Abstract Sneh Socio Final

8/2/2019 Abstract Sneh Socio Final

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Family Disorganisation: The Discordia concord of social fabric

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

DR.JISUKETAN PATTANAIK SNEH

R.NO.-41ASST. 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. Disclaimer......................................................................................................... 032. Acknowledgement............ 043. Introduction........... 054. Family /Evolution of the western family.. ........................... 065. Family Disorganisation & the Bewildered Moral Standard of a modern

family................................................................................................................. 08

6. Divorce in an urban settlement...... .097. Desertion in an urban community...................................108. The Ecology of family disorganization... 119. Socio Analysis of a case of family disorganization1210. Family Organization & Society..1411. The Concept of family disorganization & its countless Reasons... 1512. Conclusion...1713. 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 Date: 01

st

April,2012

NUSRL, Ranchi


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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 thefunctions 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

The Family: Its Sociology and Social Psychiatry by Joseph Kirk Folsom, 604 pgs.2Family 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.

3109kwww.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 totransact 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 sequenceof 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 small-

town 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 discover

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

4The 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 affectedby 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 totheir 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 FAMILYB. THE ROMANTIC FALLACYC. FAMILY TENSIONSD. FAMILY DISORGANIZATIONE. AFTER DIVORCEF. DIVORCEG. CRUELTYH. ADULTERYI. 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

6The 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 unidirectional-

effects modelsfirst, from parent to child, and then from child to parentto bidirectional-

effects 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 :ByCarolina maria henn.

Families in Difficult Situations : By B. Devi Prasad, Aruna khasgiwala and Thrityvaswani

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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