VeV President Oliver Hunziker takes stock and looks ahead.
Thoughts on the New Year
from Oliver Hunziker, President of VeV Switzerland
A new year has begun.
What was is over, what the future holds, we don't know.
So it's time to pause briefly and look back and forward.
The year 2017 brought us the new maintenance law. Long postponed, it finally came into effect on January 1st. Today, a year later, the uncertainty remains just as great. Judges, lawyers, and experts are completely divided on how the new law should be applied. This leads to considerable legal uncertainty because, currently, it is crucial where and by whom a judgment is handed down. It is more than urgently necessary that some landmark rulings are finally issued to restore clarity.
The new child support law also introduced shared custody as a possibility. This is very welcome; however, after the first year, a sobering assessment must be made. While there are certainly progressive institutions and authorities for whom reviewing the situation is a matter of course, unfortunately, the dinosaurs who continue to oppose this model with mostly untenable arguments are not yet extinct.
Just a few weeks ago, a Geneva study was published that described the alternating custody model as virtually unusable. At the same time, all pro-custodial experts from around the world were dismissed as dreamers and fantasists, while the cited critical experts were, of course, told the absolute truth.
Fortunately, the Federal Council only partially adopted the views of the study it commissioned and reaffirmed its support for alternating custody.
The question is not about the model itself, but rather about whether such a model is also possible when there are differences between the parents.
It's often said that quarreling parents couldn't make such a custody arrangement work.
That this is absolutely not true can be found in many sources.
However, it's certainly undeniable that, based on the above statement, even a simple, minor argument can be enough to bring such an arrangement to its knees. In other words, anyone who doesn't want shared custody only needs to engage in a little conflict. Unfortunately, our responsible authorities often simply refuse to acknowledge this effect. And so it happens that the parent who selfishly views the child as property and refuses to share it prevails.
Shared custody is an intrinsic principle, not an artificial model. Those who are convinced that a child needs both parents will inevitably favor this custody arrangement in the event of separation or divorce. Only those who believe they are the better parent will oppose it.
It should be noted that there are certainly situations where it might be more appropriate to hand the child over to only one parent. However, these cases are the exception, not the rule. In fact, in Switzerland, shared custody is currently the exception, not the rule. Something is clearly going wrong.
I urge our relevant institutions to examine these issues more closely. In many cases, the authorities have both the opportunity and the power to positively influence these situations. The vast majority of people are experiencing separation or divorce with children for the first time. They would be quite open to constructive solutions if only these were presented to them. Instead, far too many families are still being sent on a journey through the conflict, whether by heated lawyers, uninterested agencies, or even supposedly well-meaning colleagues.
At the beginning of a conflict, it would therefore be entirely possible to intervene and guide the process. Not only when the situation is hopelessly deadlocked, but as early as possible. At these crucial moments, authorities, experts, advisors, etc., could still exert influence and convince the parents to resolve the conflict as peacefully as possible.
For this reason, we revived the training program for separation counselors GeCoBi separation counselors are specifically trained to resolve separation conflicts as constructively as possible and to offer parents, and especially children, a good starting point for their future family structure at two locations.
But let's look a little further ahead.
GeCoBi will follow immediately in 2018 .
We will celebrate this properly; details will follow soon.
The training course will take place again in 2018, planned for May.
We will of course remain involved politically and socially – our task is far from over.
With that in mind, I wish you all a happy 2018.
All children need both parents!
VeV Switzerland – Association for Parental Responsibility
Oliver Hunziker
President