SHARED custody of children has gone up from just 2% to 25% of families in a decade, according to latest figures – one in four divorced couples with one or more kids in common have set up an almost 50-50 régime of upbringing and residence.
Brought into play in 2005 through an amendment to the Spanish Civil Code, joint custody means the child effectively lives with both parents, alternating residence between them, although not necessarily strictly half their lives with each.
The aim was to prevent the agony suffered by one parent – usually, statistically, the father – of missing out on his child's life by becoming a 'weekend dad', or even going months or years without seeing the children at all.
In many cases, until then, a father could find himself paying the mortgage on the family home for the mother and children to live there, on top of his own mortgage or rent, plus a childcare allowance, and yet rarely spending any time with his sons or daughters at all.
But joint custody has proven to be a double-edged sword in a high number of cases: fathers who are not really interested in bringing up their children applying for shared custody to avoid paying childcare maintenance, or even – if he remarries and has stepchildren – to increase his immediate family unit to three kids or more to qualify as a 'large family', with the consequent benefits and tax breaks this brings.
It has even led to women who have left violent husbands being forced to let their children spend time with these men, and unable to detach themselves from their abusers, but numerous campaigns are currently running to call for anyone charged with domestic violence, male or female, to be barred from unsupervised access to his or her children.
Four in 10 families in Catalunya; fewer than one in 13 in Extremadura
Although shared custody has rocketed since 2005, after the first five years a huge difference has been seen by region, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
This was because some of Spain's 17 autonomously-governed regions introduced their own laws on child custody – for instance, parents in the land-locked western region of Extremadura are five times less likely to be able to access a joint care agreement than those in the north-eastern region of Catalunya.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com