Family Law Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words - 1

Family Law - Essay Example However, many feel that family law does not deal with disputes adequately. This is because not only does family law fail to adequately consider areas such as equal parental rights over children, it fails to deal with unmarried couples that have a relationship and do not live together. It also fails to deal with heterosexual cohabitation, same sex cohabitation, etc. Family law needs to accommodate these types of structures as well because these arrangements are growing in number. In order for family law to deal with the changing nature of family, it has to recognize and accommodate the fact that family structures now vary. In order to develop a general understanding of the reasons why family law has to be amended in order to become more accommodating in its approach, one has to consider the areas family law encompasses1. Family law deals with the following areas that are all family-related: All the three points above appear to be quite broad and encompassing. However, there are family structures today that may not necessarily be encompassed by them. This particularly refers to cohabiting couples. These may be heterosexual or same sex couples. It must be noted that same sex cohabiting relationships, however, have been recognized since 2004. It took a slow process for this type of relationship to be recognized2. Also, with cohabiting couples, cases may be more complicated because of them having children. Along with considering cohabitating heterosexual couples, a look at Figure 1 in the Appendix provides one with the trends of Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the UK3. These indicate perhaps an increasing trend towards families that do not consider marriage. A broader view of cohabitation is addressed later in this paper. New Family Structure [The Single Parent Family]: It is known that now marriage is becoming less significant to family structure, and parenthood is taking its place. Parenthood may be in the form of two parents or a single parent. Single parenthood may emerge from different situations. In many cases it emerges from a couple dating and having no commitments4. A dating couple that does not live together or does not even plan to get married may end up with a child accidentally. Therefore, they might feel forced into remaining together as a family. Since, in many cases, there is no commitment on either side, the mother decides to keep the child and raise it alone. In such a case, there can be little demand for child support from the father. This is because there is no civil union or any such family law that could compel the father to pay towards the child's upbringing without the existence of marriage. It must be noted here that a father becomes legally bound to pay for child support if he is married to the mother of his child. In many cases, the mother does not want to continue her relationship with her partner5. If no marriage exists, a father does not have to pay for child support, but he may also not be able to see his child. Therefore, there is every chance that the child will grow up without knowing or seeing his or her father. Figure 2 in the Appendix shows the percentage of single parents in the