Family Disorganisation:

The Discordia concord of social fabric

SUBMITTED TO: DR.JISUKETAN PATTANAIK

SUBMITTED BY: SNEH R.NO.-41

ASST. PROF (IVth Sem) BA. LLB(H)

SOCIOLOGY PROJECT

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF STUDY AND RESEARCH IN LAW RANCHI, JHARKHAND 2012-13

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CONTENT Table of Contents

S.No Topics Pg.No.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Disclaimer......................................................................................................... 03 Acknowledgement............ 04 Introduction........... 05 Family /Evolution of the western family.. ........................... 06 Family Disorganisation & the Bewildered Moral Standard of a modern family................................................................................................................. 08

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Divorce in an urban settlement...... .09 Desertion in an urban community...................................10 The Ecology of family disorganization... 11

Socio Analysis of a case of family disorganization12 Family Organization & Society..14 The Concept of family disorganization & its countless Reasons... 15 Conclusion...17 Bibliography18

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DISCLAIMER

This project has been prepared by me studying in NUSRL for academic purposes only. The views expressed in the brief are personal to the intern and do not reflect the views of any of personality or the judges from elsewhere. The project which is presented before you has not been copied from any website and a lot of effort has been made to ensure that this formal written project is devoid of various discrepancies.

SNEH Place: Ranchi Semester IVth NUSRL, Ranchi Date: 01st April,2012

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am highly obliged to my subject teacher Dr. Jisuketan Pattanaik who has guided me throughout this project and instilled in me the basic concepts and formats related to this formal brief of a renowned case. I am also thankful to my fellow colleagues who have helped me throughout and without whose cooperation and support, submission of this project would have been next to impossible. Above all, I am highly indebted to my parents who kept on motivating and cheering me to work for this project with complete dedication. It would be extremely unfair if our respected Vice Chancellor is not mentioned. He is the pillar of our institution which is yet to flourish. I am also thankful to him for his inspirational lectures and further deliberations.

Sneh B.A.L.LB. (Hons.) NUSRL, 2012

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INTRODUCTION

This project presents an overview of the traditional Indian family. The impact of India socio-political history on these families is also explored. The traditional Indian family was predominantly patrilinear in nature, extended families were the norm, and childbearing was of the utmost importance. Colonialism, industrialization and urbanization caused fathers to leave their families behind in rural areas to find employment in cities. Indian Rural marginalized people in all spheres of living and numerous laws limited their freedom of movement. All these factors contributed to the disintegration of Indian families. As a result divorce rates increased, parental authority declined and most people ended up living in poverty. New family structures, such as single-parent and nuclear structures have emerged. Despite all these negative influences, the Indian family proved its resilience and did not founder completely. A deep sense of union is a particular strength in this regard. However, Indian families need much support in overcoming the atrocities of the past. This project first focuses on the consequences of internal and external forces and events impinging on Indian families which may push them into difficult situations and may lead to family+ disorganisation or family dysfunction and this includes an examination of the variety of difficult situations faced by families in the contemporary society and theoretical frameworks which can be used to understand families as well as methodologies for making a holistic assessment of such family systems. It is therefore evident that the family is regarded as one of societys most germane pillars with strong edifice and solid foundation with stable family life and enhancing all social stability. It is thus accepted that the family is a dynamic, ever-changing institution which reflects societal changes. However, it is more or less true that recently, more than ever, the modern family is subjected to extreme pressures which have led to a worldwide decline in the quality of family life. The results of this includes, increasing divorce rates and family violence, as well as a breakdown of parental authority. Indeed, many professionals have come to the conclusion that the family as an institution is in a state of constant decline, and resulting into possible disintegration.

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Family
A basic unit of social structure, the exact definition of which can vary greatly from time to time and from culture to culture. Society defines family as a primary group, and the functions to be performed by these families, are by no means constant. There has been much preference of nuclear family, which consists only of parents and children, but the nuclear family is by no means universal. The primary functions of the family are reproductive, economic, social, and educational, it is through kinit variously defined, that the child first absorbs the culture of his group.1

