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The most common reasons given for the breakdown of marriages or live-in partnerships in Britain are communication problems and growing apart, according to analysis by UCL researchers of the latest National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3).
[...] Natsal is the largest scientific study of sexual health lifestyles in Britain. It is carried out by UCL, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and NatCen Social Research [sic]
Natsal is run every 10 years, and includes a representative sample of men and women resident in Britain aged between 16 and 74. Natsal-3 was carried out between 2010 and 2012.
The study focused on the responses of 706 men and 1254 women to questions about their reasons for breakdown of a marriage or cohabiting relationship in the past 5 years.
[UCL is, of course, University College London. It has as part of one of its faculties the above-mentioned school.]
I would have guessed footie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:48PM (11 children)
Well, I see how abolishing marriage would remove spousal abuse, by the simple fact that there would be no more spouses (not that it would reduce the total amount of abuse, it would just be labelled differently). However I don't see how it would remove child abuse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:00PM (10 children)
Child abuse can be mostly eliminated pretty easily: prevent people from having children. Private rearing of children is what leads to child abuse. Instead, let the state take over that function, so that professional child-rearers can be employed for this. There was a pretty good book a while ago about a society like this, called "Brave New World".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:06PM (6 children)
You seem to have missed all the cases where children were abused by teachers, priests or others professionally tasked to care of them.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:31PM (4 children)
You have a good point there. Eliminating child abuse by priests is easy: get rid of religion. But the others aren't so easy, and that really comes down to society wanting to invest strongly in childrearing, which means finding the most qualified people to do jobs involving children (like teaching, nannying, etc.), which is different from today where we massively underpay teachers and then wonder why they're frequently so lousy. Also, in addition to making these jobs prestigious and well-compensated, they need to have a good amount of oversight and cross-checking to keep standards of care high and eliminate anyone who's lacking. In a society which really wants to raise children in the best way possible, these investments will be made. In a society like ours which doesn't care about raising kids well, we get what you see today.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:39PM (3 children)
You have a good point there. Eliminating child abuse by priests is easy: get rid of religion.
You are joking, right? It isn't the religion that causes the abuse, religionists are no more prone to child abuse than any other group. The reason pedo-priests were such a big problem is because the church covered for them to protect its own reputation rather than protect the children. Just like UPenn covered for Sandusky.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:44PM (2 children)
Right, it was the organization. Get rid of organized religion and there's no more organization and no more potential to cover up abuse that way.
Getting rid of big-money collegiate sports would be a good thing too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:55PM (1 child)
Where you do stop?
Boy scouts?
4H?
Schools?
Pee-Wee football?
What organizations are you going to allow to exist?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @05:23PM
NAMBLA. All organizations are now NAMBLA.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:33PM
I certainly don't want to downplay your valid point about child abuse occurring among non-family caregivers. However, it's worthwhile to note that most stats suggest it's a lot more common for abuse to occur in the home (from parents, siblings, other extended family members, family friends, etc.). Stats I've seen are that parents are generally implicated in ~75-80% of substantiated cases of child maltreatment, and ~90% of child abuse is caused by relatives of the child.
Perhaps those stats are so high mostly because of "opportunity," i.e., most kids spend a lot of their free time with family, and perhaps rates among non-family would be higher if more children were in the care of other people. (This is suggested by the high rates of foster care abuse, for example.) But the fact remains that right now a lot more abuse occurs at the hands of family.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:46PM (1 child)
I must be really weird. The only thing I found really disturbing about Brave New World was how certain people were intentionally retarded with ethanol in the maturation chamber or whatever it was called. It's easy to criticize a 1931 novel in 2017, but it seems that robots and AIs would do a better job of replacing the lower castes. Everything else I thought were interesting ideas that could improve the human condition, including some kind of outlet for people who can't fit into the system. I would need that outlet personally, but so many people are so desperate to be told by somebody else what their lives mean and what they must do with them.
Granted, I haven't read it since I was a teenager.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:59PM
Yeah, I always wondered why it was deemed a bad society when it really seemed ideal in many ways. But you're right, it was written ages ago (I thought it came out in 1947 or 49 actually, very close to when "1984" was published, in 1948), so some things seem a little silly. They didn't have real robots back then, and given technology now, we're already looking at replacing our crappy jobs with automation and robots, so in such a future society I think that's a given, so we wouldn't need to artificially breed dumb people for them. Also, in the book they had women carrying around "birth control" and having to remember to take it regularly. We still have a lot of that today, but only because many people don't want to take the permanent step of a vasectomy or tubal ligation. In a future society where natural births are eliminated, there'd be no reason to even bother with medical birth control; we'd do permanent sterilization on everyone automatically. I'm guessing they hadn't yet invented these procedures in the late 40s.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday March 29 2017, @07:11AM
Child caring from people without a vested interest in those children in combination with low probability of discovery or deterrent is a fertile ground for abuse.
And the state have many perverted interests. They are not suitable to raise children. Private homes have risks but they are lesser than the state has and doesn't carry nasty systematic feedback.