Amazing Graphic Shows Chicago’s Middle Class Disappear Before Your Eyes

By John Dodge
 April 3, 2014 11:12 AM
CHICAGO (CBS) — The graphic that you are about to see is sobering, perhaps depressing, and you can’t take your eyes off it.
We have the exhaustive work of Daniel Kay Hertz, a masters student at the University Of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, to thank for that.
At the risk of sounding like an old carnival barker, step right up and watch the middle class of Chicago vanish before your eyes.
However, this is no side-show.
It shows the demise of the foundation of an American city.
Watch as the grey squares, which illustrate the middle class that dominated the most of the city’s neighborhoods in 1970s, quickly vanish over 40 years.
The poor, represented by the orange and red colors, explode across the map.
And watch what happens in the green areas representing the upper middle class and wealthy. Not surprisingly, it spreads from downtown to the north side, but not with the same ferocity as the reds and oranges.
Especially in 2000, the greens-the color of money–grow much darker. It seems the rich simply got richer. In later years, the wealthy pushed the poor out of the near West Side. It appears that area bypassed the middle.
The data comes from the U.S. Census.
In his blog, Hertz says he fears that the often-told story of segregation and income inequality in Chicago has led to apathy.
“These facts somehow seep out of the ground here, as much a part of the city as the lake, and that as a result there’s really nothing we can do about it,” Hertz writes.
Hertz says the work isn’t meant to be depressing. Not along ago, he reasons, there was a large vibrant middle class in Chicago, and it is possible to get it back.
The goal of the maps “is not merely to depress you (you’re welcome!), but to suggest just how dramatically the reality of Chicago’s ‘two cities’ has changed over the last few generations, how non-eternal its present state is, and that a happier alternate reality isn’t just possible, but actually existed relatively recently.”

Jail Becomes Home for Husband Stuck With Lifetime Alimony

By Sophia Pearson - Aug 26, 2013 1:19 PM CT

Ari Schochet has grown so accustomed to being sent to jail for missing alimony payments that he goes into a routine.
Before his family-court hearing, Schochet, 41, sticks on a nicotine patch to cope with jailhouse smoking bans, sends an “Ari Off the Grid” e-mail to friends and family, and scrawls key phone numbers in permanent ink on his forearm.

 

Former Citadel Investment Portfolio Manager Ari Schochet stands for a photograph in a parking lot across from the Bergen County jail in Hackensack, New Jersey on April 15, 2013. Photographer: Sophia Pearson/Bloomberg

Schochet, who said he worked as a portfolio manager while at Citadel Investment Group Inc. and once earned $1 million a year, has been jailed for missing court-ordered payments at least eight times in the past two years as he coped with the end of his 17-year marriage.
The reason he ran afoul of the law was simple. He was out of work for most of that time, a victim of a weak economy, and he ran through his savings trying to pay his wife alimony and child support that totaled almost $100,000 a year.
“It’s a circle of hell there’s just no way out of,” Schochet said. “I paid it as long as I could.”
Schochet and ex-spouses in similar changed circumstances say New Jersey’s law unfairly imposes lifetime alimony on them. If they fail to make payments, like the $78,000 a year Schochet owes his ex-wife in alimony, they can be jailed for contempt of court regardless of whether they have a job or resources.
Relief may be on the way. In states such as New Jersey, Connecticut and Florida where divorce laws are based on century-old notions of what an ex-spouse deserves, laws are being proposed to limit alimony in recognition of wives’ earning power and the changed economic circumstances husbands can face.

Massachusetts’s Law

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers in 2007 recommended restricting alimony amounts and duration. The proposal became the basis for Massachusetts’s alimony reform laws in 2011. Those statutes eliminated permanent alimony and gave judges guidelines for calculating amounts.
Three states have enacted laws abolishing permanent alimony with caveats allowing discretion in exceptional cases, according to Laura W. Morgan, an attorney and owner of Family Law Consulting in Charlottesville, Virginia. Lawmakers in at least 10 other states, including New Jersey, are being prompted by advocates to consider more restrictive legislation, said Morgan, who is writing an alimony handbook to be published by the American Bar Association.
New York lawmakers are considering a bill that would create an alimony formula that would require that only spouses with much higher incomes than their ex-partners pay support.