Evolution of the Western Family

The patriarchal family, which prevailed among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, is often associated with polygamy . Earlier the only person recognized as an independent individual under the law. He possessed all religious rights as priest of the family ancestor cult, all economic rights as sole owner of the family property, and power of life and death over the members of the family. At his death, his name, property, and authority descended to his male heirs. The Roman system was transferred in many of its details into both the canon and secular law of Western Europe. In the 19th cent., when the Western nations began to grant women equal rights with men with respect to the ownership of property ( husband and wife), the control of children ( parent and child), divorce, and the like, basic changes took place in the structure of the family, and the rights and protections associated with it. The state has also intervened to modify the authority of parents over their children. At the same time, education has shifted increasingly from the household to the school. The effect has been to loosen traditional family ties. In Western Europe, where legislation provides equal financial benefits and legal standing to all children, families have increasingly come to consist of one or two unwed parents and children, especially in Scandinavia and other part of N Europe.2

Another factor affecting the modern Euro-American family was the Industrial Revolution, which removed from the home to the factory many economic tasks, such as baking,
1 2

The Family: Its Sociology and Social Psychiatry by Joseph Kirk Folsom, 604 pgs. Family Disorganization: An Introduction to Sociological Analysis by Ernest R. Mowrer. 320 pgs.Book

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spinning, and weaving. Economic and social conditions have discouraged the presence of the husband and father in the home; in industrial communities the wife and mother also is often employed outside the home, leaving the children to be cared for by others. Sociologists and psychologists find in these changed relations of the members of the family to each other and of the family to the community at large the source of many problems such as divorce, mental illness, and juvenile delinquency.

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FAMILY DISORGANIZATION AND THE BEWILDERED MORAL STANDARD OF THE MODERN FAMILY The lineage is one of the main matchmaking resources of socialization. Almost within the last generation the family has come into public consciousness as the matrix of a growing social problem. It is not alone an foster in the more palpable forms of family disorganization, such as divorce, separations, and desertions, which causes concern; these explicit forms are recognized as but the overt expressions of a new conception of the family, uneasily felt but as yet largely undefined. As the family has seemed about to disintegrate, programs and plans for its rehabilitation have appeared in numbers. Some seek to counteract the putrid forces with new rules of conduct and new ideals, others encourage clearing the ground for an entirely new institution. Few correspond either in analyses or causes or in remedies suggested. They are, all the same, a manifestation of current standpoint toward the family and thus may serve as a point of departure for more systematic study.3 The family is not simply a group of individuals living in close proximity, as formal studies of divorce and desertion often seem to believe. It is also an organization of attitudes and standards which each family develops independently and which characterizes the family as a cultural group. Family pride, family prejudice, the jokes and proverbs intelligible to no outsider, and the hopes and ambitions that distinguish families from one another help to make up what may be called the "family complex & thorn.

109kwww.css.ac.in/download/deviprasad/Article%20No.4.pdf

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DIVORCE IN AN URBAN SETTLEMENT The distinction between divorce (the legal dissolution of marriage) and family disorganization (the process by which the family group becomes disintegrated) has been recommended in this urban community. Divorce is but the legal recognition of the group that the family no longer has any subsistence in the attitudes of husband and wife-that the interests and aims of each have become completely differentiated. Give causes or factors of family disorganization from an investigation of legal causes upon which divorces have been granted tell little. They ignore the human-nature aspect of the problem, and regard divorce as the breach of a legal contract. It is necessary to go beyond the formality of the legal process of obtaining a divorce to discover what may be called the "natural" causes of family disintegration and factors which affect them. Statistics may seem a very formal method to use in discovering the factors affecting human relationships, yet through the proper manipulation of divorce records significant light may be thrown on the real causes of divorce. For such a statistical study it is advisable to select one community for exhaustive exploration. The chief advantage of this limitation is that the grounds upon which divorce may be obtained are uniform, not only for the community, but for the state in which it is located. This makes possible statistical comparisons of the local divorce rate with that of the larger political area of which it is a part. There are many landmark cases where judicial separation & divorce has been granted due to cruelty being meted out on wife and they filed divorce petition seeking divorce Saroj Rani vs. Sudharshan Chawda Harvinder kaur vs. Harvinder Singh

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DESERTION IN AN URBAN COMMUNITY

"Desertion is the poor man's divorce" is not an unusual expression among those who have to transact with the problem. Such a characterization of desertion expresses recognition that there is no fundamental difference between these two forms of family disintegration, except the differences between the two population groups from which the cases come. Desertion characterizes the poverty group, i.e., that group in the population which in an economic crisis must fall back upon the social agency for assistance. Divorce, on the other hand, is confined largely to the middle and upper classes. That the motives are essentially the same in both types of cases is implied in this expression. Sorry to say, no attempt has been made to study the two types together, though common sense would tend to confirm the hypothesis that fundamentally the causes of family disintegration differ little in the two groups, barring so far as poverty is a greater factor in desertion than in divorce. A comparison of desertion rates in various countries or in different areas within the same country has not been practically reasonable, because of the lack of statistics. There is an impression, probably correct, among social workers that desertion is a happening of city life, moreover, there is no "desertion" in any legal sense in the country, because there are no social agencies to report the cases, and no special courts to prosecute the offenders. At any rate, desertion is at present characteristically a problem of the city.

