DAILY MAIL: Family breakdown is a "cancer" behind almost every evil affecting the country, a senior judge will declare today.
Mr Justice Coleridge blames youth crime, child abuse, drug addiction and binge-drinking on the "meltdown" of relations between parents and children.
He warns that the collapse of the family unit is a threat to the nation as bad as terrorism, crime, drugs or global warming.
The speech to family lawyers contains a fierce attack on the "neglect" of successive governments.
The 58-year-old judge, who is married with three grown-up children, will say family breakdown is an epidemic affecting all levels of society from the Royal Family down.
It is "on a scale, depth and breadth which few of us could have imagined even "a decade ago. It is a never-ending carnival of human misery. A ceaseless river of human distress.
"I am not saying every broken family produces dysfunctional children but I am saying that almost every dysfunctional child is the product of a broken family."
The judge, who is in charge of family courts across South-West England, will say he has a duty to speak out.
He will call on the Government to put the family at the top of its agenda, alongside the economy and the war on terror - and make it "rather more important than taking oaths of allegianc" [sic].
His speech will say: "Families are the cells which make up the body of society. If the cells are unhealthy and undernourished, or at worse cancerous and growing haphazard and out of control, in the end the body succumbs.
"In some of the more heavily populated urban areas, family life is quite frankly in meltdown or completely unrecognisable . . . it is on an epidemic scale. In some areas of the country family life in the old sense no longer exists." Family Life Is in 'Meltdown': Judge Launches Devastating Attack on Our Fractured Society >>> By Steve Doughty
Mark Alexander
