The Living Together Campaign - An investigation of its impact on legally aware cohabitants

Research Report to the Ministry of Justice, UK.This is a summary of the findings of a short study carried out between January and September 2006 into the behaviour and attitudes of a group of ‘legally aware’ cohabitants/former cohabitants and intending cohabitants who had accessed The Living Together Campaign (LTC)’s website on the legal position of cohabiting couples - http://www.advicenow.org.uk/livingtogether. ‘Legally aware’ cohabitants are defined here as those cohabitants who do not believe in the ‘common law marriage myth’ and thus are aware by having accessed the LTC website or by prior knowledge that they do not have the same rights as married couples.Ministry of Justice, UK

Cohabitation and the law: myths, money and the media

This chapter version has been deposited with the kind permission of Sage. The definitive version of this chapter was published by Sage in the 24th British Social Attitudes Report 2008, by Alison Park, John Curtice, Katarina Thomson, Miranda Phillips, Mark Johnson, Elizabeth Clery. ISBN: 9781412947749. Available at: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book231969The 2000 British Social Attitudes survey confirmed a growing social acceptance of heterosexual cohabitation as a partnering and parenting choice and identified strong public support for reform of cohabitation law. It also established the existence of a ‘common law marriage’ myth whereby the majority of the public, and cohabitants in particular, falsely believe that cohabiting couples who have lived together for some time have the same legal rights as married couples. Even among those cohabitants who were aware of their vulnerable legal position, it was found that very few had taken appropriate steps to gain or provide legal protection despite, as we found in subsequent research, often having good intentions to do so. These findings prompted widespread media interest and government concern. This led the Department for Constitutional Affairs (now the Ministry of Justice) to fund their 2004 Living Together Campaign, aimed at advising cohabitants about their legal rights and indicating practical steps they could take to gain marriage-like protection where possible. Subsequently, in 2005, with Scotland having already decided to reform the law relating to cohabiting couples (see Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006), the government decided to refer the issue of whether cohabitation law should be reformed to the Law Commission for England and Wales, a decision which sparked further media interest. The attention paid to cohabitation over the last few years makes it worth revisiting the subject, to see whether, and how, behaviour and attitudes are changing. So our first aim in this chapter is to examine the evolving prevalence and role of cohabitation as a relationship form in British society. Our second aim is to establish whether attitudes to cohabitation have changed, and whether legal knowledge and actions have increased following a period of sustained government and media focus. Finally, we consider public beliefs about cohabitants’ legal rights and financial practices. This latter issue is vital, as the courts may now take into account how cohabiting couples manage their money in deciding appropriate legal remedies on separation. Some of our key findings have already informed the deliberations of the Law Commission, due to report to Parliament in 2007, but this is the first full account of our research

Transcriptional changes in response to X chromosome dosage in the mouse: implications for X inactivation and the molecular basis of Turner Syndrome.

BACKGROUND: X monosomic mice (39,XO) have a remarkably mild phenotype when compared to women with Turner syndrome (45,XO). The generally accepted hypothesis to explain this discrepancy is that the number of genes on the mouse X chromosome which escape X inactivation, and thus are expressed at higher levels in females, is very small. However this hypothesis has never been tested and only a small number of genes have been assayed for their X-inactivation status in the mouse. We performed a global expression analysis in four somatic tissues (brain, liver, kidney and muscle) of adult 40,XX and 39,XO mice using the Illumina Mouse WG-6 v1_1 Expression BeadChip and an extensive validation by quantitative real time PCR, in order to identify which genes are expressed from both X chromosomes. RESULTS: We identified several genes on the X chromosome which are overexpressed in XX females, including those previously reported as escaping X inactivation, as well as new candidates. However, the results obtained by microarray and qPCR were not fully concordant, illustrating the difficulty in ascertaining modest fold changes, such as those expected for genes escaping X inactivation. Remarkably, considerable variation was observed between tissues, suggesting that inactivation patterns may be tissue-dependent. Our analysis also exposed several autosomal genes involved in mitochondrial metabolism and in protein translation which are differentially expressed between XX and XO mice, revealing secondary transcriptional changes to the alteration in X chromosome dosage. CONCLUSIONS: Our results support the prediction that the mouse inactive X chromosome is largely silent, while providing a list of the genes potentially escaping X inactivation in rodents. Although the lower expression of X-linked genes in XO mice may not be relevant in the particular tissues/systems which are affected in human X chromosome monosomy, genes deregulated in XO mice are good candidates for further study in an involvement in Turner Syndrome phenotype.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Financial affairs? Money management in same-sex relationships

The present paper offers a qualitative analysis of how 22 co-habiting same-sex couples manage and think about their finances. Results show that partial-pooling and independent management are the most popular systems with emphasis placed on egalitarianism and devising a fair money management strategy. Significant income disparities between most partners necessitated the adoption of a system of proportional contributions to joint expenses. Despite attempts to equalise outcomes, an underlying norm of equality (characterised by equal contributions) paradoxically (re)produced the status and control of the higher earner in most cases. A degree of financial autonomy was an important ideal highlighting a valuing of co-independence rather than financial 'merging' for lesbian and gay couples. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved