ABSTRACT
W.H. Auden (1907-73), ‘Birthday Poem’ According to Rimmer (1981), one in three of all marriages are now remarriages for at least one of the partners, and recent figures indicate that about half of these are likely to end in a further divorce. The stepfamily is not a new family phenomenon, though until this century stepfamilies were more likely to be created following the remarriage of widows or widowers. Since the increase of longevity as well as the rise in the divorce rates, most stepfamilies are now likely to be those which result from divorce and remarriage. Although nuclear families are frequently idealised, mythology and folklore indicate that stepfamilies are regarded with intense ambivalence if not outright negativity, on one hand featuring wicked stepmothers who dominate a passive father and terrorise their children; and on the other, sexually predatory stepfathers with an innocent young girl who may or may not ultimately triumph (see ‘New beginnings’, page 127). Another view is that of the classic Oedipal triangle of sexual rivalry either between the girl and her stepmother or between the boy and his natural father for a usually much younger stepmother (Maddox 1975). Such cultural negative stereotyping of the stepfamily is evident, even in the euphemisms for stepfamily-such as ‘blended’, ‘reconstituted’, ‘remarried’, ‘second’, ‘merged’, ‘combined’ or ‘reorganised’. This negative stereotyping distorts
perceptions, ‘so that what is perceived is believed about the group’, which leads to a less favourable evaluation regardless of what behaviour is observed (Coleman and Ganong 1987). A further example of this can be seen by the stereotyped media mythology, following enquiries into child abuse cases which have resulted from the death of a child at the hands of their stepparent-as for instance, Maria Colwell (1974), Wayne Brewer (1976), Jasmine Beckford (1986) and Kimberley Carlile (1987); and the ‘discovery’ of child sexual abuse (see Chapter 7, ‘Physical and sexual child abuse in stepfamilies’, page 149).
