively important."

 

Research and Public Opinion

·         For a Lasting Marriage, Try Marrying Someone Your Own Age

There are many predictors of the success of a marriage, among them the having of money, the having of children, and the length of time a couple spends dating before they tie the knot says the Atlantic. Another big predictor, though, is age: The closer a couple is when it comes to their respective birth years, the greater their chances of avoiding divorce.

 

That's according to a study that compiled polling data from more than 3,000 recently married and divorced Americans. The study used a multivariate model to calculate the factors that seemed to best predict the marriage's chances of success. (Or, at any rate, its chances of not ending in divorce.) Its results were visualized by the data scientist Randy Olson, who created a series of charts to illustrate the study's findings. Today, Olson released another set of visuals—the most intriguing of which focuses on the matter of the age gap. A one-year discrepancy in a couple's ages, the study found, makes them 3 percent more likely to divorce (when compared to their same-aged counterparts); a 5-year difference, however, makes them 18 percent more likely to split up. And a 10-year difference makes them 39 percent more likely.

 

Once you enter large-gap territory—the 20-year difference, the 30-year difference—the odds of divorce are ... almost never in your favour.

 

If your partner happens to be 15 years older or younger than you are, that's not automatically a bad omen: Statistics, of course, are not destiny. But, as predictors, the study's findings stand to reason. Marriage is, above all, about 50-50 partnership; differences in ages also mean differences in life experience and cultural reference points. Generations may be an invention, but they are meaningful nonetheless. So, with all the necessary caveats about love's vagaries and mysteries, if you want a marriage that lasts, you should probably try to marry someone your own age.

·         Is your relationship moving toward marriage? If it isn't, you probably can't admit it

Dating couples who have moved toward marriage over the course of their relationship remember accurately what was going on at each stage of their deepening commitment. But couples whose commitment to each other has stagnated or regressed are far less accurate in their memories of their relationships, says a new University of Illinois study reports Science Daily.

 

"People like to feel that they're making progress as a couple. If they're not - if, in fact, the relationship is in trouble - they may have distorted recollections that help them feel like they're moving forward because they need a psychological justification to stay in the relationship," said Brian G. Ogolsky, a U of I professor of human development and family studies.

 

The researchers expected to find some distortion in romantic partners' memories. "One theory was that recollections might be higher across the board because people like to remember the best possible course of their relationships. But, as we looked at couples' actual experiences and compared relationships that were developing in a positive direction with those that were not, we saw that the accuracy of their memories diverged rather sharply. It's fascinating how memory works in couples," he noted.

 

Ogolsky said that both findings - that highly committed people remember their relationship history accurately and that couples in trouble don't - are important. "When a couple is considering making a lifelong commitment, they have a lot at stake. It's important that they have accurate recollections of how their relationship evolved," Ogolsky said. But, if a couple's relationship is undergoing a slow and painful death, it no longer serves their purpose to remember the course of the romance accurately. To avoid constant disappointment, they misremember how things are going, he noted.

 

The nine-month study followed 232 never-married heterosexual couples who had dated for just over two years on average. Each member of the couple reported on their chances of marrying, being careful to take their partner's views into consideration. Each month, participants rated their chances of marriage from 0 to 100 percent, and researchers plotted a graph from the results. At the end of the study, participants reflected on their entire relationship to see how their recollections matched up with reality.

 

The researchers looked at the actual and remembered trajectories of three groups: advancers, who had gone on to a deeper state of involvement; maintainers, who may have been casually dating at both the beginning and the end of the study; and regressers, who had reverted from serious to casual dating or had broken up and gotten back together again. "Couples who had deepened their commitment remembered their relationship history almost perfectly. The graphs for this group were really interesting because the plot of the end-of-study recollection could be placed right on top of the one we had graphed from the monthly check-ins," Ogolsky said.

 

Maintainers recalled their relationship as being lower at the beginning than they had reported yet higher at the end. "They had given themselves some room to grow and remembered the recent past as better than they had reported it being. If they saw maintenance as stagnation, that's a way of addressing that cognitive gap. It helps them feel that their relationship is developing in some way -- that they're making progress," he noted.

 

The most interesting group was the regressers, Ogolsky said. "If we looked at their history as they reported it to us over the nine-month period, we could see that their chances of marriage were plummeting. Yet their recollection was that things had been going okay. Of course, they hadn't seen the graph so they didn't know their trajectory looks this dire, but it's fair to say they were in denial about the state of their relationship."

 

·         A fifth of over-50s say they married the wrong person... and one in ten put falling in love again on their bucket list

Almost a fifth of over-50s think they married the wrong person - more than chose the wrong career or didn't spend enough time with their children reports the Daily Mail. Picking the wrong spouse has been exposed as one of Britons' biggest regrets in a new survey on the silent traumas of empty-nesters. It was the third most common, beaten only by the number of people who wished they had seen more of the world (23 per cent) or saved more for retirement (19 per cent). But there is some hope - as almost half of those questioned (45 per cent) feel more youthful than their parents' generation was, and 12 per cent have 'falling in love again' on their bucket list.

