In
the United States, in 2005 there were 7.5 new marriages per 1,000
people, and 3.6 divorces per 1,000, a ratio which has existed
for many individual years since the 1960s.[1] As many statisticians
have pointed out, it is very hard to count the divorce rate, since
it is hard to determine if a couple who divorce and get back together
in that same year should be considered a divorce, so there is
in fact no predictive relationship between the two annual totals.
This method does not take account of the length of marriage, just
the fact that a certain percentage of people were divorced and
a certain number of people are married, rendering the statistic
problematic. Nonetheless, the claim that "half of all marriages
end in divorce" became widely accepted in the US in the 1970s,
on the basis of this statistic, and has remained conventional
wisdom. Pollster Lewis Harris in his 1987 book "Inside America"
wrote that "the idea that half of American marriages are
doomed is one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense
ever perpetuated in modern times."
To establish an actual divorce rate requires tracking
and analyzing significant samples of actual marriages through
decades, which is not an easy task. Recent US scholarship based
on such longterm tracking, reported for example in the New York
Times on April 19, 2005, has found that about 60% of all marriages
that result in divorce do so in the first decade, and more than
80% do so within the first 20 years; that the percentage of all
marriages that eventually end in divorce peaked in the United
States at about 41% around 1980, and has been slowly declining
ever since, standing by 2002 at around 31%. Some have attributed
this decline to the popularity of co-habitation without marriage[citation
needed]. While in the 1960s and 1970s there was little difference
among socioeconomic groups in divorce rates, diverging trends
appeared starting around 1980 (e.g., the rate of divorce among
college graduates had by 2002 dropped to near 20%, roughly half
that of non-college graduates).
In the decades following introduction of no-fault
divorce laws, there was an extraordinary increase in divorce rates,
and more recent research has clarified that US divorce rates had
been on a gentle increase since the 1890s (with a short-term decline
during the Great Depression and a spike just after World War II).
The long-term rate of increase steepened with the advent of no-fault
divorce laws in the late 1960s; the gradual decline starting in
the early 1980s has continued for a quarter-century thus far,
often attributed to increased social acceptability of co-habitation
without the benefit of marriage[citation needed].
States in the US handle billions of dollars in
alimony and child support arrangements, which commonly result
from divorces. (According to a 2003 US census report], 43.7% of
custodial mothers and 56.2% of custodial fathers, are divorced
or separated.) A 2005 Census Bureau Report found that in 2002,
$40 billion had been paid in support arrangements by 7.8 million
payers, 84% of whom were men. States also collected federal incentives
to collect support payments, with a potential incentive pool of
up to $454 million in fiscal 2004.
The Italian national statistical institute found
a 74% divorce increase between 1995 and 2005.
The divorce rate is generally low among Muslims,
in comparison to other religious groups.[citation needed] This
may be due to the somewhat strict limitations generally placed
on divorce in Islam, as well as a very strong culturally-based
stigma associated with it. However, at least in some Muslim populations,
that rate may be rising. For example: in 2004 in Singapore (which
has an 18% Muslim population) many feared that the divorce rate
among Muslims had risen too high: 9 out of every 1,000 marriages,
a ratio 3 times higher than Malaysia, and 5 times higher than
Indonesia.
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