Connecticut’s Law

Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy in June signed legislation revising the state’s alimony statutes to add education and earning capacity to a list of factors to be considered. The changes, which take effect Oct. 1, direct judges to specify the basis for any award of permanent alimony. The law also calls for lawmakers to study the fairness and adequacy of statutes governing alimony awards and make recommendations by February.
Florida’s legislature passed an alimony overhaul that would have eliminated permanent support. Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, vetoed the bill in May, citing its provision to allow changes to existing awards.
Following a state commission’s recommendation in 1995, New Jersey limited the duration of alimony after short-lived marriages while leaving intact permanent alimony and judicial discretion.
The first of two proposals before New Jersey lawmakers would allow modification of alimony due to changed circumstances such as a payer’s unemployment or disability. The bill, sponsored by Assemblyman Sean Kean, a Wall Township Republican, would keep permanent alimony. That bill and an identical one in the Senate have passed the judiciary committees.

Far-Reaching

A more far-reaching proposal, sponsored by six Assembly members including Kean and Charles Mainor, a Democrat from Jersey City, would abolish permanent alimony. Identical legislation in the Senate is sponsored by Sandra Cunningham, also a Jersey City Democrat.
The Mainor-Kean bill is modeled on the Massachusetts law, which was supported by women’s groups and the state bar association. It would base alimony on the length of the marriage and income and allow ex-spouses to stop payments when they retire.
“You have a moral and legal obligation to provide for your child until they’re 18,” Mainor said in an interview. “You don’t have that same obligation to your former spouse for the rest of your life.”

Reform Group

The Mainor-Kean bill is backed by New Jersey Alimony Reform, an advocacy group headed by Tom Leustek, a divorced Rutgers University plant-science professor from Rahway who pays his former wife alimony based on a private settlement to avoid litigation.
Mainor’s bill would leave in place three types of alimony: rehabilitative, reimbursement and limited-duration.
Rehabilitative alimony is to help an ex-spouse become self-supporting. It would generally be limited to five years barring “unforeseen events.” Reimbursement alimony can be ordered if one spouse supported the other’s advanced education expecting to share the “fruits of the earning capacity” it created.
Limited-duration alimony would be awarded for no longer than half the length of a marriage of five years or less, with higher percentages for those approaching 10, 15 or 20 years. For marriages of 20 years or more, payments could last indefinitely.
Alimony would end if the receiving ex-spouse remarried or entered a new civil union, as permanent alimony does now. It would end when the paying spouse reached retirement age, whether he or she retired. Judges could make exceptions to the rules “in the interests of justice,” based on evidentiary findings.

Circumstances Differ

The difficulty with strict criteria for alimony amounts is that family circumstances differ, Bonnie Frost, a former chairwoman of the New Jersey Bar Association’s family law division, said in an interview.
About 22,000 former spouses receive alimony under court supervision in New Jersey, with child support also going to about 60 percent of them. An unknown number receive maintenance under private settlements that couples reach before going to family court.
Persuading a judge to change amounts is difficult and expensive, Leustek said. The average fee for a lawyer to start the process is about $10,000, he said.
Mainor’s bill seeks to rein in judges by requiring them to justify their refusals to make modifications in writing.
Judges are following the law, not deciding cases “based on a public discussion about reform,” said Winnie Comfort, a spokeswoman for New Jersey courts.

Legal Origins

Alimony laws in most states originated when women typically stayed at home and depended on their husbands for financial support. If a husband left, the wife was entitled to lifelong support to avoid starvation, said Morgan, the family law attorney in Charlottesville. In the 1950s alimony was seen as necessary to a woman’s survival.
Women now make up almost half the labor force, 47 percent compared with 30 percent in 1950, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Dual-income couples accounted for 59 percent, of married households with children under 18 in 2011, according to the bureau. About a third of women earned more than their husbands in 2011, compared with 18 percent in 1987.
“But there is still a glass ceiling, and women are still earning just 70 cents on the dollar” earned by men, Morgan said.
She called the current push for change “very male-driven.”
“As men retire, they don’t want to keep paying alimony,” she said. “For every horror story that you can come up with about a support obligor, I can come up with 10 for an obligee who can’t make ends meet because her post-divorce standard of living has so drastically dropped.”

