Personal family conduct and public family policy

norman dennis, 6 December 2004

‘Creating stronger families’ was an explicit objective of the Home Secretary’s recent Five-Year Plan. ‘Families’ were allegedly placed ‘at the heart’ of his policy to combat crime. (Confident Communities, Cm 6287, July 2004.) In the document, however, the word ‘family’ appears only when it means any household arrangement whatsoever. ‘A family’, to the Home Secretary throughout Confident Communities, is a household composed of any single adult, or any ‘partners’ of any sexual orientation, in any relationship, together with children, whatever their parentage. In the whole of the document ‘marriage’ is mentioned once, and then in order to denigrate it. At the time, I was baffled that in formulating public policy a Home Secretary could dismantle and transform the concept of the married family in this way. I’m not baffled now.