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| Why is UNITY required? Broken families produce a broken society, and family life is threatened as never before in Britain. More than 40% of marriages end in divorce, with over 150,000 in England and Wales in 2004. The majority of these couples had at least one child aged under 16. Nearly half of all children in the UK are born to unmarried parents. In 1980, the figure was one in eight. More than a quarter of children currently live in one-parent households while, in 2006, figures show 250,000 more one-parent families than in 1997. Research published by the think tank, The Centre for Social Justice, has found that those experiencing family breakdown are 75% more likely to fail at school, 70% more likely to become drug addicts, 50% more likely to have alcohol problems, 40% more likely to get into serious debt and 35% more likely to be unemployed. Furthermore, a recent and well-received UK policy review on family breakdown, found that nearly one in two couples who live together split up before their child’s fifth birthday. This compares to one in twelve married parents. Finally, in 2006, an analysis of the latest data from the Millennium Cohort Study which looks at 15,000 mothers who gave birth during 2000/01, found that family breakdown is five times more common among co-habitees than amongst married couples. The risk of breakdown was 6% for married couples and 32% among unmarried couples. Family breakdown, it found, resulted in higher levels of crime, anti-social behaviour, educational failure, and mental and emotional disturbance. For British Asians, the problems are more complex. With the added factors of religious law, arranged marriages and other cultural and religious considerations, it is increasingly hard for Asians to keep their families intact. Issues faced by Asians include teenage children being caught between the Asian culture and the expectations of their friends, and the growing assertiveness of Asian women, leading them to expect a more ‘Western’ marriage. Intercultural marriages, too, present their own challenges. Such problems require specialist help from trained counsellors familiar with the problems faced by Asian communities. Fortunately, UNITY provides such a service. At present, we focus on pre-marital, marital and post-marital counselling. |
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