Law and family

Reading from "Regulating families and gender"

The state, via the judicial system, shapes family and gender relation. In most of cases, judges make assumptions about what is good for families and children in the face of contradictory laws and conflicting evidence. Courts are supposed to balance the rights of individuals with the obligations of being married or being a parents, but in many cases show, this is a difficult challenge.

Partly because the law itself is gender biased. The task of adjudicating family conflict is difficult because judges, like any one of us, draw on taken-for-granted meanings associated with manhood, womanhood, and family well being. Family law, or the judge's understanding of it, conflicts with the views at least one of the parties involved. The hidden assumptions about gender in our law and policy decisions shows that how families are regulated by official state institution.

1. Marital rape. Only till a few years ago, marital rape was established legally, because prior to that the courts assumed that the husband was legally entitled to have sex with his wife, he could not be tried for raping her. But the concept of marital rape was a legal contradiction, rape laws have prohibited men from having sex with other men's wives or daughters. The blatant assumption underlines both laws are that women are "possession" men. This idea is consistent with the long standing legal precedent defining marriage as a property relationship.

2. The broad definition of "family policy" refers to everything that governments to do that affects families (Zimmerman, 1988. This definition however makes it difficult to evaluate how effective such policy affect families. China's one child policy has successfully curbed the overgrowth population, that also leads to many unintended consequences, as when the rate of female abortions, female infanticide, and female abandonment increased dramatically. Shifts in laws and polices are themselves the results of large social and historical changes, but whether laws and policies cause changes in families, or whether they simply follow larger social and economic changes,are still needed to further research.