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THE ECOLOGY OF FAMILY DISORGANIZATION Statistics of family disintegration, such as of divorce and desertion, collected upon the basis of political areas are misleading whenever such areas do not possess the

cultural homogeneity assumed for them. A national realm of India is made up of not one area but of many areas--resident neighbourhoods, industrial communities, immigrant colonies, rooming-house districts--all nursing to have certain distinctive cultural characteristics. Instead of a homogeneous population there is heterogeneity of population by racial and national origin, by economic status, by marital conditions, and by intellectual type. Certainly, statistics of divorce and desertion compiled and tabulated for the entire India will mean little or nothing for any one of these areas. This insufficiency of data for the whole of India to be important for localities may be suggested by a comparison of an immigrant colony with a cosmopolitan community. "Back of the Yards," where the population is almost exclusively Catholic and largely foreign born, the divorce rate is low. On the Lower North Side, with its rooming-house population tending toward the Bohemian type, the divorce rate is comparatively high. Moreover, the ratio of divorces in either of these areas varies considerably from that for the whole of India. Even the layman recognizes the difficulties involved in assuming that the divorce rate for all of

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SOCIO-ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF FAMILY DISORGANIZATION The following analysis of the diary of Miriam Donaven is presented as a tentative exposition of a method which it is contended will contribute to the understanding and control of family disorganization a more effective technique of analysis than currently found in statistics of divorce and desertion. Such a method of analysis, with the modifications which application to more cases will bring, should lead finally to the utilization of quantitative methods resulting in the precision of prediction and control now found in the natural sciences. This tentative method of analysis may be divided into three parts: (1) Influences of ecological and cultural forces, (2) conceptualization of the conflict between husband and wife into a process or sequence of events, and (3) Interpretation in terms of attitudes and values.

SOCIAL BACKGROUND Miriam Patterson was not an unusual sort of person. She was just an ordinary girl who had grown up in Westfal with much the same outlook upon life one would expect of a smalltown girl. She was a high-school graduate, and had a fairly wide circle of friends. Her philosophy of love was typical of Main Street.H. E. Patterson, Miriam's father, operated a grocery in

West Heights during the early childhood of his daughter. When Miriam was about eight her mother and father were Statistics of family disintegration, i.e., of divorce and of desertion, have been concerned primarily, as has been seen,with the measurement of this phenomenon in order to dis- cover three things: (1) The extent of disintegration (2) The historical trend and

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(3) The causal factors Counting the number of cases within an area for a particular year gave the extent in absolute numbers for that area. Ratios, if desired, could then be computed from these data with reference to whatever data were thought to show significant relationships. Measurement of the extent of family disintegration at regular historical intervals gave a picture of the trend for a particular area.4 Here, again, the data were considered either in absolute numbers or in ratios. In the determination of the relative weight of causal factors, however, emphasis was directed almost exclusively to ratios, i.e., the proportion to the whole of the number of cases representing any one causal factor.5

The Personality and the family pattern by James S Plant, ch-VII.

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Family Organization and Society

By the concept of family organization we include both the structure and the function. Family organization refers to the marriage status and the relationships between parents and children. The status of husband and wife, parents and children, their particular roles, duties, and responsibilities, their emotional attitudes, and finally the related social sanctions, all determine the particular form and activities of the family. The family organization can obviously function only in reciprocal relation to the larger social order. Each is inevitably and vitally affected by the stability and organization of the other. The family is basic in the whole social structure, similarly the characteristics of family life are largely determined by outside influences in the form of secondary contacts. The nature, of both family organization and family disorganization is thus certainly affected by the culture of which it is a part. Today the family indicates increasing instability as evidenced in the number of marriages which end in divorce. But this does not mean that modern husbands and wives put an end to their marriages out of sheer and wilful perversity. But it does mean that family tensions are more right to lead to divorce than was true in our grandparents time. There were many unhappy marriages in earlier periods, but "good" women did not seek divorce even though they knew their husbands were philanderers. Commercialized sex barter bears witness to this possible divorce. The entertaining needs of the family were in the past were provided by the members themselves. This is still true in a certain sense, even though the actual locus of the recreational activity may be remote from the family residence. Inasmuch as it performs so large a share of the functions necessary for a healthful existence, the family has come to be characterized as a social and economic unit.