 

The online survey, which quizzed 1,000 people over 50 about their top ten regrets, did not reveal how many of the respondents were still with their spouses. Some regrets were heavily laden with emotion - 17 per cent said they never told their parents how much they meant to them, while 15 per cent did not spend enough time with their children or worried too much about what others thought. Others were more predictable. A sixth of the participants (16 per cent) chose the wrong career and another 16 per cent spent too much of their lives at work. Another sixth (15 per cent) wished they had learned to play a musical instrument, or wanted to ask their grandparents more about life before they died.

 

The over-50s' bucket lists, meanwhile, read like a travel brochure of one's dreams. The top ten responses included cruising the world, living abroad, flying first class, swimming with dolphins and going on safari in Africa. There are some more heartfelt ambitions too, however - a tenth of over-50s still want to publish their first novel, and 14 per cent are yearning for grandchildren.

 

Martin Lock, chief executive of lifestyle website Silversurfers, which commissioned the study, said the lack of saving for pensions was worrying. 'The over 50s have reached a point where they feel more confident about themselves,' he said. 'However, our research shows they may not have the money to really enjoy these years.'

 

·         High-fliers can afford more babies, study says

Highly educated women are having more children than those who left education earlier because they can afford child care and household help, a new study suggests reports the Telegraph. In previous generations women with university degrees tended to have fewer children because they pursued careers and put off starting a family for longer.

 

But a new study suggests that women at the top of the ladder are now earning so much money that they can afford enough help to have more children, even if they continue their careers.

 

Economists Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi, of Tel Aviv University, Israel, found that while fertility rates among American women with some form of college education have largely stagnated over the last 30 years, among women with advanced degrees they have risen by more than 50 per cent . American women without any form of high-school diploma have a fertility rate of 2.24 children. Among women with a high-school diploma the fertility rate falls to 2.09 and for women with some form of college education it drops to 1.78.

 

However, among women with college degrees, the economists found the fertility rate rises to 1.88 and among women with advanced degrees to 1.96. In 1980 women who had studied for 16 years or more had a fertility rate of just 1.2.

 

Hazan said highly educated women were more likely to be able to afford help that allowed them to raise larger-than-average families. "You have a nanny, people to pick up your laundry and suits, buy you food from the local store for you to cook for dinner, and you can leave all the mess to the housekeeper in the morning," he said.

 

Although the research was carried out in the US, the team said it was likely to apply to the UK where income inequality between the richest and poorest is growing. Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of Netmums, the UK online forum, said many women hope to have a third child but cannot afford it. "It's the women who have good careers, who can afford a cleaner and a nanny who take the stress out of their lives, who can have three children,” she said.

 

Ms Freegard said that the cost of childcare was so high in Britain that large families were unachievable. The researchers also speculate that highly educated women are increasingly benefiting from advances in fertility treatment that enable them to spend more years at university without reducing their chances of future parenthood. And there is already evidence that employers are becoming aware that paying for such technology could help them attract employees. Apple and Facebook are offering to freeze eggs for female employees in an effort to attract more women on to their staff.

 

The research was published in the Economic Journal.

 

·         Bad marriage, broken heart?

Older couples in a bad marriage - particularly female spouses - have a higher risk for heart disease than those in a good marriage, finds the first nationally representative study of its kind reports Science Daily. The findings suggest the need for marriage counselling and programs aimed at promoting marital quality and well-being for couples into their 70s and 80s, said lead investigator Hui Liu, a Michigan State University sociologist.

 

"Marriage counselling is focused largely on younger couples," said Liu, associate professor of sociology. "But these results show that marital quality is just as important at older ages, even when the couple has been married 40 or 50 years."

 

The study, funded by the National Institute of Aging, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, is published online in the Journal of Health and Social Behaviour. Liu analyzed five years of data from about 1,200 married men and women who participated the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project. Respondents were aged 57-85 at the beginning of the study. The project included survey questions about marital quality, and lab tests and self-reported measures of cardiovascular health such as heart attacks, strokes, hypertension and high levels of C-reactive protein in the blood.

 

Liu set out to learn how marital quality is related to risk of heart disease over time, and whether this relationship varies by gender and/or age. Among her findings:

·         Negative martial quality (e.g., spouse criticizes, spouse is demanding) has a bigger effect on heart health than positive marital quality (e.g., spousal support). In other words, a bad marriage is more harmful to your heart health than a good marriage is beneficial.

·         The effect of marital quality on cardiovascular risk becomes much stronger at older ages. Over time, the stress from a bad marriage may stimulate more, and more intense, cardiovascular responses because of the declining immune function and increasing frailty that typically develop in old age, Liu said.

·         Marital quality has a bigger effect on women's heart health than it does on men's, possibly because women tend to internalize negative feelings and thus are more likely to feel depressed and develop cardiovascular problems, Liu said.

·         Heart disease leads to a decline in marital quality for women, but not for men. This is consistent with the longstanding observation that wives are more likely to provide support and care to sick husbands, while husbands are less likely to take care of sick wives. "In this way, a wife's poor health may affect how she assesses her marital quality, but a husband's poor health doesn't hurt his view of marriage," Liu said.