Women’s Stories

Women paying alimony have horror stories too. Alisa Whiting, 50, who helped form New Jersey Women for Alimony Reform last year, worked in the mortgage industry for 25 years earning about $160,000 with bonus in 2004, when she was a vice president at JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), she said.
Whiting’s ex-husband was self-employed with two businesses and made more than she did for most of their 20-year marriage, she said.
When he stopped working after she filed for divorce in 2008, she was ordered to pay $20,000 a year in alimony until her youngest son is out of college and $25,000 a year afterward.
Whiting lost her job that year and went to work for a software company in Woodbridge, New Jersey, earning $52,000 a year responding to requests for proposals. Her hours were cut July 1 to two days a week. She takes home about $800 a month, including unemployment payments, she said.

Own Counsel

She plans to represent herself in court in a request for an alimony modification.
“There are no words to describe the despair that I feel,” Whiting said. “I’m tired. It’s infuriating. Permanent alimony is an outdated concept. It’s based on a salary that I don’t have any hope of ever earning again.”
Support-enforcement hearings in Bergen County have been held in the county jail in Hackensack since Hurricane Sandy damaged the courthouse.
Accused scofflaws store their belongings in lockers in a central lobby before being sent through electronic metal detectors and corralled in holding cells that flank a fluorescent-lit multipurpose room.
Judge Lisa Firko, like other family-law judges, conducts hearings from a makeshift bench while jail employees pass documents between a court-appointed attorney and probation staff.
Schochet, who Citadel spokeswoman Katie Spring said in an e-mail worked as an analyst and “not a portfolio manager” when he was at the firm, parks in a dirt lot across the street when he’s required to make an appearance at Firko’s court.

Avoided Jail

Since April, he has managed to leave the jail following each appearance after Firko acknowledged his efforts to secure a well-paying job. Schochet now works part-time as an entry-level stock transfer agent, a job that leaves him with about $100 a month in disposable cash after garnisheeing and taxes. He’s got a steady girlfriend and job prospects.
“It’s amazing how small you can live,” said Schochet, whose longest jail stay was 11 days. “I’m down to paying for electricity, water, my cell phone, Internet and gas. Friends help out with whatever else I need.”
All that may be in jeopardy when he faces Firko again today to explain why he was rejected for a court-required $500,000 life insurance policy naming his ex-wife and children as beneficiaries.
Schochet’s ex-wife, Sharona Grossberg, declined to be interviewed about her divorce, which became final in April 2012. Her attorney, William Schiffman, didn’t respond to requests seeking comment on the case.
“When I tell people what’s happened to me these last two years they say, ‘Your story can’t possibly be true, and you must be in court because you beat your wife,’” Schochet said. “This has nothing to do with anything other than money.”

