theunitofcaring:

mailadreapta:

earlgraytay:

mailadreapta:

fandom-geek:

A woman who wants to divorce her husband of 40 years because she says their marriage is unhappy has lost her case in the supreme court.

Five justices upheld rulings by a family court and the court of appeal that Tini Owens must stay married to Hugh Owens.

Tini, who is in her late 60s, wants a divorce. She says her marriage to Hugh, who is in his 80s, is loveless and has broken down.

She says he has behaved unreasonably and that she should be allowed to end her marriage. Hugh, however, refuses to agree to a divorce and denies her allegations about his behaviour. He says that if their marriage has irretrievably broken down it is because she had an affair, or because she is “bored”.

so i know that tumblr is super focused on the usa and women’s rights over there, but this is really fucking important case in uk law

unlike the us, the uk doesn’t have no fault divorce. you have to have been married for at least one year before filing for divorce, and then you have to pick one of five grounds under which divorce is permitted

• adultery – 14% of divorces, but only counts if you didn’t continue as a couple for six months afterwards, unless the affair is still ongoing or there’s more acts afterwards. fun fact, however – if you are in a civil partnership instead of a divorce, you can’t use this ground at all! really fucking shitty, am i right?
• desertion – if your spouse left you for more than 2 years in the last 2 and a half, then this ground is usable. only 1% of divorces are under this ground, however
• 2 years separation – 27% of divorces, as it requires mutual agreement between the couple
• 5 years separation – 13% of divorces, this is what the court has told ms owens she has to use, and she can only file under this ground in 2020. this is used in cases when your partner objects to the divorce, shittily enough
• unreasonable behaviour – 45% of divorces, and this is what ms owens used when she filed. to quote the government’s page on divorce, your spouse must have “behaved in such a way that you cannot reasonably be expected to live with them”, with examples of abuse, violence, and drugs/alcoholism

(note – scotland has slightly different divorce law, as it changes the 2 years separation to 1, and the 5 years separation to 2. no much better, but a little)

and long story short… three different courts (the family court, the appeals court, and now the supreme court) have all declared the examples ms owens used to be insufficient

now, the president of the supreme court, lady hale, said she found this “very troubling”, and another judge said he was very reluctant to give this judgement, and my thoughts on that are….. eh 

unlike the usa, judicial activism is generally a no-no, and so both the appeals court and the supreme court have said parliament would need to amend the 1973 matrimonal causes act, which laid out the grounds for modern divorces

which really needs to happen as the last time divorce law was updated was in 2004, when the government mandated that if a transgender person was to legally transition, they needed to divorce their partner before they were allowed to. which is its’ own entire bullshit, tbh, and has been repeatedly brought up as an example of how shitty the uk is wrt transgender rights

so yeah…. i’m pretty sure a campaign is going to start because of this case and the supreme court’s ruling, and i’d really appreciate it if non-uk people would raise awareness of this gigantic goddamn issue in our country

I had no idea that Britain didn’t have no-fault divorce. Good for them! No-fault divorce is pure evil, completely indefensible by any moral standard.

The causes that Britain allows for seem quite reasonable. If nothing else, they’re a little too lenient.

what the fuck is wrong with you?  

A marriage is where you stand up in front of your family, friends, and (often) God to promise that you’re going to stick with this person for the rest of your life. Where I come from, adults keep their fucking promises.

There are legitimate reasons for divorce. Some of them are given above. But no-fault divorce is defined as divorce for no reason. It’s divorce because you got tired of being married. It’s divorce because you apparently aren’t an adult and can’t keep your fucking promises.

Keep your fucking promises.

In every state that adopted no-fault divorce, whether unilateral or by mutual consent, divorce rates increased for the next five years or so. But once the pent-up demand for divorces was met, divorce rates stabilized. Indeed, in the years since no-fault divorce became well-nigh universal, the national divorce rate has fallen, from about 23 divorces per 1,000 married couples in 1979 to under 17 per 1,000 in 2005.

Even during the initial period when divorce rates were increasing, several positive trends accompanied the transition to no-fault. The economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania report that states that adopted no-fault divorce experienced a decrease of 8 to 16 percent in wives’ suicide rates and a 30 percent decline in domestic violence. – New York Times

It turns out that using state violence to enforce your personal definition of morality leads to more domestic abuse, more suicide, and – yep – more divorce. 

I feel like this is an important lesson to keep in mind in general.

(Also, no-fault divorce is not, actually, “defined as” no-good-reason divorce, it is ‘no obligation to have enough evidence of your circumstances to satisfy the government’. It is really, really important, under lots of circumstances, that one not have to navigate dozens of layers of bureaucracy on the way to safety. And if you add those dozens of layers of bureaucracy in order to invasively verify that someone’s personal circumstances meet your standards, well, you’re causing suicide, domestic violence, and higher divorce rates in order to feel good about yourself. If we’re calling policies evil here…)

Unhappy marriage not grounds for divorce, supreme court rules