·         Children of divorce 'more likely to drink, fail exams, develop eating disorders and do drugs'

Children of divorced parents are more likely to get bad exam results, drink, take drugs and develop eating disorders, a survey has shown reports the Daily Mail. Nearly two thirds of children who saw the break-up of their families claimed it had a negative effect on their GCSEs. One in eight said they had used drugs or alcohol and almost a third said they ate more or less as a result.

 

The survey – commissioned by Resolution, a group that represents 6,500 family lawyers in England and Wales – looked at the experiences of 500 young people aged 14 to 22. Resolution chairman Jo Edwards told the Times that the study had revealed just how far-reaching the impact of divorce can be. She said: ‘The findings underline just how important it is that parents going through a split manage their separation in a way that minimises the stress and impact on the entire family.’ Each year, around 100,000 under-16s see their parents break-up. Many suffer long-term effects associated with the pressure the divorce process puts on them.

 

Of those surveyed, a third said that one parent had tried to turn them against the other parent and more than 25 per cent said they had been dragged into their parents’ arguments. Schooling is also adversely affected as children struggle to complete their homework. Around 12 per cent admitted skipping lessons and 11 per cent found themselves increasingly in trouble with teachers as a result of a change in family circumstances.

 

Siôn Humphreys, a senior policy adviser at the National Association of Head Teachers, said that education was suffering because teachers are not trained to deal with the problem. She told the Times: ‘Teachers see day in, day out, the impact separation can have. ‘It would not be unusual for the school to be the first port of call to support the parent left holding the baby, but it is not necessarily something teachers are specially trained for.’

 

Last month, EU statistics for 2012 revealed that British children are more likely to be from single-parent families than anywhere else in Western Europe. One in four now live with a lone mother or father, compared with around one in six across the EU. The only EU country with a higher figure than Britain was the eastern state of Latvia. We are now ahead of Belgium, Denmark, Ireland and France, where the number of youngsters living with just one parent is dropping – or rising more slowly.

 

Harry Benson, of the Marriage Foundation, has urged policy-makers to take ‘essential’ steps in limiting the ‘host of negative social and economic implications’ of divorce.

 

According to Harry Benson, Research Director of Marriage Foundation, the worst effects tend to occur where there was less conflict before the separation and more transitions afterwards. 

 

“Where marriages are abusive or downright unpleasant, children are often better off out. But the worst effects of divorce – according to research – are felt by children whose parents didn’t argue much before the separation. ‘Mummy and daddy don’t love each other’ makes no sense to a child because it comes out of the blue. Children then internalise the reason as being down to them or to the unpredictable nature of relationships. This can then go on to affect their own relationships in adult life.

 

“The other factor that damages children is the number of transitions experienced post-divorce. New partners, new homes, new schools, all cause disruption and confusion. Children not in either of these categories are much more likely to cope. 

 

Research by Marriage Foundation shows that half of all family breakdown comes from parents who are not married. “For all the talk of divorce, it’s vital to remember married for life remains the norm” says Benson. “For couples who don’t marry, it’s the exception.”

 

·         One in thirty divorcees admit to sleeping with their ex

One in five divorcees in England and Wales wish they had never got divorced from their ex and 1 in 30 admit to having slept with their ex after the divorce had been finalised according to a  study of 2,500 users of one of the UK’s largest divorce providers divorce-online.co.uk.

 

The survey found that many people admitted to sleeping with their ex after the divorce had been concluded and even more astonishing was that a significant proportion had been in a new relationship when they decided to roll back the years and sleep with their ex.

·         1 in 30 of that then further admitted that they had slept with their ex after divorcing each other.

·         1 in 10 of those who had slept with their ex while they were in a new relationship.

 

Survey questions:

·         Do you regret splitting up with your ex-spouse?

·         Have you had sexual relations with your spouse since divorcing?

·         Have you had sexual relations with your ex-spouse whilst in a new relationship?

 

Where respondents to the survey had indicated they had slept with their ex, the 3 most common reasons given, in order were.

1.       Loneliness

2.       Missed having sexual relations

3.       They wanted to get back at their new partner Loneliness and wanting to get back at a new partner were more common among women whereas men indicated that they missed having sex.

 

·         Could parenting coaching for expectant couples deliver healthier babies?

Stress and depression in pregnant women are linked to poor birth outcomes and a variety of long-term medical and developmental problems in children says Prevention Action. Typical interventions focus on treating the mother’s stress, and leave the father out of the picture. But a program that takes a different approach – aiming to improve the parents’ relationship and co-parenting abilities – shows encouraging results.

 

High stress levels during pregnancy pose a risk for babies because high levels of the stress hormone cortisol are linked to early labour. Early labour, in turn, can produce other difficulties, such as low birth weight and complications that require longer hospital stays.

 

Could a program “designed to prepare couples to enter parenthood together in a supportive manner” help improve birth outcomes? A recent study of the Family Foundations program found that the program did not improve average outcomes among a group of relatively advantaged couples. But women who started the program with high levels of stress saw better outcomes for their children at birth than a comparison group – suggesting that couples’ coaching could be an effective route to healthier births for an important subgroup of women.

