BIGAMY PREVENTION

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 119, 22 May 1928, Page 6

BIGAMY PREVENTION

An English jucltre has recently said that a method of preventing double or repeated marriages when one undivorced party to the contract is still living should be devised. The simplest action when once made cannot be unmade, and when an offence against the law is committed the punishment of the offender may accentuate the effect of the deed upon the doer but cannot lessen its effect upon others. The judge said that punishment inay be impressive, but ineffective in prevention, and added that the present system of marriape registration is '"full of loopholes." There have been men who have married many women in a few years, and when a seducer baits his trap with matrimony few women are resistant and an unscrupulous scoundrel finds easy prey. All he has to do to escape one marriage and contract another is to move to another locality, and perhaps also change his name. This is not a trick easily defeated. In the first place, every candidate for matrimony should be compelled to prove identity by production of a birth certificate, and this certificate should bear evidence of any previous marriage and of the partner's death or divorce. A bachelor would have an unendorsed "clean" certificate, and as a birth certificate is always obtainable (very few exceptions) there would be no hardship if marriage was postponed until those who did not carry one procured it. The number of bigamous unions before the English Courts average 500 yearly, and it is probable that twice that number escape public notice. It is not only the women who suffer wrong; there is often a child or children, and these legally nameless ones are frequently reared in poverty, .the disgrace of the mother adding to the undeserved misery. The men who come to New Zealand and Australia leaving wives elsewhere are not inconsiderably numerous, and, apart from the method here suggested, they are protected by distance and the cost of pursuit and exposure from just retribution. The law provides a means of escape from an unhappy marriage and the man who runs, hides and "marries" again has no reasonable excuse for his conduct. More often than not bigamy is of the fourth degree, that is, it is but a means of extorting money from unsuspicious women, several, perhaps, being deceived, robbed and deserted in turn by one man. A woman who neglects to make a legal marriage her fixed condition of union is beyond help from the State, which cannot do more than issue warnings and offer legal protection. If the State closes the "loopholes" mentioned by the judge, and in the manner described herein, marriage will have greater honour and heartless rogues one scheme the less for exploiting the "lonely woman." Almost incredible stories come to us from European countries relating the infamous doings of men who appear to have a special fascination for spinsters and widows of mature age and from whom money has often been obtained by the simple device of a bigamous marriage. There is no property in names, and an assumed name and title and a plausible address form a stock-in-trade easily carried. It is to be hoped that the National Council of Women will urge the Government to amend the law relating to marriage registration. —H.A.Y.