Bulletin

Issue: May/June 2007

News

Soft divorce gains wide support

Research has confirmed that sweeping changes made to the Family Court system last July have resulted in happier children and parents.

Dr Jennifer McIntosh, above, Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and director of the Family Transitions clinic, was commissioned to study the change from an adversarial system to a softer approach based on European models.

Instead of divorcing spouses lining up with their lawyers to fight it out in court, under the new less adversarial system judges speak directly to the parties, their communication unrestricted by the laws of evidence.

Professor McIntosh studied 38 families divorcing under the old system, and 50 under the new. She found that parents who divorced under the new system argued less, were more likely to have co-operative arrangements for sharing the children, and reported lower emotional distress in their children.

She concluded that the new system demonstrated a greater capacity to respond to the psychological vulnerabilities of divorcing families. Whereas 70 per cent of parents involved in the old system felt the process had a negative effect on them, only 29 per cent felt this way about the new process.

The results of the research were released to wide public acclaim in a report Finding a Better Way by the Chief Justice of the Family Court, Diana Bryant, in April.