 

Some other recent studies have found that therapies to improve pregnant women’s mental health result in better birth outcomes. Most of these focus exclusively on the women with programs like yoga, massage therapy, and cognitive behavioural therapy. But, as the program’s designer and co-authors point out, a major influence on mental health is the relationship with the partner. The team believed that a program designed to foster long-term positive parenting relationships between prospective mothers and fathers might also improve birth outcomes by lowering the mother’s stress levels.

 

Family Foundations, created by Mark Feinberg from Penn State University, consists of nine classes teaching co-parenting approaches, starting before the child’s birth and finishing soon after. Topics included problem-solving, emotion and conflict management, communication, and joint parenting support strategies.

 

This study involved 169 couples, aged over 18, living together and expecting their first child. Couples were randomly assigned to the intervention or to a control group. Participants in the control group received information on developmental stages and selecting quality childcare. Mothers were assessed at around 22 weeks pregnant. Cortisol saliva levels were taken and mothers were interviewed about how often they used drugs, tobacco and alcohol. After the intervention, parents sent back questionnaires and follow-up tests for mothers took place at six months, one year and three years from the child’s birth date.

 

Overall, intervention group participants were found to have more positive birth outcomes on some measures, although the differences between groups were mostly not statistically significant. The most notable average difference between the groups was that women in the intervention group were, on average, less likely to need a C-section.

 

The most intriguing results, however, come from comparing the effects of the program for women with different pre-natal cortisol levels. Among women with low pre-natal cortisol, there was little difference between control and intervention groups. But among women with high pre-natal cortisol, the difference was much more noticeable. Women with higher initial levels of cortisol who were in the program reported better birth weight, gestational age at birth, and length of newborn hospital stay than their counterparts in the control group.

 

This suggests that programs that teach first-time expectant couples how to parent together may reduce poor birth outcomes by lowering stress levels in mothers-to-be – at least for mothers who start out with high levels of stress.

 

By focusing on couples rather than mothers alone, Family Foundations aims to promote the importance of the roles of both mothers and fathers in bringing up children. Good relationships between parents are linked to better child outcomes up to the age of at least six years. The authors also speculate that co-parenting strategies might help keep fathers engaged in their children’s life long-term in the event of the relationship with the mother breaking down.

 

The authors acknowledge that their research has some limitations. Most importantly, data on the mothers’ psychological health changes were collected six months after delivery, and not during pregnancy. As such, it is unclear if reductions in mothers’ stress occurred during pregnancy as a result of the intervention. A second limitation is that this study is led by the program’s founder. In the long term, it will also be useful to see the results of independent program evaluations.

 

·         The Family Environment and Adolescent Well-Being

Adolescence is an important developmental phase along the path to adulthood, years during which youth become increasingly independent from their families reports Child Trends in the US. Yet parents and other family members still play a critical role in the promotion of adolescents’ well-being, by providing a positive support system within which youth can explore their changing identity.

 

There were 25 million children aged 12 to 17 in the United States in 2013, living in diverse family environments. An estimated 66 percent of adolescents live with both parents (biological, step, or adoptive), 25 percent are in single-mother households, while only 5 percent live with a single father. Just over 40 percent of all adolescents and as many as 60 percent of black and Hispanic adolescents live in low-income families. Overall, 21 percent of adolescents are Hispanic, 56 percent are white, non-Hispanic, and 15 percent are black, non-Hispanic.

 

In this brief, we update the findings from the 2006 publication, The Family Environment and Adolescent Well-being: Exposure to Positive and Negative Family Influences, and highlight several key areas of interaction between the family environment and adolescent well-being, using national data sources.

 

Key findings:

·         65 percent of adolescents have parents who say they can communicate very well with their child about things that really matter.

·         Less than half of adolescents eat meals with their families at least six nights a week, although it is more common among poor families, Hispanic families, and first- or second-generation immigrant families.

·         Smoking is more common among single parents (26 percent smoke) than parents in two-parent families (16 percent), particularly among Hispanic families and those with incomes at or above poverty.

·         Over 80 percent of adolescents with parents who are married or partnered have parents who report high levels of happiness in their spousal or partner relationship.

·         Less than a quarter of adolescents have parents who say they only know a few or even none of their child’s friends.

·         Almost all 10th-graders (90 percent) say their parents know where they are after school. About 65 percent of parents are light drinkers; however, 10 percent of single fathers report being heavy drinkers, compared with less than 5 percent of mothers or married fathers. Half of parents in two-parent families and less than 40 percent of single parents exercise vigorously at least once a week.

 

·         Parents who regularly kiss are 'less likely to shout at their children and more attentive' than couples who have tensions

Parents who regularly kiss each other and have shared interests are more likely to praise their children, new research shows reports the Daily Mail.  A study of 5,000 families has shown couples who feel they have a high level of 'bliss' and kiss each other often are likely to be better parents.

 

Experts say the study confirms that a fulfilled love life leads to more successful parenting and helps reveal what makes a 'good' father. When both men and women consider themselves in a blissful relationship they were seen to praise their children more often instead of shouting at them. Frequent kissing, spending time enjoying shared interests and a sense of general satisfaction all contributed to a blissful relationship.

