Revenge is, well, undignified actually

There's been something of a minor surge in stories of people taking revenge on the ending of their marriages lately (it is the notorious silly season, after all).  First there was the man who destroyed his wife's collection of designer handbags (plus shoes and clothes, of course) when she left him for a man she met while on holiday:

The handbags

Now there's the tale the husband scattering his wife's underwear along the public highway:

The underwear

Intimate information is another quite common tactic, such as intimate photos of your formerly loved one:

The compromising photo

And there's always a constant diet of cases of cutting furniture and household effects in half because "that's fair".  Another favourite is publishing intimate photographs and videos of the person you see as having betrayed you.

I always wonder though, do these perpetrators really feel better as a result?  More to the point, do they look better to their friends and families?  For myself, it really speaks of immaturity.  However hurt you feel, lashing out to cause suffering and for no other reason, is just about as undignified and humiliating as it gets.  You show yourself as out of control and spiteful.  Sure, I understand why Mr. Plews, the handbag husband, is annoyed.  There must have been some relatively serious spending going during the marriage and on the face of it, there was a distinct lack of frankness from his wife about the new man in her life.  Nevertheless, there is no dignity in revenge.  Mr. Plews and these others come across as people unable to control themselves and the essence of living in a civilised society is exercising self control, especially with people who offend, hurt and annoy you. 

It's probably worth noting that the underwear scatterer, Mr. Klutch, had just been served with a protection from abuse order by the court, to protect his wife.  This rather suggests that the problems between them had  been of a pretty significant nature event before then and that Mr. Klutch had been operating outside the normal boundaries even of hurt and upset husbands.

It's clear from these tales that courts are intolerant of this type of behaviour, and so they ought to be.  English courts are just as capable of punishing this abuse as American ones, and of making orders intended to prevent it.  Abusive behaviour takes an almost endless variety of forms, only limited by human ingenuity.  The law is astute to be over prescriptive.  If property is damaged or spouses and partners put in fear or distress, there are orders available to prevent future repetitions and penalties for those who perpetrate those acts.


Blog Disclaimer: Nothing in www.austinkempfamilylaw.blogspot.com blog should be construed as legal advice. If you require legal advice upon any family law related matter then you should instruct a solicitor. Any links to other blogs or web sites are provided for convenience only and Austin Kemp Solicitors cannot accept any responsibility for the contents of such linked blogs/sites.

Good news - judges like to do the right thing. Edgerton v. Edgerton

 There's been one of those odd and complicated divorce cases in the Court of Appeal recently.  It's all to do with a husband declaring that a significant part of the family assets, belong to his mate.

First the husband asserted that he owed his friend Mr. Shaikh a shed load of money.  Then the story changed - actually Mr. Shaikh and he were in partnership and that a large sum of money and a house were actually partnership assets.  Despite the fact that the wife had got an undertaking from the husband that he wouldn't dispose of his interest in various assets, including the "partnership" assets, the husband's friend began an action against the husband, claiming repayment of the debt.  Then he discontinued that action and began a separate one, claiming that his partnership with the husband was dissolved and seeking an account of the partnership assets.

Withdrawing legal aid - stupid or what?

So now Mrs. Edgerton faces her first problem.  She has legal aid for the divorce proceedings but the partnership action is in the High Court Chancery division.  At one stage it is joined with the ancillary relief application but for unexplained reasons this is changed and the hearings are separate.  It is not clear why, but she didn't have legal aid for the Chancery action.  Legal aid to argue over the property division but no legal aid to decide how much property there is to divide.  Penny wise, pound foolish!

As a result, Mrs. Edgerton loses the Chancery action and a large slice of the matrimonial pot looks as if it's going to disappear to the husband's close friend and associate.

However, the judge in the divorce proceedings, somewhat surprisingly, asserts that he isn't  bound by the decision of the chancery court as to the partnership action.  The order in the chancery action had been by consent between the husband and his friend as the wife's defence of it had been struck out for failure to comply with directions. In other words, the wife had unsurprisingly been out of her depth, she didn't have legal assistance and the husband had taken full advantage of this.  As a result, the family judge makes an injunction which effectively prevents the chancery order being implemented, so the husband and his friend appeal against the injunction to the Court of Appeal.

At the Court of Appeal

Now it doesn't require a great deal of legal knowledge to appreciate that the wife's case in relation to the chancery order has problems.  There aren't different High Courts - there's just the one and it simply has different divisions.  That must and does mean that a decision of one division must bind all the other divisions.  That's why in relation to disclosure issues, husbands have tended to go to the Queen's Bench Division for orders rather than the Family Division - the judges have a different approach and can still bind the family judge.  So this was an appeal which was bound to succeed and it did.

But the Appeal judges clearly couldn't stand the thought of clear injustice being done.  They thought long and hard and came up with a doctrine, based on uncontested facts, which would give the wife a remedy.  They then set a timetable with detailed steps which would enable her to access that remedy.

So good news!  Judges are hostile to injustice and will exercise their intellects and legal knowledge to secure justice for a litigant wherever possible.  All is not yet as bad as it could be.






Blog Disclaimer: Nothing in www.austinkempfamilylaw.blogspot.com blog should be construed as legal advice. If you require legal advice upon any family law related matter then you should instruct a solicitor. Any links to other blogs or web sites are provided for convenience only and Austin Kemp Solicitors cannot accept any responsibility for the contents of such linked blogs/sites.

Am I the only person to be annoyed by this?

 This is simply so sexist!  Why do people think that this is an appropriate way to report or campaign on a serious matter?

Women and children could die

Well, what about men?  Has this been completely forgotten then?  Or perhaps nobody really took any notice of it in the first place!

Men get hurt too

Or this:

Men get killed as well

Or perhaps men dying doesn't really matter.  To say that this latest shot in an otherwise worthy campaign is stereotypical would be a crashing understatement.  Let's be clear - men deserve and are entitled to the protection of the law every bit as much as women or children.  Making men invisible in terms of protection shows a callous disregard for 50% of the population.  Quite rightly, that sort of attitude towards women has been pilloried for decades and the sort of overt discrimination which they suffered is at least expressly condemned if it has yet to be entirely eliminated.

Google domestic violence and you will find a plethora of sites discussing violence against women.  Now that remains a national scandal and it seems that few of the initiatives of the last 20 years have had much effect in reducing its incidence.  However, failing to recognise the existence of male victims and brushing them off as a statistical irrelevance is, I have to say, deeply prejudiced.  Perhaps not consciously prejudiced but prejudiced nonetheless.  The Lawrence enquiry found the police to be institutionalist racists.  Is family law in danger of becoming institutionalised sexists?


Blog Disclaimer: Nothing in www.austinkempfamilylaw.blogspot.com blog should be construed as legal advice. If you require legal advice upon any family law related matter then you should instruct a solicitor. Any links to other blogs or web sites are provided for convenience only and Austin Kemp Solicitors cannot accept any responsibility for the contents of such linked blogs/sites.