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THE CONCEPT OF FAMILY DISORGANISATION & ITS COUNTLESS REASONS

A. THE CHANGING FAMILY B. THE ROMANTIC FALLACY C. FAMILY TENSIONS D. FAMILY DISORGANIZATION E. AFTER DIVORCE F. DIVORCE G. CRUELTY H. ADULTERY I. CONCUBINE

1. Concord of Objectives: The organized family possesses an essential accord of objectives. That is, the members of such a family possess similar attitudes on the most important aspects of their joint actions. This similarity of attitudes is related to such mutual problems as the care and discipline of the children, their education, and the allocation of various items in the family budget, the location of the home, the question of sex relations, and other matters of a deeply personal nature. The organized family is one in which these common objectives are equally defined by all members of the family. In the disorganized family there is a failure of the husband and wife to define the situation in terms of common values. 2. Unity of Personal Ambitions: In even the most perfectly organized family the individual members holds different life pattern and different tastes. Complete harmony of personal ambitions with the welfare of the family is always difficult, if not impossible, human nature in an individualistic society being what it is. Nevertheless, the well-organized family is one in which the individual members subordinate their interests to the welfare of the family as a whole.6

The Family on the Threshold of the 21st Century: Trends and Implications

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For e.g. :- A father who refuses to deny himself any of his more expensive whims in order to feed and clothe his family adequately is failing in a basic function. The degree of individuality possible and desirable in the modern family varies considerably from that of the preliterates. Among many archaic peoples, the welfare of the family group is paramount. The individual does not count apart from his family affiliations. In our society such a complete identification is difficult where each adult member "lives his own life." But the degree to which this unity of definition is achieved is an index of family organization. 3. Unity of Interests: The members of the regal family possessed substantially similar interests in all important respects, since their lives were so largely bounded by the same narrow social milieu. In matters of religious practices, education, recreation, and economic activities, the various members of the family participated as a unit. Such an identification is clearly no longer possible in modern urban life of the large city, where the members of the Family develop different interests by virtue of their roles in the various secondary groups. A considerable similarity of religious, recreational, educational, and economic interests is characteristic of the organized as opposed to the unorganized or disorganized.

by Solly Dreman.

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CONCLUSION Augusta Comte, the father of Sociology, called Sociology as the queen of sciences. Some Sociologists have come to view Sociology in terms of natural sciences. Thus, in the area of socialization, there has been a steady progression from unidirectionaleffects modelsfirst, from parent to child, and then from child to parentto bidirectionaleffects models, and finally to multidirectional-effects models. The latter are more complex, more ecologically valid, but more difficult to test empirically. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable that models of socialization should reflect more sophisticated contextual theoretical approaches. Who are the agents or forces of socialization answers that those include parents, children, teachers, peers, institutions, the media, and society?

Parents socialize childrenbut children also socialize parents. Peers may socialize children even more so than parents. Likewise, parents' families and friends socialize parents. Furthermore, the media, historical events e.g., war, famine, industrialization, socioeconomic status, family structure, cultureall of these influence both parents and their children. By leaving these important factors out of our models of socialization, we limit the complexity of our theoretical models and thus our ability to explain important outcomes. Finally, socialization occurs in many different contexts i.e., at home, in the workplace as well as over the life-course.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles Referred:
The relationship between Certain family variables and The psychological well-being :By Carolina maria henn. Families in Difficult Situations : By B. Devi Prasad, Aruna khasgiwala and Thrity vaswani James S. Plant, Personality and the Cultural Pattern

BOOKS
Family disorganization An Introduction to a Sociological Analysis: By Ernest R. Mowrer, Ph.d. The Family: Its Sociology and Social Psychiatry :by Joseph Kirk Folsom. 604 pgs. The Family: Source Materials for the Study of Family and Personality: by Edward Byron Reuter, Jessie Ridgway Runner. 622 pgs.

NEWSPAPER
The Hindu The Times of India Indian Express

Link &Websites used:

www.unilorin.edu.ng/publications/jekayinoluwa/8.%20FAMILY%20DISORGANISATION.htm 109kwww.css.ac.in/download/deviprasad/Article%20No.4.pdf http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2966484?uid=3738256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=55981218903

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