 

Unsurprisingly, parents who often considered divorce, got on each other's nerves, argued frequently and regretted forming their relationship were more likely to shout at their children.

 

The study also revealed men were more optimistic about the state of their relationships than women. Men were more likely to say they were 'very happy' in the relationship (69 per cent) than women (65 percent). And only 37 per cent of women said their partner 'rarely or never' got on their nerves, compared to 43 per cent of men.

 

The research was undertaken by NatCen Social Research, the University of East Anglia and the Thomas Coram Research Unit as part of broader study on fatherhood. Dr Svetlana Speight, of NatCen Social Research, told the Daily Telegraph the research showed 'happy mums and dads' made for better parents. She said: 'It's really important to understand what makes dads good dads and it's clear from this analysis that love-life fulfilment is a big part of this.'

 

And Professor Margaret O'Brien, from the Institute of Education in London, said: 'Clearly, this research shows that fulfilled individuals within a loving relationship are more successful at raising their children.'

 

·         Social Influence and Teen Sex: What Matters and What Doesn’t

American parents often worry that their adolescent children are susceptible to their friends’ influence and will be pressured into having sex before they are ready to do so. Are these worries justified? asks Science of Relationships. Past research has found that social influence is associated with behaviours such as smoking and alcohol use among teenagers. A recent study extended this work and investigated whether three types of social influence predict adolescent sexual behaviour:

 

1. Peer pressure refers to the explicit and direct social pressure to conform with the demands of a particular group to “fit in.” In this case, adolescents might be motivated to have sex (or not) because they think they will be liked better by their friends, or disliked if they don’t conform to the group (i.e., “C’mon, everyone’s doing it”).

 

2. Thinking Your Friends Approve: Injunctive norms are reflected in one’s beliefs about others’ attitudes towards a particular behaviour. For example, an adolescent may believe that their friends approve or disapprove of having sex. The friends are not directly telling the teenager to have sex (that would be peer pressure, see above). Rather, injunctive norms operate indirectly; friends and classmates may simply make it known that they think having sex is okay (or not).

 

3. Thinking Your Friends are Doing It: Descriptive norms refer to what one believes others themselves are doing. If a teenager believes that their peers are having sex, then they may be more likely to also engage in sex as result of role modelling or imitation. Like injunctive norms, it is a less direct form of social influence than explicit peer pressure.

 

So, which of these forms of social influence are most strongly associated with adolescent sex?

 

The research team combined the results from 58 independent studies conducted between 1980 and 2012, including almost 70,000 adolescents from 24 countries, using a statistical technique known as meta-analysis. By combining the results from many studies about a particular topic, the findings generated by a meta-analysis are powerful because they are relatively uninfluenced by statistical aberrations from a single study.

 

Of the three types of social influence, descriptive norms had the largest association with adolescent sexual behaviour. Injunctive norms were the next best predictor of teenage sex, and peer pressure was the weakest. In short, although parents may be worried about the effects of peer pressure on their teenage children, simply knowing about their friends’ and classmates’ own sexual behaviour is likely a much more powerful force for adolescents.

 

·         Sex will soon be just for fun not babies, says father of the Pill

Sex could become purely recreational by 2050 with large numbers of babies in the Western world born through IVF, the professor who invented the contraceptive pill has claimed reports the Telegraph. Prof Carl Djerassi, the Austrian-American chemist and author, said he believes that the Pill will become obsolete because men and women will choose to freeze their eggs and sperm when young before being sterilised. He also claims it will end abortions, as no children will be unplanned or unwanted.

 

In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Djerassi said that advances in fertility treatment made it much safer for parents without fertility problems to consider IVF. The progress will give rise to a ‘Manana generation’ who are safe in the knowledge that parenthood can be delayed without repercussions, he claims. They may even have healthier children because their eggs and sperm would be younger. “The vast majority of women who will choose IVF in the future will be fertile women who have frozen their eggs and delayed pregnancy,” he said. “Women in their twenties will first choose this approach as insurance, providing them with freedom in the light of professional decisions or the absence of the right partner or the inexorably ticking of the biological clock. However I predict that many of these women will in fact decide to be fertilised by IVF methods because of the advances in genetic screening. And once that happens then IVF will start to become a normal non-coital method of having children. Over the next few decades, say by the year 2050, more IVF fertilisations will occur among fertile women than the current five million fertility-impaired ones. For them the separation between sex and reproduction will be 100 per cent.”

 

Prof Djerassi, 91, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, who now lives between London and Vienna, was crucial in the development of the oral contraceptive pill in 1951. They originally created the medication for neurological disorders and to help infertile women. Progesterone, the active ingredient in the Pill, is produced by pregnant women and helps an embryo to implant in the womb. It works as a contraceptive because it tricks the body into thinking it is pregnant, triggering a natural contraceptive response in the body.

 

“But in 1950 nobody was asking about birth control,” he said. “It was just after World War 2 and people needed to have children. However the 60s came and suddenly there was rock n roll and the hippy movement, and the first real flowering of the women’s movement and they all had a sense of sexual liberation. The technology just happened to be around at the right time. If it had taken an extra 15 years to develop I don’t think we would have a contraceptive pill today.”

