Men Who Leave Home

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 688, 13 June 1929, Page 8

Men Who Leave Home

Deserting Husbands and Their Cost

DESERTING husbands are costing- the people of Auck land somewhere about £IO,OOO annually.

Perhaps the greatest problem facing the Minister of Justice today is that of dealing effectively with these domestic defaulters, of whom there are well over 1,000 from Auckland alone.

Tlie mere administration of justice to men wlio desert their ■wives and leave their economic dependants upon an already overburdened charitable relief department does not settle the economic problem, nor does it extinguish the moral debt incurred by the deserter himself. Exaction of ven-geance—-which the law describes as justice—is in its result simply a case of the dog snapping at the wolf and the wolf snapping at the dog. Nobody benefits in the end, but everyone finishes up one degree worse than before the trouble began. Wife deserters are recognised by social workers to be a bad lot. “All rotters,” one man described them. But there again, analysis of their normal conscieuce does not bring the problem any nearer solution. True enough, the defaulting breadwinner is the worst type of case upon which the magistrate is called to adjudicate, and upon whom maintenance officers are compelled to keep an alert eye, because under the existing machinery of the law it is not worth while bringing him to justice once he is caught. PITIFUL PROCESSION There are approximately 4,000 payers of maintenance in Auckland. The Magistrate’s Court deals with 1,500 or 1,600 cases every year—a pitiful procession of domestic tragedies in which three out of every four are traceable to wife desertion, and in which many fall by the wayside and are forced along to pay their arrears. Some husbands clearly state their intention of leaving home; others disappear on the pretext of looking for worlf; a few walk out and slam the front door without a word of explanation. The sum of £20,000 is collected annually under maintenance orders in this city. Figures compiled by the Auckland Hospital Board tell their own vivid story of the rapidly increasing band of wife deserters who disappear from the district —and frequently from the country—and throw the responsibility of keeping their dependants upon the State. In 1924 there were 135 defaulters brought under the notice of the board,,

and their dependants totalled 455. The cost of charitable relief was estimated to be £2,730. In the succeeding years, recording as they did a steady shrinkage in the wage-earner’s spending margin, there was a sympathetic increase in the number of defaulting husbands, until today the number is close upon 200, and their dependants well over 600 people. The cost to the people in direct relief payments to these dependants is a great deal more than £4,000. In addition to this relief paid to the wives and families of these men, cases of hospital treatment for which the fees must be written off as irrecoverable are estimated to cost a further £4,000 or more, while the education of children, and incidental expenditure on their behalf, cannot be overlooked in the computation. Altogether, the round estimate of £IO,OOO would no more than barely cover the cost to the people of men who shirk their responsibilities. TROUBLE IN THE HOME The problem is rapidly becoming more acute. Soon the authorities must face it, for it threatens to outgrow the organisations established for its control. Recent increases among defaulters are startling, and the burden upon the State grows daily heavier and more irksome. The causes of this dismal social trend are in the main traceable to the common causes of most social discontent. Poverty brings the seed of discord which later germinates into domestic intolerance and then to open hostility. “I feel that the unemployment problem is the chief cause of husbands leaving their wives in the lurch in such great numbers,” a prominent woman social worker in Auckland ventured. “Lack of work breeds the first germ of discontent in any home, and that leads later to more widespread trouble.” A man, following closely the general problem, waved his hand toward the marriage age statistics and the divorce figures. “There is the trouble,” he suggested. “Youth; enthusiasm; marriage; children; all these we have in great measure. Two things alone are lacking—manliness and money!”