Almost on the heels of its countrywide consultations, which sought and gained consensus for the ‘Stamp it Out’ campaign, the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security has plunged headlong into a series of forums guaranteed to bring about some amount of controversy because of the subject matter: divorce.
The dialogues are being conducted with the aim of, eventually, changing the archaic laws governing the way divorces are granted. These are currently being sought, and for the most part, granted at a high rate, given that at any sitting a judge could easily have upwards of forty divorces on his docket.
Needless to say, no one can find a priest or marriage officer in any area of this country who has anywhere near forty marriages on his plate on any given day. As a matter of fact, this would not even occur in the so-called marriage seasons — June and December — notwithstanding the fact that priests, giving this word the widest connotation possible, vastly outnumber judges in this jurisdiction.
The obvious logic that would seem to flow from this would be not to make divorces easily available. However, this appears to be one instance where abandoning logic makes more sense.
Considering the myriad reasons for which people now choose to enter into marriage, and the fact that despite admonitions to the contrary the institution is entered into lightly and ill-advisedly, having a “victim” and a “victor” in divorce cases is definitely out of sync. It does seem more than a little odd and old-fashioned that plaintiffs must be asked whether they had “conspired” with respondents to end their marriages and would not be granted a divorce if it turned out that they had.
To return to the comparison made earlier, no minister asks a man and a woman standing before him/her to be married, whether they had conspired to be joined together. In fact, conspiracy in marriage, in spite of how this degrades the institution, appears to be just the ticket. Among the more prevalent are those marriage contracts entered into to provide persons with resident status in North America for a financial consideration; the so-called “business” or “visa” weddings.
Minister Priya Manickchand, who as a member of the legal profession, would have handled divorce cases prior to wearing her current hat, no doubt has had more than observer status in this. She would have been involved in the past in the drawing up of long petitions superficially casting blame on one party or the other, when in fact at the centre of the issue was a couple, who had, in some cases, simply grown apart.
Minister Manickchand must be given credit, too, for repeatedly leading her team into areas that wild horses could not drag some people to. While the minister does not exude an abrasive personality, she is no shrinking violet when it comes doing what must be done to uphold persons’ human rights, particularly those of women.
Meanwhile, as part of the Ministry of Human Services’ current goal, steps should perhaps also be taken to divest this country of other laws and practices (cultural norms) which to all intents and purposes make a woman and her children, her husband’s property. Practices, whether they are enshrined in the law or not, which include married women needing to present not just proof of marriage, but their husband’s birth certificate when applying for a passport and the father having to be the one to apply for a child’s passport among others, need to change.
In a world where technological advances are being unfolded practically every day and being pressed into use with the same immediacy, it can only be called shocking that women’s rights and gender equality are still issues to be fought for. Keeping women “in their place” so to speak, is a large part of the reason why domestic violence is perpetuated. Breaking with tradition and tossing out archaic customs that are continued simply because the previous generation espoused them, in conjunction with education, could only serve to help remove that dark shadow constantly looming over us.