 

He believes that a male contraceptive pill is unlikely because it would take far too long to prove there would be no impact on sperm quality. Men are able to father children for much longer than women, so trials would need to last decades. Similarly, it is still not clear how long frozen sperm can be kept for. Prof Djerassi believes that the army could take part in a huge experiment to determine the safety of keeping sperm long term.

 

“With little difficulty and relatively minor expenditure tens of thousands of volunteers could collect their own semen to be cryopreserved for many years,” he said. “This step alone would generate an invaluable resource for studies on male fertility.”

 

Fertile male sperm has already been preserved inexpensively for years. Provided one first demonstrated that such storage is possible for several decades rather than just years many young men might consider early vasectomy, as a viable alternative to effective birth control.

 

·         Women who stop taking the Pill can find their partners less attractive

Women may find their partners less attractive if they stop taking the Pill, new research has said reports the Telegraph (and the Guardian). Scientists found that the hormonal contraceptive can unexpectedly alter the way a woman assesses levels of male attractiveness, as well as satisfaction with their partner.

 

The study tested newly married women who were on the Pill when they met their husbands, and subsequently stopped using it. They were found to be more or less happy with their relationship after coming off the oral contraceptive depending on how good-looking their husbands were. So those men whose faces did not conform to objective measures of traditional attractiveness (i.e. they weren’t Benedict Cumberbatch), found their new spouse became less happy with their relationship once they’d come off the Pill.

 

But, those women married to men who were deemed to be classically good-looking, felt more satisfied with their spouse once they stopped taking the oral contraceptive.

 

Researchers followed the progress of 118 newlywed couples over the first four years of their marriage. The women were asked to complete regular surveys to rate their levels of satisfaction with their relationship, and record their use of the Pill. The scientists, who have published their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, also employed ‘trained observers’ to rate and monitor the men’s facial attractiveness.

 

The results show that women who were taking the Pill when they met their spouse – and later stopped – saw a change in how they rated their marriage.

 

Surprisingly, women who altered their use of the Pill during the first four years of marriage reported that their relationships were subsequently less sexually satisfying - regardless of their partner’s appearance. This finding goes against the widely accepted view that a woman’s sex drive falls while she is regularly taking hormonal contraception. They do, however, seemingly support research that the Pill can influence a woman’s receptiveness for male body odour.

 

And they also back-up a 2012 study that found the Pill subconsciously influenced how a woman chooses her partner. Those taking it often chose less-attractive men, who were worse in bed - but the relationships tended to last two years longer than those women who weren't using the hormonal contraceptive.

 

Michelle Russell, a psychologist at Florida State University, said: “Marital satisfaction is strongly associated with mental and physical health and a host of physical, mental and social outcomes for children. “The fact that wives’ hormonal contraceptive use was linked to their marital satisfaction suggests that hormonal contraceptives may have far-reaching implications, both beneficial and harmful.”

 

Faith and Spirituality

·         Rabbi Sacks: Family Is Most Humanizing Institution in History - A Look at 7 Key Moments in the Idea of Love That Brings New Life

Rabbi Jonathan Sachs is a great supporter of marriage evidenced by his frequent and welcomed involvement in Marriage Week events. He addressed the colloquium underway in the Vatican on the complementarity of man and woman. The rabbi's address was titled "The Family is the Single Most Humanising Institution in History." It really is too long to include here, but as an exposition of the Jewish understanding of marriage and family to a Christian audience it is unparalleled – so make a coffee, click this link, and enjoy!

 

Overseas News

·         Ireland to hold referendum on gay marriage

Ireland is to hold a referendum in mid-2015 on whether to allow same-sex marriage, the Republic's government has said reports the Guardian. The decision is a victory for the deputy prime minister, Eamon Gilmore, who has been lobbying for a national vote. The vote will be held as part of a special "constitution day", in which a wide-ranging referendum could result in other changes to the Republic's constitution such as the abolition of blasphemy laws.

 

Before Tuesday's cabinet meeting, Gilmore said he hoped the Fine Gael-Labour government would back moves toward full equality in Ireland. Gilmore, who is leader of the Irish Labour party, said it would be "important to win this referendum".

 

This year the country's constitutional convention – which is charged with examining changes to the constitution – recommended amendments to allow same-sex couples to marry and have the same legal rights as the rest of the population.

 

The minister for public expenditure and reform, Brendan Howlin, said that view was shared by the majority in cabinet, adding: "The Irish people in opinion polls had indicated their support for this issue and should be given the opportunity when practicable to express their views."

 

Two Fine Gael ministers back the referendum. Alan Shatter, the justice minister, brought a memo to cabinet on civil marriage for same-sex couples, while Michael Noonan, the finance minister, said he had no personal objection to legalising gay marriage. But there is concern within Fine Gael that its backbenchers from rural, Catholic constituencies might oppose such moves. The taoiseach, Enda Kenny, has yet to state publicly whether he would back the yes vote.

