DIVORCE RATE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23033, 10 May 1938, Page 13

DIVORCE RATE

BRITISH STATISTICS ; MANY UNHAPPY UNIONS ONE OUT OF EVERY 87 [from our OWN' correspondent] LONDON, April 14 According to the latest official figures of the Registrar-General one marriage out of every 87 in this country ends in the' Divorce Court. That is the proportion worked out on tiie basis of something over 4000 divorces a year, which is the total reached for the last few years, writes a representative of the Evening News. In the last two years there has been a slight ralling-off in the number of divorces, but the new Act is clearly going to increase tho work of tho ('ourts. A supplementary list of nearly 1500 cases-; has already been added to those down for hearing during the current term. The highest ratio of divorces so far reached in this country was in 1928, when the decrees granted represented one in every 75 marriages. A year or two before that the proportion was 1 in 106, and 20 years ago 1 in 386. Marriage Rate Continues to Rise One curious disclosure of the divorce and marriage statistics is that the increased number of marriages dissolved has been accompanied by a continuously rising marriage-rate. In the last half-dozen . years the marriage-rate has risen steadily from | 15.3 per 1000 population to 17.4. j Even among divorced people the i number of remarriages is increasing J rapidly. A few years ago 60 per cent was considered a high proportion. Now j j the ratio for both sexes is nearly 75 ! per cent. Most Divorced Men Remarry More than 76 per cent of all divorced husbands now remarry, and the vast proportion of them take spinsters for I their second wives. In the same way I divorced women nearly always marry bachelors. Out of 6468 divorced people who remarried in 1936, the latest year for which returns are available, only 365 of the marriages were of brides and bridegrooms who had both been divorced. The danger period in marriage appears to be shifting a bit later than the eighth year, which has hitherto been notorious. The latest figures show that 55 per cent of the divorces were of couples who had been married for 10 years and upward.