Fewer marriages end in divorce-expert

Press, 25 May 1989, Page 14

Fewer marriages end in divorce-expert

PA Hamilton The theory that one in three New Zealand marriages ends in divorce is a myth, according to the president of the Demographic Society, Mr Mansoor Khawaja. Statistics had been wrongly manipulated to arrive at that figure and a nearer estimate would be one in five, Mr Khawaja said at the society’s conference in Hamilton. The estimates, however, varied from year to year. “They took the number of marriages in one year and divided it by the number of divorces to get one in three. But the divorces in that year aren’t the result of the marriages in the same year, so it’s misleading,”

Mr Khawaja said. Suggestions that the divorce rate was increasing in New Zealand was another fallacy, he said. “It is 50 per cent higher than it was 30 years ago in 1958, but it has been dropping since 1982. So people who say the divorce rate is going up are wrong,” he said. Mr Khawaja used statistics to discredit another belief about divorce increasing among parents whose children had just left home. He said the rate was actually declining among marriages in the older age groups, so children leaving home were not causing a rash of divorces among couples finding themselves on their own

again. Divorce was far more accessible to couples today than it was between 1867 and 1872 when only five divorce petitions were filed.

In those days it was only wealthy people who could afford the trip to Wellington for the court hearing who seriously contemplated divorce. Divorce legislation had changed four times since then, moving away from a punitive approach to become a remedy for an unhappy relationship, he said.

The concept of matrimonial fault had been dropped and the 24 grounds for divorce simplified into one of "irreconcilable difference.”