 

The Catholic church has not announced whether it intends to run a campaign for a no vote. The church hierarchy's temporal power in Ireland has been dramatically diluted during the past decade owing to a series of paedophile priest scandals. Church of Ireland's pro-lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender group, Changing Attitude Ireland, welcomed the referendum and challenged the churches not to oppose it.

 

Dr Richard O'Leary, the chairman of CAI, said: "The government's intention to hold a referendum to extend civil marriage to same-sex couples will facilitate discussion and challenge the ignorance, especially in the churches, of the positive experiences of same-sex relationships. We hope that the Irish churches will embrace the message of inclusion, which is shared by many Christians, and will not oppose the extension of full civil rights to gay and lesbian persons. In particular, we hope that the minority Protestant churches in Ireland will empathise with the minority gay community and support legal equality for all the people of Ireland."

 

Recent opinion polls have shown a consistent majority of the Republic's electorate are in favour of full equality in law for same-sex couples.

 

·         Nicolas Sarkozy calls for repeal of France’s same-sex marriage law

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has told supporters that the country’s same-sex marriage law should be scrapped reports the Guardian. Sarkozy, who is campaigning to lead the opposition centre-right UMP party and is expected to run again for president in 2017, was speaking at a debate organised by the conservative Common Sense (Sens Commun) group on Saturday. Referring to the “mariage pour tous” or “marriage for all” legislation passed by France’s Socialist government last year, he said it needed “rewriting from top to bottom”.

 

His comments, two weeks before the UMP’s hotly contested leadership election, prompted catcalls from the 3,000-strong audience and cries of “Repeal! Repeal!”. Sarkozy, appearing rattled, responded: “If you’d rather one says repeal the law and make another one … in French, that’s saying the same thing. It comes to the same result. But hey, if that makes you happy, then frankly, it doesn’t cost much.”

 

Sarkozy explained he was in favour of some form of marriage for same-sex couples, but something different from that for heterosexuals. He said he opposed surrogate parenthood for same-sex couples.

 

The same-sex marriage legislation is known officially as the Taubira law, named after the justice minister Christiane Taubira who oversaw its introduction. “It’s no use being against surrogacy if you don’t repeal the Taubira law,” Sarkozy said to cheers and applause.

 

The former president, who has been married three times, has previously criticised the legislation, saying it was “humiliating families and humiliating people who love the family”, but it is the first time he has called for its repeal.

 

An Ifop poll published on Saturday found that 68% of respondents supported same-sex unions and 53% supported adoption by same-sex couples. Sarkozy’s comment and apparent policy-making on the hoof brought angry reactions from the governing Socialist party, which accused him of “appealing to the most reactionary instincts of his core supporters”. A spokesperson said Sarkozy wanted to create “a new form of segregation” with his two-tier marriage proposal. The anti-gay marriage group La Manif Pour Tous (Demonstrations for All) cautioned that Sarkozy’s “conversion” to its cause was still only a “declaration of intent”.

 

New Books, Resources and materials

·         Happily ever after

Here is a marriage documentary, Happily Ever After, that you can watch online for free. It features John Gottman and Stephanie Koontz among others and is under 60 minutes. Whenever/wherever you can get a Gottman refresher I suggest you take it -- his salt shaker metaphor, alone, is worth the time - for Marriage Educators or for couples. [With thanks to Diane at Smartmarriages]

 

·         Bringing Fathers In: helping global activists embrace ‘dad power’

The Fatherhood Institute and MenCare are launching a package of practical resources for health, education and social care professionals, policy makers, programme managers and designers, researchers and evaluators.

 

Bringing Fathers In is designed to help professionals from a range of disciplines work in ways that embrace and build on dads’ vital role in improving children’s outcomes. The resources include factsheets on making the most of fathers to support their children’s early learning, support maternal and infant health, and reduce violence in their children’s lives, along with 10 research summaries and evidence-based best practice advice.

 

A strong body of international research suggests that positively involved fathers can have a huge impact on their children in all sorts of ways, contributing towards:

·         better friendships with better-adjusted children

·         fewer behaviour problems

·         lower criminality and substance abuse

·         higher educational achievement

·         greater capacity for empathy

·         higher self-esteem and life-satisfaction.

 

Fatherhood Institute joint chief executive Adrienne Burgess, who led the resources’ development, said efforts to improve children’s outcomes can be boosted significantly by harnessing father-involvement: “Fathers’ impact on health, education and other aspects of wellbeing is enormous, across countries and cultures. Whether a mother has a professionally-attended childbirth, a child’s likelihood of being vaccinated and of making good progress in language development, can depend hugely on fathers’ attitudes and behaviour. By working creatively with men we can harness ‘dad power’ for the good of everyone.”

 

Gary Barker, International Director of Promundo, which leads the Men Care global fatherhood initiative, added: “There is a slow but very real revolution going on in many parts of the world in terms of men’s participation as involved fathers.  These resources are a tremendous asset to the program staff and governments around the world who are working to make equitable caregiving and father involvement a universal reality.”