  Bloomberg.com

Don’t Marry

Why Modern, Western Marriage Has Become A Bad Business Decision For Men

The Marriage Strike

By Matthew Weeks
For those of you who know me in real life, this will not come as a surprise, but I have no designs on ever getting married. Now, it appears I am not alone in my disposition.
“Why Men Won’t Commit: Exploring Young Men’s Attitudes About Sex, Dating and Marriage,” a study released by researchers Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, concludes that men are, indeed, more apprehensive about getting married than before.
“The median age of first marriage for men has reached 27, the oldest age in our nation’s history,” Mr. Popenoe remarked in the Washington Times. “If this trend of men waiting to marry continues, it is likely to clash with the timing of marriage and childbearing for the many young women who hope to marry and bear children before they begin to face problems associated with declining fertility,” he continued. You know this is a collegiate study when an examination of a trend that is affecting men is used to fret about the state of women.
The study contains several possible explanations for this phenomenon, based on interviews with 60 single men, 25 to 33, who live in four parts of the country. While that level of measurement certainly is not statistically significant enough to reflect any kind of a national trend, responses generally revolved around the possibilities of suffering huge losses if the marriage ends in divorce. (“An ex-wife will take you for all you’ve got” and “men have more to lose financially than women” were common
refrains, the study reports.)
To humor the study’s results for a few minutes, let’s examine whether or not these young men’s concerns are justified. If we accept the old feminist argument that marriage is slavery for women, then it is undeniable that — given the current state of the nation’s family courts — divorce is slavery for men.
Take a hypothetical husband who marries and has two children. There is a 50 percent likelihood that this marriage will end in divorce within eight years, and if it does, the odds are 2-1 it will be the wife who initiates the divorce. It may not matter that the man was a decent husband. The reality of the situation is that few divorces are initiated over abuse or because the man has already abandoned the family. Nor is adultery cited as a factor by divorcing women appreciably more than by divorcing men.
The new trend that has taken hold of the court system is what as known as the “no fault” divorce, in which the filing party needs only to cite their general discontent with the marriage in order to be granted a hearing. Women initiate these unilateral divorces-on-demand 3 times as often as men.
While the courts may grant the former spouses joint legal custody, the odds are nearly 40 to 1 of the wife winning physical custody. Overnight, the husband, accustomed to seeing his kids every day and being an integral part of their lives, will now be lucky if he is allowed to see them even one day out of the week.
Once the couple is divorced, odds are at least even that the wife will interfere with the husband’s visitation rights. Three-quarters of divorced men surveyed say their ex-wives have interfered with their visitation, and 40 percent of mothers studied admitted that they had done so, and that they had generally acted out of spite or in order to punish their exes.
Then, of course, there is the issue of financial losses due to court-imposed payments. In the end (99 times out of 100), the wife will keep most of the couple’s assets and –if they jointly own one — the house. The husband will need to set up a new residence and pay at least a third of his take-home pay to his ex in child support, on top of whatever alimony payments the courts impose upon him. These can run as high as another third of his income. (Add the cost of taxes to that and the man gets to keep exactly 13% of his take-home pay — he’d better pray that’s enough to keep him alive.)
But as bad as all of this is, it would still make our hypothetical man one of the lucky ones. After all, he could be one of those fathers who cannot see his children at all because his ex has made a false accusation of domestic violence, child abuse, or child molestation. Or a father who can only see his own children under supervised visitation or in nightmarish visitation centers where dads are treated like criminals.
He could be one of those fathers whose ex has moved their children hundreds or thousands of miles away, in violation of court orders, which courts often do not enforce. He could be one of those fathers who tears up his life and career again and again in order to follow his children, only to have his ex-wife continually move them.
He could be one of the fathers who has lost his job, seen his income drop, or suffered a disabling injury, only to have child support arrearages and interest pile up to create a mountain of debt which he could never hope to pay off. Or a father who is forced to pay 70 percent or 80 percent of his income in child support because the court has imputed an unrealistic income to him. Or a dad who suffers from one of the child support enforcement system’s endless and difficult to correct errors, or who is jailed because he cannot keep up with his payments. Or a dad who reaches old age impoverished because he lost everything he had in a divorce when he was middle-aged and did not have the time and the opportunity to earn it back. Our imaginary man might consider himself lucky if he knew what his life could have been.
Over five million divorced men in America are currently experiencing the situation I just outlined. Without a doubt, their stories and experiences are heard by unmarried men. Can anyone truly blame the men for having apprehension? They stand to gain little and lose everything they’ve worked for in their entire lives should they “take the plunge”, so to speak.
So ladies, if you have a problem with this, speak to your feminist brethren. This is the legacy which they have left behind. By erasing the stigma of premarital sex and encouraging physical liberation, they have eliminated one of the most powerful incentives in history for men to tie the knot. By advocating government as a surrogate husband in the case of single motherhood, they have eliminated the disincentive for women to file for divorce. And through decades of litigious activism, they have given rise to the bloated and intrusive family court system and stacked it so egregiously against the men of this country that it now appears they are subconsciously engaging in what could be called a “marriage strike”, preferring to play the odds rather than assume a massively disproportionate amount of risk.
As for the men, make no mistake, they are slowly beginning to realize that the power is now in their favor. They have more and more perfectly legitimate reasons for remaining unmarried every day. Given a choice between not marrying one’s lady friend — assuming no risk whatsoever and still having the historical benefits of marriage (sex, companionship, etc.) available to them, or marrying the woman and having a 50-50 chance of their lives being utterly destroyed should the woman so much as be “unhappy” with the marriage, the decision is a no-brainer. What women perceive as a “fear of commitment” is really nothing more than a pragmatic assessment of the odds facing men in the prospect of a marriage.
Therefore, the trends evident in this study are not much of a surprise. I would wager that if the study were conducted nationally, similar results would be produced. Of course, such a study would invariably seek to address the grievances of the dejected single women of the country. My advice to them would be simple: offer to sign a prenuptial agreement that outlines the exact terms of a possible divorce: how assets would be divided, how any alimony and child support would be handled, and other vital elements that may be causing apprehension. And don’t be insulted if your potential mate asks you to sign one, or if he desires terms that will be equitable to him. No matter how strong your love may be for one another, the demand for eligible bachelors willing to commit to marriage is currently exceeding the supply, and if you won’t sign it, odds are that there’s another woman out there who will.
NOTE: Statistics in this article (and, in effect, much of its text) are drawn from Glenn Sacks and Diana Thompson’s Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed of 7/5/2002 entitled: “A Marriage Strike Emerges as Men Decide Not to Risk Loss”

Marriage Strike wikibin.org

The marriage strike is a media term for the recently acknowledged sociological mass action social phenomenon of men choosing to avoid legal marriage. The marriage strike refers to a behavioral trend, usually of men, living within the Western world. Media commentators examining the marriage strike believe that after a considered cost-benefit analysis, the legal contract that is modern marriage no longer represents an attractive option for men living in the changed legal, economic, sociological, cultural, and demographic environment.

