Family Mediation
– is it working for dads? Barbara Relph* Barbara Relph spoke to Nurit Zubery, a mediator and LLM student at the University of Auckland, about a thesis study she completed in 2021 on the experience of fathers in the mandatory family mediation process. Zubery spoke with 13 men about their experiences of the process. Nurit Zubery believes that there is a problem with the way the family mediation system relates to men, and the misconception about how men ‘are’ in divorce. Zubery’s qualitative study at the University of Auckland Law School was supervised by Professor Mark Henaghan. The study comprised interviews with 13 men about their experience of the family mediation process to discover why and how the system was failing them and, just as importantly, why it mattered. She discovered four key experiences that negatively affected fathers’ view of the process. 1) Strong grief reaction Zubery says that men experience a more severe grief reaction than women, partly because women initiate over 70% of separations. In the 1980s, when women started returning to work after having children, they rebelled against continuing to be responsible for household and family tasks, and traditional gender roles, resulting in a sharp increase in separation and divorce rates. This is now widely known as the “gender revolution”.
DECEMBER 2021
According to Zubery, statistics showed new phenomena for men arose as a direct result of divorce. Rates of psychiatric hospital admissions increased (nine times more likely than for women), involvement in motor accidents for men doubled in the six months following divorce, they are nearly five times more likely to commit suicide than women after divorce, and the rates of substance abuse and illness such as cancer, heart attacks and diabetes all increased for men. Primary contributing factors are the loneliness, despair and isolation experienced strongly by men. According to Zubery, men find separation tougher than women, and many never recover. Her view is that this is largely down to how society has historically trained men – from childhood – to control their emotions and conform to a masculine gender norm where only powerful emotions are permitted to be expressed anger, pride, and contempt. Another factor Zubery thinks causes men to react more severely is that, unlike women, they lack a good support network. Even men with very good friends don’t tend to share emotional distress with them but rely on their partner for all emotional needs. This multiplies the loss for men in that they not only lose their relationship and the future aspirations associated with it, but any
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