Forthcoming conferences and events

·         Forthcoming conferences

Details of all forthcoming conferences can always be found under our listing at 2-in-2-1

 

Consultations and Campaigns

Below is our running list of current and recent consultations and campaigns. New items or those requiring action are highlighted. The Reference numbers are to the newsletter where we covered the subject.

 

·         Commission consultation on offences against the person

The Law Commission is conducting a scoping consultation, exploring the options for reforming the Offences Against the Person Act 1861. It asks whether a new statute should include a new offence of minor injury and a dedicated offence to tackle domestic violence.

 

In respect of domestic violence the scoping paper asks (at para 5.144 et seq) whether consultees consider that there is benefit in examining whether reform of offences against the person should include specific offences of domestic violence. The paper sets out arguments for and against the establishment of new offences.

 

Closing date 11th February 2015

 

Soap Box!!

·         The next 35 years

First of all, many thanks to those who sent messages of sympathy at our lack of internet access last week – we did eventually manage to download them!

 

And so this week you have a bumper edition, filled if I’m honest, with more bad news than good I think. And for me I think the saddest article is the one from Prof Carl Djerassi, father of the contraceptive pill, who is predicting that many (presumably well off) couples will, by 2050, prefer to freeze their eggs and sperm at a young age, and have children solely by IVF later in life.  The industrialisation of the conception of children will be complete, and the concept of a child being the ultimate act of creativity of the love of a man and a woman will finally be completely subverted.

 

Of course there will be many ‘benefits’ (sic) of such a system – proper career and family planning and integration; ready genetic screening to remove most inherited diseases; complete flexibility for women in particular to select a suitable genetic male as the father; etc.

 

Perhaps even more terrifying is the timescale he envisages – 2050 sounds a long way off, but in reality it’s only 35 years – I may still be around then! (Though possibly not still producing this newsletter). Our young grandchildren, both the four already around and any new ones who follow in the next few years, will be at the age of making these decisions about how to continue their line.

 

There is an alternative of course, but it’s one that it seems fewer and fewer young people will actually achieve. The sad demographic fact is that the proportion of young people actually fulfilling their dream of finding a life partner, forming a lifelong bond, and having children is steadily and inexorably falling. It is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy – the fewer young people actually believing that marriage is possible, the fewer who will invest the time and energy in finding, and being, lifelong mates.

 

Those working in the field of innovation often speak of the concept of “disruptive technologies” – inventions and ideas that completely change the market or a particular field. Fire gave man the ability to survive in harsher climates, and to eat a wider range of food; trains and cars opened up the opportunity for people to pursue employment over much greater distances, breaking the geographic constraints that had held the bonds of kinship to a relatively defined locus; changes in reproductive technology have already distanced the act of love-making from reproduction, and these latest predictions are just the logical extension of this particular technology.

 

‘Industrialisation’ is a threat on so many fronts – our climate, our approach to food and farming, our built environment, and now it seems to our very means of keeping the species reproducing. In every area, the freedom and power gently slips from the individual man or woman to the “system”. How long before we have demands to ensure that those using the “reproductive technologies” are vetted to ensure they are appropriate people, with the necessary wealth, skills, values etc to be the parent to our next generation?

 

Marriage, the right of two people to assert their long term commitment to an intimate lifelong union, and with it the responsibility to bring new life into this world, stands as one of the very few institutions that embody a natural, non-industrialised, philosophy of life.

 

Once we lose the vital linkage between love, pro-creation and the next generation we will lose the any vestige of hope for a “natural future”.

 

And that thought just might keep me going with the newsletter for the next 35 years!

 

 

 

 

 

Best wishes,

The 2-in-2-1 Team

 

Technical Stuff

 

Keep us informed - Do keep us posted on your news, and in particular please let us know details of your project(s), either present or planned.  Either post it at the forum, or e-mail us and we'll put it out there for you.

 

Subscribe  - If this email has been passed on to you by a friend, you can request your own copy by replying to this email with 'subscribe' in the subject line and your name in the body of the email and we will then send further information about the UK Marriage News and access to the Forums to the address you reply with.

Unsubscribe - If you have received this message in error, or do not wish to be contacted by 2-in-2-1 using email in the future, please simply reply to this message with 'unsubscribe' on the subject line of your reply.

 

Contribute to costs – Although we don’t charge for the newsletter, we do invite you to contribute to our costs. You can do so online or by sending a cheque made payable to 2-in-2-1 Ltd to 11 Lamborne Close, Sandhurst, Berks, GU47 8JL.

 

Change of Address – If you change e-mail address please let us know! We automatically delete addresses after two weeks of unsuccessful delivery attempts. Simply reply to the Newsletter using your new address with the words change of address in the subject line and we will update your records accordingly.

 

Access the forums - To start using the system for the first time simply go to http://www.2-in-2-1.co.uk/forums/. Scroll to the bottom of the page where you will see a Login box. Put in your username and password as above and then press the Log in button. You will only need to do this login the first time you visit - from then on the system will recognise you each time you return (unless you use a different computer).

 

This Newsletter is published by 2-in-2-1 Ltd, Company No. 3792423   Registered office:- 11 Lamborne Close, Sandhurst, Berks, GU47 8JL, © 2014. All rights reserved.