In Britain, the number of weddings in 2006 was the fewest since 1895, with the proportion of people getting married falling to the lowest level since 1862, when marriage records began.

Appearance in the Media
In 2002, 'National Marriage Project', published their annual report on the state of marriage in the United States, The State of /Our Unions. The 2002 report was subtitled: Why Men Won't Commit - Exploring Young Men's Attitudes About Sex, Dating and Marriage. This study broke new ground in investigating men's role in the equation of contemporary marriage.

The report found that young men were reluctant to marry. Ten main reasons for their reluctance to marry were cited. The first 3 reasons were:
* 'They can get sex without marriage'.
* They can enjoy "a wife" through cohabitation'.
* 'They want to avoid divorce and its financial risks'.

'Marriage Strike'
After the publication of the Rutgers report, columnist and radio broadcaster Glenn Sacks, and Dianna Thompson, the executive director of the American Coalition of Fathers and Children, published a July 5, 2002 article in the Philadelphia Enquirer, titled Have Anti-Father Family Court Policies Led to a Men's Marriage Strike?.Versions of this original article were then disseminated widely.

An excerpt from the Dianna Thompson and Glenn Sacks article:

'Kathleen is attractive, successful, witty, and educated. She also can't find a husband. Why? Because most of the men this thirty-something software analyst dates do not want to get married. These men have Peter Pan Syndrome--they refuse to commit, refuse to settle down, and refuse to "grow up"'.



'However, given the family court policies and divorce trends of today, Peter Pan is no naive boy, but instead a wise man.
"Why should I get married and have kids when I could lose those kids and most of what I've worked for at a moment's notice?" asks Dan, a 31 year-old power plant technician who says he will never marry. "I've seen it happen to many of my friends. I know guys who came home one day to an empty house or apartment--wife gone, kids gone. They never saw it coming. Some of them were never able to see their kids regularly again"'.



'The US marriage rate has dipped 40% over the past four decades, to its lowest point ever. There are many plausible explanations for this trend, but one of the least mentioned is that American men, in the face of a family court system which is hopelessly stacked against them, have subconsciously launched a "marriage strike"'.



'"It's a shame," Dan says. "I always wanted to be a father and have a family. But unless the laws change and give fathers the same right to be a part of their children's lives as mothers have, it just isn't worth the risk"'.


Rutger's 2004 Marriage Report

In a 14 July 2004 article for Intellectual Conservative, retired professor of psychology and commentator Carey Roberts wrote a follow up article, this time on the findings of Rutgers University's 2004 The State of Our Unions report.

In his 2004 article, Carey Roberts stated:

'When almost one-quarter of single men in their prime courting years -- that’s two million potential husbands -- declare a Marriage Strike, we’re facing an unprecedented social crisis'.


'News of the Marriage Strike first began to settle into our national consciousness in 2002. That year, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe of Rutgers University interviewed sixty men to probe their attitudes about marriage. And to their surprise, they discovered that some of these men were flat-out opposed to tying the knot. So this year, the Rutgers researchers decided to launch a full-scale national survey of single heterosexual men, ages 25-34. These men represent almost 10 million of the nation’s most eligible bachelors. The report was just released last month'.


'Among those men, 53% said they were not interested in getting married anytime soon -- the marriage delayers. That figure alone is cause for concern. But this is the statistic that every American who wants to strengthen and protect marriage should be worried about: 22% of the men said they had absolutely no interest in finding their Truly Beloved. The report described these guys as “hardcore marriage avoiders.”


'Why are these men refusing to marry? Some of their reasons are spelled out in the 2002 report: “Some men express resentment towards a legal system that grants women the unilateral right to decide to terminate a pregnancy…There is also a mistrust of women who may ‘trap’ men into fathering a child by claiming to be sterilized, infertile or on the pill. Many men also fear the financial consequences of divorce…They fear that an ex-wife will 'take you for all you've got' and that 'men have more to lose financially than women' from a divorce."


