may be helpful if I give some examples of matrimonial wrongs which come from cases in which I have been involved professionally. The obvious examples are allegations from petitions alleging cruelty or constructive-desertion (i.e. where one spouse has been driven from the home by the conduct of the other). I have no figures at my disposal, but my guess is that petitions on these two grounds amounted to about one fifth of the total. The following are I suggest bad, but typical, allegations by wives against their husbands in the West Riding. Blows to the head and body with fists, kicks when the wife is lying on the floor, attempts to strangle, the wife thrown downstairs, beatings with belts, attacks with pokers or broom sticks, furniture and crockery thrown at the wife, crockery and meals thrown onto the fire. Often allegations have a sexual flavour. Beatings or the wife thrown out of bed if she refuses intercourse, milk bottles and broomsticks up the vagina, punches between the legs as she stands on a chair to reach a cupboard, kicks on the backside as she bends over the fire, sodomy until the wife screams with pain, punches in the belly when the wife is pregnant. These are what the Report calls superficialities. One lives, and learns! The enigma deepens when one realises that these acts are not always done by monsters; sometimes they are done by normal, and even occasionally likable, men. I have confined myself to allegations by wives against husbands; but it does not take much imagination to see what degree of provocation there must sometimes be on the part of the wives to provoke such conduct, for instance a wife using her sex to torment. This to my mind is one of the chief problems in divorce, to understand or at least to realise how relatively normal people, neither particularly good nor particularly bad, can do such appalling things to one another. I do not agree that the concept of the matrimonial wrong is a superficiality. It is a horrible reality; and until one realises this, then in my opinion one does not understand what divorce is all about.
Often in public discussions on divorce, the impression is given that the…