The legal profession and the judiciary, and by corollary the government, have over many years demonstrated a blind preference for the petitioner’s interests in both divorce and financial settlement cases. This is in manifest contempt of the rights of the defendants.
The government should not underestimate the trauma created by their implicit condoning of false allegations and unilateral divorce or the trauma created by the further prospect of losing your family life, home life and the psychological and mental health difficulties that follow on from divorce by way of financial settlement. The emotional devastation is significantly exacerbated by the knowledge and then the experience of having both the legal fraternity and then the judicial process ally itself with spouses who want to break up marriages. Even more so when the decision is unilateral and the respondent knows that there are doubts in their partners mind.
The government should also not misjudge the frustration—and indeed the sheer bewilderment —which flows from a law founded on principle (however arguable that principle may be in itself) being circumvented by procedures based on expediency.
Mr Justice Anthony Lincoln understood the emotional devastation when in an address given to the Family Law Bar Association in1981stated:-
“No-one could feel a stronger sense of injustice, no-one be more outraged than (to take but one example) a husband who has to part with a substantial proportion of his resources and maintain his wife over a very long period when he has in no way been at fault in the course of the marriage, where the fault, if it had been investigated, could be shown, however slight, to have been the fault of the wife, and could be shown on proper enquiry to have brought the marriage to its termination.”
Extracts from Just a Piece of Paper – IEA Health and Welfare unit , 1995
Divorce often makes marital conflict worse for children, not better. Set against this inconvenient fact, the idea that conflict will be minimised if the law denies parents the opportunity to speak the truth to each other is manifestly risible.
Melanie Phillips at page 17.
Conflict is particularly likely to arise as a direct result of the decision to separate in the cases where the divorce is being unilaterally pursued for self-interested reasons that have little or nothing to do with the objective state of the marriage or the conduct of the other party. These are of course, precisely the kind of actions permitted by divorce-on-demand procedures.
Patricia Morgan at page 27