'Four decades ago, radical feminists, taking their cue from Marxist-Leninist theory, decreed that marriage was nothing more than gender slavery. Claiming to speak on behalf of American women, feminists set out to radically rework -- or even do away with -- the age-old social contract of marriage. And women, mesmerized by the ephemeral promise of liberation and empowerment, opted to go along for the ride'.


'Now, feminists are succeeding beyond their wildest dreams. And women are left to wonder why their Prince Charming is nowhere to be found'.

Distinction
*The Marriage Strike is not 'organised'. It does not have 'leaders'. The marriage strike is a sociological example of . Mass action refers to situations where large numbers of otherwise isolated individuals independently come to similar conclusions, at the same time, and then act simultaneously on those conclusions in a seemingly coordinated action. A bank run is another example of mass action at work.

*The marriage strike also differs in how individual men prefer to apply their individual strike against their legal system.
**A man may continue a day-to-day marriage like relationship with a partner, and choose to simply forgo the legal contract aspect.
**A man may choose to completely disengage from all relationships.
**Taking advantage of a globalized world, a Western man may decide to pursue marriage and long-term relationships, but overseas, within a different legal jurisdiction, and a different cultural climate.

Key Elements
*Observers of the marriage strike hold that the combination of no-fault divorce, and prevailing prejudices within Western family law applied in divorce courts that are substantially more likely to favor the wife over the husband. This disadvantage extends to rulings over primary child custody, child visitation rights, ownership of the family residence and other shared property, child support, and alimony.

*It has been observed that this situation enables a woman to unilaterally divorce her husband, financially pauperize him, while simultaneously depriving him of the right to see his offspring.

*Observations have been made that since the divorce rate is high, and that women are more likely than men to seek no-fault divorce, then such divorce scenarios are a likely outcome of marriage, and therefore, men cannot be blamed for choosing to side-step a marriage contract. Many women with financial assets or with high paying salaries are also avoiding legal marriage.

*There have also been numerous studies showing that approximately 76% percent of no-fault divorces in the United States were initiated by women -- usually against a man who works a blue-collar job, and for subjective grounds such as "emotional unfulfillment", rather than any actual wrongful conduct of the man himself.

*Divorce is a $28 billion-a-year industry with an average individual case-load cost of about $20,000. Furthermore, it is an unquestionable fact that those men most unable to afford adequate legal representation, are most likely to financially suffer the greatest in resulting judgments and settlements.

*Such evidence gives rise to allegations that many women are unfairly reaping a financial windfall through divorce at their ex-husband's expense, and therefore, men should simply avoid this risk through avoiding marriage altogether.

*Commentators have conjectured that marriage poses absolutely no utility to a man whatsoever, in that traditional positive benefits of consortium, financial security, and child custody have been entirely revamped and eclipsed by reforms to original marriage laws.

*Likewise, external commentators have observed that other social changes, such as the opportunities presented by the advent of and the sexual revolution now represent equal or greater benefits to the lifestyles of non-married persons.

*Commentators hold that changes in family law have created a one-sided situation that unfairly benefits women in both marriage and divorce, to the man's detriment.

Legal Causations of Emerging Western Marriage Strike
The Financial Penalty of Divorce
*Marriage, while being publicly understood as a union between man and woman, is also a legal contract. Divorce then is considered a legal contract that is broken, and legal consequences come into play. There is a division of the previously shared financial assets of the married couple. Assets are divided for distribution to both parties by a court order. Typically, a woman will receive 50% ownership of the couple's assets on the divorce decree. These assets include property, housing, vehicles, savings, and investments.

No-fault Divorce
*No-fault divorce is divorce in which the dissolution of a marriage does not require fault of either party to be shown, or, indeed, any evidentiary proceedings at all. It occurs on petition to the court, typically a family court by either party, without the requirement that the petitioner show fault on the part of the other party. Either party may request, and receive, the dissolution of the marriage, despite the objections of the other party.

Father's Limited Access to Children After Divorce
*In the Western world, family law is structurally more likely to award primary child custody to a child's mother in the case of divorce. This legal situation results in fathers often having very limited access to their children after divorce. In an attempt to balance the rights and needs of the mother, father, and children, courts may award a couple joint custody of their children after divorce.

