Legal and Psycho-Social Issues in Divorce and Child Custody.

Abstract

Marriage is one of the oldest institutions of human history, it is a social contract and
traditionally between a man and a woman, Lord Penzance defined it as “the voluntary union
for life of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others”. It will be germane to note
that whenever a marriage has broken down irretrievably between the contracting parties,
then it becomes a reservoir for sometimes intractable legal and social problems. The man
and the woman may be happy to unburden the marriage and get a divorce, but the issues of
what law and social parameters can work in order to secure the best interests of the issues
of marriage(children) sometimes create unfathomable social problems. The scope of this
paper is to critically analyze the issues and problems that usually blaze the trail of a failed
marriage and what a lawyer and a psychologist would do in the circumstance to propagate
and secure the emotional, social, psychological, physical and moral well being of the children
of a failed marriage. This research will employ analytical, critical, historical and empirical
methodology, the extant laws of the matrimonial causes Act that regulate divorce and
custody will be critically analyzed in order to create a comparative confluence between
psychology and law in what the researcher will be termed as “psychology of matrimonial
causes”.