SOCIETY-CHILE: Problems of Recognition and Protection

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Gonzalez

SANTIAGO, May 25 1998 (IPS) - Chilean law dictates that only the traditional model of a family – with children born after the marriage of the parents is recognised. There is no recognition of children born out of wedlock nor are there any divorce laws to regulate any marriage breakdown.

The social problems of recognition and protection of families were aired recently at a seminar organized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Family Foundation, a government organism headed by Marta Larraechea, wife of President Eduardo Frei. It Coincided with the International Day of the Family, celebrated by the United Nations since May 15, 1994, in the International Year of the Family.

“Different families, infinite dreams, just one Chile” is the motto of a campaign launched by the Family Foundation, which seeks precisely to raise awaremness of the changes which have occurred in the classic or conventional family structure.

Minister of the National Service of Women, Josefina Bilbao, and the former Christian Democrat Mariana Aylwin, agreed there is no recognition of the diversity of family groups and situations in this country.

In Turn, Carlos del Castillo, UNDP representative posted in Chile, stated that the United Nations proposed for this year the slogan “the family as educator and promotor of people’s rights.”

The sentence is related to the commemoration in 1998 of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also covers the importance of the family as a basis for the strengthening of democracy and social justice, said Del Castillo.

“The forms in which families are structured, operate and develop, along with the perception of the family in society, vary significantly from one country to another,” said the Uruguayan diplomat.

“However,” he added, “in any culture the family provides the natural framework in which material support, emotional solidity and training in values is received, everything that is vital for the development of the individual.”

“If tolerance, respect and equity permeate family life, these become values which become influential in society, and therefore in the nations and the world,” said UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The challenges for the traditional family institution were reflected in the last UNDP report on Human Development in Chile, called “The Paradoxes of the Modernisation,” which analyses the social behaviour of the population.

Del Castillo indicated that 26 families chosen at random, interviewed in this study, had a crisis which led to situations of insecurity, and even those which overcame it said they did not possess the necessary resources to confront the new threats emerging from the social surroundings.

“The weakness of the families became clear in the difficulties in managing, without disintegrating, challenges like the incorporation of the wife into the workforce, the increasing individualisation of the communicative preferences and styles of the children, the economic demands and other forms in which modern life particularly intervenes in family life,” said the expert.

Bilbao repeated that the modern cultural and economic phenomena, together with social backwardness, mean families are becoming increasingly diverse from the point of view of their make up and leadership.

The nuclear family no longer responds only to the ideal of the Judeo-Christian culture of a group based on matrimony, with a two- parent leadership, that is with the permanent presence of a couple in charge of one or more children born of this union.

Single-parent families are increasingly numerous and the number of households headed by women is on the up especiallly in the strata of extreme poverty.

In the two-parent area there are also the reconstituted families, generally made up of couples who have children from previous marriages, where either one or both of the partners have been married before.

Then there are also the extended families, where the couple and their children are accompanied by other relatives, and where there are also single-parent set ups, as well as situations where the parents are replaced by the grandparents.

Teenage pregnancy and adoptions are other elements which generate family relationships not covered in the present legal code of Chile. The legal code also does not consider the conceptions of the family of the indigenous groups like the Mapuche, Aymara, Rapuni and Kawashkar, which together make up 10 percent of the Chilean population of nearly 15 million people.

Bilbao stressed that at present, 42 percent of the children born in Chile are born out of wedlock, but that 70 percent of these are recognised by both parents, which indicates these are stable partnerships, prevented from formalising their union due to the current laws.

Domestic violence is another factor which needs to be tackled, as, according to statistics, 85 percent of child offenders have been victims of abuse in their homes, said socialist deputy Isabel Allende.

For Bilbao, the family must be the space where everyone can participate in equality of conditions and develop their differences and, therefore, their potentials and difficulties should be recognised in the face of society. “And the society of the future will not be able to be defined in a rigid form nor measured with dogmatic extremes,” she declared.