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Empowering Men:
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Law School Proves that Family
Court Must Be Opened Up.
© Peter Zohrab 2005 |
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The principal Men's Rights argument for completely
opening up the Family Court to the public and the media is the claim that
the professional who participate in Family Court processes are, in general,
biased against men (or biased in favour of women, which amounts to the same
thing, in practice). This is a hard thing to prove, and the professionals
themselves no doubt see themselves as unbiased,
or as able to pick up their own biases, which comes to the same thing.
However, I have just (in March 2005) graduated with a Bachelor of Laws degree,
and my experiences in Law School give
me absolute confidence that the above-mentioned anti-male bias is a fact !
Family Dispute Resolution in Japan
Professor Taimie L. Bryant, in her article, Family Models, Family Dispute
Resolution and Family Law in Japan ((1995) 14 UCLA Pacific Basin LJ 1),
refers to the Japanese ie model of the family, "a patrilineal,
patriarchal chain of authority extending between the eldest sons of successive
generations." She goes on to state:
"Family Court mediation, which is a prerequisite to litigation of
most types of family disputes in Japan, reinforces this ideology of ie
.... This Article explores how and why this is true despite the fact that
neither the laws regulating the family nor the legal system as it deals
with dispute resolution requires the adoption of one particular model."
It is probably typical of a (latently) Feminist legal article that Bryant's
reasoning is not particularly clear, but the core of her explanation of why
Japanese Family Court mediation reinforces the ideology is as follows:
"...clients must present their positions and the backgrounds of the
dispute in terms that would meet with approval by wealthy members of a generation
or two older than they" (i.e. the mediators -- PZ)
Assuming that Bryant's analysis is more or less correct, we can see that
mediation, being a confidential process held behind closed doors and ratified
by the Family Court, would tend to reinforce the ideology and values of the
mediators, which in New Zealand includes Family Court judges. As Bryant points
out, clients have to present their positions and the backgrounds of the dispute
in terms that would meet with approval by the mediators. This puts men at
a disadvantage, since the Western legal culture has to a large extent adopted
Feminist ideology and grafted it onto conservative, anti-male chivalry --
as can be seen from other pages on this website, e.g.:
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Latest Update |
24 March 2018 |
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