GLOATING OVER MARRIAGE DISPUTES

Evening Star, Issue 22452, 24 September 1936, Page 8

GLOATING OVER MARRIAGE DISPUTES

NEED FDR " DOMESTIC COURTS" “ Broken romance cannot always be doctored, yet quicker than the medico to the sick, law is the physician whose aid is sought,” says Mr Cecil Geeson, in his book ‘ Just Justice?’ “ Yet, he continues, “ Jaw never heals, but rather steals what is left of romance, affording but a hasty redress, rather than a lasting redemption. Can the machinery of the law be humanised, and given sufficient flexibility to enable those who control jt to address themselves in their wisdom to humane as well as to legal aspects of the case of those who seek its aid?” Mr Geeson is an earnest advocate of special domestic courts to deal with matrimonial differences—to take the place of the ordinary Police Court proceedings. This reform will surely take place in the near future, and Mr Geeson, visualising the day when reform takes place, says:— “ When the system of maintenance and separation orders in the Magistrates Courts is reformed it will pass into legal and social history as a great reforming measure for the amelioration of the lot of the working classes and the protection of children. It will mark an era in progress as great as any which have in the past improved work-ing-class home life; it will rob it of an abiding terror. It will take its place as a reform as welcome as 'those enactments which took child labour from the mines and factories, and those reforms, resulting from the work ol Howard and Elisabeth Fry, which humanised and improved our prisons. Mr Geeson, in an urgent plea, shows the dangers which accompany a public hearing of matrimonial disputes. “ A discussion in public,” he asserts, “ of intimate marital relation of husbands and wives of refinement is a very terrifying ordeal. It is an expose of everything public that is sacred and secret. _ls it to be wondered that, from this actual or threatened ordeal by exposure of such things many will shrink? ... “ It is not uncommon that when a case is finished some 20 or 30 neighbours will leave the court with the parties. From time to time their titters have been suppressed by magistrates or gaolers. It must be remembered that in these cases vague generalisations may not usually be accepted in evidence, and rightly so, and it is from the specific narration of often unpleasant details that the neighbours of the parties derive their amusement. ... “ Direct hardship is imposed when private details of domestic life must be discussed before perhaps almost the entire inhabitants of a street. Life is sharp, direct, and hard in Mean street, and as a consequence it is perhaps not surprising that refinement and) reticence are not conspicuous. . . . “ A humble pride exists amongst the vast _ majority of the labouring and working classes, which shrinks from association with the ‘ House of Correction.’ Herein lies, of course, one of the great safeguards of society and the maintenance of private property and the safety of the individual, which ensures that through times of. prevalent distress and dire misfortune for many, great numbers do not turn lawbreakers. “ But this same feeling of abhorrence brings .on in many homes the final rift between man and wife. In these days of social progress we owe it as a reform duo to the respectable working clase that their marital misfortunes should not thus be stigmatised, or suffer the ill-associated publicity such procedure entails. In these days, in the vernacular phrase, it does not ‘ belong.’ “ The system originally intended for the wife-beater and 1 the protection of his victim was doubtless relegated to the police courts because it was there, when he had gone too far in violence, and was charged with a criminal offence, that it was convenient to find and deal with him. Whatever reforms become in time operative, acts of violence can still be dealt with in the police court; that is its proper function. “ But marital dissension, inevitable in some cases, as the fact that one individual is not just as another —temperamental differences, religious questions, money matters, sexual discrepancies, bad marriage bargains, and unjust dealings, together with the many other difficulties which cannot be foreseen which arise from the contract of marriage—should bo dealt with ns matters drsdlosing symptoms of mental illhealth, in turn affecting the common ■weal, and be dealt with as requiring a sympathetic, humane assistance rather than as necessitating the infliction of opprobrium on either party.”.