Divorce is the legal procedure by which marriage can be formally ended. Not all societies permit divorce (e.g. the Republic of Ireland) but in the majority of western countries, not only is divorce now possible but also legal constraints and obstacles to divorce have been gradually reduced since the end of the Second World War. It is usually possible to divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, and it is no longer necessary to prove that a spouse has committed a matrimonial offence such as adultery or desertion. The fact that divorce is now easier to obtain has, however, led to a belief that divorce itself is easy. Moreover, the idea that couples divorce simply because they are incompatible masks the seriousness of problems that may exist within the institution of marriage. Such problems may include violence, economic deprivation and cruelty to children. It is a mistake to imagine that couples divorce readily for whimsical reasons.
In the European Union, Denmark had the highest rate of divorce in 1990 (12.8 divorces per 1,000 existing marriages) with the United Kingdom close behind (12.6 per 1,000). The USA has the highest divorce rate of all developed societies and some statistics suggest that one in two marriages will end in divorce. It is necessary to be cautious about such statistics and it is particularly difficult to compare trends across countries. It would, for example, be wrong to presume that marriages do not break down in some countries where legal divorce is not available or where it is restricted. Couples in Catholic countries, for example, may rely on the process of annulment or may simply separate without going through any legal or formal process.
The rise in divorce in the west, particularly immediately following the Second World War, led to concerns over declining moral standards and fears about the stability of society. Rising divorce rates have often been (popularly) associated with rising rates of illegitimacy and of delinquency; such trends can be seen as generating moral panics and tendencies to blame individuals rather than understanding the deeper structural changes which may be giving rise to such developments. These sorts of moral concerns continue in the 1990s but they have been largely overtaken by two questions of social policy: first, the relationship between divorce and poverty, especially for women and children; and second, concern over the welfare of children who have experienced their parents’ divorce.
It has become clear that divorce causes poverty because, at the very least, the same resources have to spread across two households (Eekelaar and Maclean 1986; Weitzman 1985). This problem is exacerbated if the main wage-earner re-partners and has additional children. Evidence suggests that the resulting hardship is most acutely felt by divorced mothers who typically retain the care of children. This is because they may not be able to return to the labour market or because they can do so only a part-time basis, often returning to lower status, more poorly paid jobs than those they held before their marriage. Such women tend to become reliant on low levels of state support, or on inadequate wages. In addition, in countries where health care is based on private insurance, divorced women often find they lose access to decent health care provision because it is typically attached to a husband’s employment and/or record of contributions. On divorce a wife can no longer claim on such schemes because she is no longer next of kin or family member, and it is unlikely that she will have sufficient contributions of her own to generate sufficient cover. Divorced wives also lose entitlement to their husbands’ occupational pension schemes and so, later in life, they are forced to become reliant on low state provisions or their own partial contributions. Thus divorce ‘stores up’ long-term poverty for many women if they have left the labour market to care for children and if they do not remarry (Glendinning 1992; Maclean 1991).
On the issue of children’s welfare, the main concerns relate to the effects of poverty and the effects of emotional disturbance on children. It is not easy to disentangle these two issues because typically children experience the loss of a parent (usually a father) at the same time as facing a significant decline in living standards. But research on the impact of divorce on children is quite contradictory with some claiming that divorce per se has little impact and others suggesting that it is very harmful. There has been an interesting shift in research focus since the 1960s and 1970s. In these decades the focus was on the potential harms of maternal deprivation. This research was often used to blame working mothers for producing delinquent children. In the 1990s, however, the focus became the absent father. It is now his loss which has become associated with disturbed or antisocial behaviour. As a consequence many countries in the European Union, the USA, Australia and New Zealand are now developing divorce laws which try to encourage fathers to remain in contact with children after divorce. Equally many are striving harder to make fathers pay more realistic amounts towards childrearing costs (for example the Child Support Act 1991 in England and Wales). Such policies could shift the economic burden of divorce on to men and away from women, but the complexities of many benefit systems and the difficulties involved in this redistribution may produce conflicting outcomes in which women and children do not necessarily benefit. It is clear, however, that many national governments wish increasingly to avoid paying for the economic costs of divorce through systems of state benefits. It remains to be seen what the consequence will be of these new strategies to deal with divorce.
Carol Smart
University of Leeds
References
Eekelaar, J. and Maclean, M. (1986) Maintenance after Divorce, Oxford.
Glendinning, C. (1991) The Costs of Informal Care, London.
Maclean, M. (1991) Surviving Divorce, London.
Weitzman, L. (1985) The Divorce Revolution, New York.
Further reading
Clark, D. (ed.) (1991) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social London.
Gibson, C. (1993) Dissolving Wedlock, London.
Mitchell, A. (1985) Children in the Middle, London.
