Civilizing Divorce: Social Change, Law and the Transformation of Parenthood
This is a research project funded by the
Australian
Research Council for 2006-2008, administered by the
University of Sydney
Project summary
This research makes an innovative contribution to the international scholarship on family law by examining the linkages between the changes in the law concerning post-separation child-rearing, and the broader transformations of family life and adult-child relations in Australia, North America and Europe. It will analyze these linkages in terms of the surrounding long-term changes in emotional life using a social-scientific understanding of the 'civilizing of parents' along with an evolving concern of government to regulate childhood and family life, both of which demand an increasing capacity to consciously think about apparently natural roles such as parenthood and childhood.
National Benefit
Understanding how the development of family law is linked to broader developments in family life and childhood will improve the capacity of policy-makers, law reformers and practitioners, other professionals working with separating couples and their children (social workers, psychotherapists, counselors, legal para-professionals, etc), and those families themselves to deal with post-separation child-rearing in ways which minimize the harm experienced by both children and parents. Establishing the patterns running across all Western countries and jurisdictions in relation to these long-term transformations in family life - but also the diversity in approaches across differing legal regimes and legal cultures, will providing significantly greater conceptual resources to draw upon in research, policy-making and law reform in a wide variety of contexts. Within the field of socio-legal studies of the legal regulation of family life, it will generate an important new research trajectory by encouraging a more wide-ranging use of social science theory and research in analyzing current family law developments, and help clarify the linkages between developments in family law and other fields of law, in turn encouraging and supporting further research into those linkages.
I hope also to help take some of the 'heat' out of the custody law reform debate, and move it beyond its current tendency towards a 'gender war' between fathers' groups and those seeking to protect women's and children's welfare. If we approach the issues as part and parcel of a more general movement towards greater emotional management, if the family is no longer seen as a 'natural' entity, generating disappointment and a sense of failure when it doesn't correspond to the ideal, if we appreciate that the structure of our social relations is such that increasing conscious and deliberate effort needs to be put into family relationships by both adults and children, this will help parents develop an improved capacity to provide a healthy start to life for their children, in all senses of the word 'health', and to maintain their children's well-being well into their transition to adulthood.
The project will make a significant contribution to two of the priority goals with National Research Priority 2, Promoting and Maintaining Good Health, a 'healthy start to life' and 'strengthening Australia's social and economic fabric'. The quality of the environment within which the children of separated parents live has a close relationship with their well-being and life potential, and is likely to have an impact on their overall health. Health and well-being at all stages of childhood is predictive of a number of later outcomes, and the project's contribution to improved policy-making and regulation of post-separation childhood experience have a significant impact on achieving a healthy start to life, part of the Government's National Agenda for Early Childhood. This interdisciplinary project, drawing on sociology, history and law, will also be central to the process of strengthening central elements of Australia's social fabric, improving our understanding of the structural underpinnings of the kinds of choices which have to be made in managing post-separation child-rearing and making Australians better equipped to navigate their way through a major process of transformation in the way our intimate lives are structured.
