Religion and Current Social Practices - A dichotomy

There was a time in the west that when marriages broke down, child custody was automatically awarded to the mother. In fact today more than 80% of the child custody remains with the mother.

In the Wall Street Journal, there was an article that investigated the phenomena of "Fatherless Boys Grow up into dangerous men". Ms. Maggie Gallagher found that between 1980 and 1990 the homicide arrest rate for juveniles jumped 87%. Following rapid changes in family formation in the 1970s, youth violence rose sharply in the 1980s and 90's, even while it declined for adults over 25.

Such correlations are merely hints that fatherlessness causes crime. Until recently, scientific evidence has been hard to come by. Researchers had long suspected a link between father absence and crime, but few had access to the kind of large nationally representative database needed to rule out alternative theories. Since boys raised by single parents disproportionately come from disadvantaged backgrounds, maybe it was not fatherlessness but poverty or discrimination that put them at risk of crime. Nor could most of these earlier studies distinguish between different sorts of disrupted families: Was it just children of unwed mothers who were at risk, or did divorce have similarly negative effects? Is a stepfather as good as a biological dad? How much does remarriage which dramatically raises family income do to restore to children the protection of two-parent home?

To answer questions like these, Cynthia Harper, a demographer at the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Franscisco, along with Princeton's Sara McLanahan, one of the nation's top family scholars, undertook what few researchers had in the past: a longitudinal look at how family structure affects serious crime, using a large national database, the National Logitudinal Survey of Youth. Their study offers a unique opportunity to calculate the true costs of family breakdown and to compare different theories about the "root causes"
of crime.

Summary of their findings:


Boys raised outside of intact marriages are, on average, more than twice as likely as other boys to end up jailed, even after controlling for other demographic factors. Each year spent without a dad in the home increases the odds of future incarceration by about 5%.
Boys raised by unmarried mothers are at greater risk, but mostly, it appears, because they spend more time without a dad.
Child support made no difference one way or another in the likelihood a boy will grow up to be a criminal. However, poverty did make it more likely that a boy will be incarcerated as an adult.
The very small number of teenage boys living with just their single fathers were no more likely to commit crimes than boys in intact families.



Since 1970, the divorce rate has doubled and the out-of-wedlock birth rate has tripled. The first heart-breaking victims of this revolutions in social behavior may be the children of single parents themselves. But they are not the only victims.

Canada has made a move towards improving the chances that the father be as likely to get custody of the children as the mother. While this would be a welcome move, it might be more heartening to see the bias shift the otherway.

As under Islam, in the event of a divorce children are awarded to the father once he/she attains the age of 2. In the light of the above article I think we might have something over here.