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There is little reason to allow people to defend divorce applications filed by their spouses, an influential foundation has claimed.

The Nuffield Foundation, a charitable trust that conduct studies and research designed to promote social well-being throughout the UK, recently conducted a study, with the help of Exeter University, designed to provide insight into why individuals choose to defend divorces and what affect this has on the UK’s courts. Sufficed to say, their findings not only suggest that defended divorces should be abolished, but also added further weight to claims that no-fault divorce should be introduced to the UK.

The study found that, rather than defending applications because they did not want their marriages to end, divorces were usually defended because the respondent simply wanted to contest the grounds and apportion blame on their spouse instead of accept it themselves. Researchers correctly pointed out that, as the courts cannot actually rule on who is at fault for the breakdown of the marriage, defended divorces are clogging up the UK’s already overstretched family courts.

The study also revealed that due to expense, emotional ramifications and discouragement from various institutions operating within the field of family law, the vast majority of people decide against defending divorce applications.

The study’s author, Professor Liz Trinder, claimed that her findings served to reinforce the widely held belief that the need to blame one spouse for the breakdown of a marriage is unhelpful and often both unfair and even harmful to the parties involved, including children.

She further argues that divorce law is now more than 50 years old and that reform is urgently needed, that our courts cannot investigate why a marriage has broken down and, furthermore, recognise that attempting to do so is simply not possible.

Ultimately both Professor Trinder and the Nuffield Foundation’s Chief Executive Tim Gardam argue that the current system encourages spouses to blame one another when this is unproductive and is a matter on which the courts simply cannot rule.

They go on to claim that there is an evident need to remove both fault-based and defended divorces from UK law in order to create a system that is more child-friendly and geared towards ‘reducing conflict and promoting resolution’.

What do you think? Should no-fault divorce be introduced? Is contesting a divorce ultimately a fruitless endeavour? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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