The Government spends a huge amount of our money on social research. This research is one of the main sources of data for independent analysis, too. But the Government deliberately avoids researching things when it might discover things that are inconvenient. It does not analyse convicted criminals to find out their family backgrounds - particularly whether or not their parents were married and stayed together throughout their childhood. In America, 32 per cent of all adult criminals were found to have lost one parent before the age of fifteen. At the time, only eight per cent of the population at large had a lost a parent in this way. And in Britain? We don't know. The Government does not want to know. It might interfere with the politically correct pretence that all kinds of parenting are just as good.
Here is an excellent excerpt from an email newsletter by Harry Benson on another way in which the Government is avoiding the truth. He ends with a call for people to join in fighting this "see no truth" attitude to social research. The more who respond to his call, the better:
At the end of June, the government released its latest findings from the Families and Children Study (FACS). FACS is a superbly designed panel study that has followed the progress of several thousand families for five years.The latest study found that lone parent families were more likely to work less, earn less, save less, be unemployed, be deprived, be on benefits and suffer poorer health than couple families. The finding does not tell us much that is new but adds to a large body of existing research.
What is especially striking is the way the study completely disregards marriage. For the second year running, FACS combines four different family types into one super group called “couple families”. Yet there is a great deal of existing research showing that these four types – married and unmarried families, as well as married and unmarried stepfamilies – do not have the same outcomes.
Two years ago, for example, an earlier FACS study of the same families showed that married couples, regardless of other factors, were at significantly lower risk of family breakdown compared to unmarried couples.Why have the researchers done this? It smacks of censorship. FACS is commissioned by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). DWP will have set out the aims of the study. The researchers then carry out the instructions of their paymasters.
In late 2003, without debate, the government quietly decided to abolish the term “marital status”. This was announced on page 41 of an obscure government paper responding to a consultation on civil partnerships. Since then, mention of marriage has been systematically eliminated from the government lexicon. When Labour abolished the marriage allowance, tax and benefit systems ceased to distinguish between married and unmarried couples. The FACS study is a perfect example of the new political correctness in action.
The policy argument against distinguishing marriage from cohabitation is to avoid stigmatising children. If only. The unintended consequence of this destructive political correctness is that more couples don’t bother marrying. And why should they when the government’s actions indicate that marriage is not important?
The result is a rise in family breakdown driven not by divorce but entirely by the trend away from marriage and associated collapse of unmarried families. Instead of avoiding the stigma of unmarried parents, huge numbers of children now experience the far worse tragedy of family breakdown.
Government censorship now prevents researchers from highlighting the benefits and protections that accrue to married couples and their children. George Orwell was 20 years ahead of his time.
Please join me in writing to the new Work and Pensions Minister Stephen Timms MP (House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA) to request that he distinguish between married and unmarried families in future commissions of the Families and Children Study.
Harry Benson's Bristol Community Family Trust website is here. For anyone interested in marriage and parenting issues it is well worthwhile visiting and registering to receive his emails.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting
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I tend to agree with Paul. I think it likely that people who are "good parental material" are more inclined to get, and stay, married because, on the average, they take their responsibilities more seriously. It is not so much that marriage in itself makes them more responsible (although there may be some such effect).
Having said that, the current tax and benefits system clearly discriminates against married parents and incentivises other arrangements. This means that married parents have fewer children than they would otherwise and the tax and benefits system subsidises adults to have more children than they otherwise would outside marriage.
I am not one for social engineering on the part of the government, so am reluctant to say that there should be tax incentives for having children within marriage and penalties for those that have children outside marriage. I think that the government should take a neutral stance. In this way the natural economic advantages of marriage would prevail over other arrangements because the subsidies for other arrangements would be removed.
Posted by: HJHJ at July 1, 2005 01:42 PM
Paul,
Forgive me, but I think you might have fallen into your own trap, namely the nature of the link between cause and effect.
I agree you cannot logically and directly link the state of being married with the relatively lower incidence of the social problems you highlight. However, you can surely claim that the state of being married is linked strongly with a sense of wanting to demonstrate an intention to stay together in a stable relationship with one partner. In other words, the 'cause' is a sense of wanting to build stability into a relationship - marriage is still the most widely accepted sign of such a desire.
In that sense, you can link the two, albeit marriage is code for the underlying cause.
Posted by: Ricky at July 1, 2005 03:27 PM
Just as statistically children do much better in stable relationships than unstable, married couples relationships are statistically much more stable than unmarried.
So it makes sense to support the most stable socially cohesive unit.
Posted by: PL at July 4, 2005 01:56 PM
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This issue is one of the few things where I think James' book maybe is in error.
Not in the conclusions, but the logic. There's an error of "it follows it, therefore it causes it" & I think this might sometimes apply.
It's possible to show a correlation between Marriage and Crime, Poverty and so on, but I don't think there is a causal relationship there which is sometimes implied.
I think they are two symptoms of the same cause - an example might be that children of step-relationships are vastly more likely to be abused than those in marital relationships. (This is undoubtedly true)
That cause is, I suppose, "chaotic life" - the sort of thing Theodore Dalrymple writes about. People who live from day to day in a haze of booze, benefits and beating up.
Everything stems from this ; their children are poorly brought up in homes where the "parental figures" change from day to day, make do and mend, chaotic child management, disregard for learning and the law and simple "morality" and concern for anyone other than themselves.
So it's not so much that the "not being married" causes the high incidence of abuse - a stable unmarried relationship is likely to be as good as a stable married relationship ; it's more that the chaotic, disorganised, immoral lifestyle makes a stable marriage impossible, and the endless sequence of ill-considered partners makes it much more likely that one of them will commit abuse.
It's really about stability and morality vs chaos and personal convenience.
Posted by: Paul at July 1, 2005 11:46 AM