ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters discuss family life from the perspectives of spouse selection, marriage, parenthood and the gender divide. I pay special attention to attitudes and actions of ordinary people as portrayed by personal interviews and the accounting of their activities in censuses and other statistics. The objective of this chapter is different and two-fold: to inform on unresolved marital conflict in Asia and to discuss an institution set up to deal with marital breakdown. On the first objective, I introduce the most relevant features of the Asian setting and present the trends in marital breakdown using comparative divorce statistics from nine of the ten Asian countries analyzed in previous chapters, three in East Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea) and six in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam).1 To meet the second objective I look into the process of institution building by focusing on the family court as one institution dedicated to the management of family conflict. I discuss four aspects of the family court: the definition and history of the family court concept; its multidisciplinary nature; problems in the implementation of a family court blueprint for the solution or containment of family conflict; and an overview of the family court in Singapore. The Singapore experience may be useful to other countries in the region.
