When elites reject data: marriage stability at the UN

Men, in countries like Australia, could hardly be said to be “in charge” within the family; but that was not the main focus of the International Day of Families for 2015. The Secretary-General’s message for the day observed that in “too many countries, discrimination against women and disregard for children’s rights remain built into family laws and government policies”.

The meeting began with presentations by four of my colleagues in the Expert Group. As we opened up to questions, the diversity within the audience became clear. The first question came from an African woman who introduced herself as the Queen Mother of her nation. Another question came from a student at an American university who wanted to talk about gender equality in raising children; another came from a Moroccan woman who wondered about whether there should be a new international instrument on the family. A representative of the Church of Latter-Day Saints asked whether it was possible to have patriarchal families without patriarchy, while a senior UN official asked what we could learn from matriarchal families.

A woman from Belarus announced that she belonged to a group called Friends of the Family. She protested about the portrayal of families in negative terms as giving rise to problems that needed to be solved through UN policy. Friends of the Family was led, we were informed, by certain governments in the Arab world. It had been continuously critical of the UN’s liberalism on family policy. Clearly, this group was unlikely to be keen on gay marriage.

The answers given to these questions were unmemorable—they usually are in such sessions. The great questions about family life cannot be answered in a few words, and in any event will not be answered in a manner satisfactory to the questioner by someone who is unsympathetic to his or her worldview. The purpose of the question is to raise an issue, and implicitly to make a point in so doing. It was a highly performative session.

So here, in one room at the UN headquarters, was great diversity of thinking about the family. The session provided a small insight into the conflicts about family policy which the Division for Social Policy and Development needed somehow to address. Yet the International Expert Group, brought together to advise the UN secretariat on family policy as it sought to advance its development goals, did not reflect that diversity.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/jTMZoQC