Alternatives to Traditional Marriage
Cohabitation Without Marriage
*Strong evidence suggests that Western men are choosing to cohabit, and not actually marry. Living with a partner presents a legally safer alternative, with marriage's benefits to both parties, a reduction in the penalties found within marriage, and without the hostility of divorce.

De-facto Law/Common Law:

*However, it should be noted that family law can also be applied in some nations (eg, Australia and Brazil) to de-facto relationships, also called common law marriages. After a certain length of time, the breakup of a non-marriage, live-in relationship can legally result in a man losing his assets to his 'de-facto wife', as considered by the law.

Prenuptial Agreement
*A prenuptial agreement, commonly abbreviated to 'prenup', is a contract entered into by two people prior to marriage. The content of a prenuptial agreement can vary widely, but commonly includes provisions for the division of property should the couple divorce and any rights to spousal support during or after the dissolution of marriage.

*All marriage dissolutions (divorces) have property distribution plans, either decided by the married parties, or decided by a divorce judge using guidelines written by state law. So technically speaking, all marriages have either a "prenup" decided by the marriage partners, or a "postnup" decided by a judge.

*Prenuptial agreements are rarely recognized by law in case of divorce. Prenuptial agreements are, at best, a partial solution to obviating some of the risks of marital property disputes in times of divorce. They are not the final word.

*Prenuptial agreements cannot specify zero amounts, can expire after time depending on state law (examples include Donald Trump divorcing Marla Maples before five years expiration, Tom Cruise divorcing Nicole Kidman before ten years expiration), and must be written properly to withstand court challenges.

*Prenuptial agreements are frequently challenged in court. For example, film mogul Steven Spielberg and actress Amy Irving had a prenup, written on a restaurant napkin, that was thrown out by the divorce judge, and Amy was awarded $100 million. Fashion models Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook had a prenup that was written so well Mr. Cook commented later that he would use Christie's prenup in his future marriage, as Peter was only awarded $2 million.

Consequences of the Marriage Strike
*Men's marriage strike is contributing to profound social changes in the West, increasing the pressure upon policy-makers to protect men's human rights in the equation of marriage & family. In mid-2008, the 2006 statistics on British births and marriages were released: 'Since 2006 the proportion of children born to married British parents is thought to have dropped below 50 per cent for the first time. They are being outweighed by those who are part of cohabiting couples or single-parent families. It comes as data from the Office for National Statistics show that women are having more children than at any time since the 1970s'.

*The same day, the Daily Mail also reported on the latest set of numbers: 'Official figures indicate that only a minority of children of long-standing British parents will grow up with a married mother and father. Most will be part of cohabiting or single-parent families. In contrast, only one in 50 children of mothers who were born in India before they came here had unmarried parents.'

*On the issue of less children being born into two-parent marriages, in 2006, Ann Widdecombe, a former Tory Home Office minister, said: 'After the death of the extended family, we are now seeing the death of the nuclear family. "The long-term consequences are bad for everyone. A well-ordered society is based on the bedrock of marriage, otherwise we will have increasing social disruption.'

Projected Future Consequences of the Marriage Strike for Western Women
Just as wider society is being shaped by Western men's disengagement from marriage, the marriage strike also represents a profound challenge to the lives of Western women.

*After the 2005 release of a government-commissioned study of contemporary social trends, the British government observed the future shape of British life: 'The report said that by 2031 40 per cent of men and 35 per cent of women aged 45 to 54 in England and Wales would not have married. "At the age of 45 to 54 the proportion of people married is projected to fall from 71 per cent in 2003 to 48 per cent in 2031 for men," a spokesman for the actuary department said. "For women, the figures are 72 per cent to 50. "The proportion of those never married by 45 to 54 is expected to rise over the same period from 14 to 40 per cent for males and nine to 35 per cent for females."

*In reaction to the publication of the same 2005 report, Jill Kirby, of the Centre for Policy Studies, stated: "The serious decline of marriage is a very worrying development. Cohabitation is an inherently fragile partnership. A lot of women in their forties and fifties will be living alone, perhaps having had a relationship or two but never having been married, with all sorts of emotional and financial implications. The question is: do we want these predictions to come true or do we want to try to recover some of the virtues and values of the past?"

*The Telegraph's article on the government report also observed that: The marriage projections have great implications for Government policy, as well as significant sociological effects. For example, terms such as mother-in-law and father-in-law will become far less common and there will be far fewer hefty divorce settlements in favour of women.