I am suspicious of the statistics because Sweden is an
anomaly in such social statistics. Sweden has the world's highest percentage of
cohabitation, that is unmarried couples living together. The Swedish government
also offers certain rights to cohabiting couple, its kind of like a hybrid of
common law marriage and domestic partnership, but not marriage in the fullest
sense. Many people have nick named it 'marriage-lite'. That is why most people
choose not to get married but remain cohabitants.
When there are so few marriages, how are there so many
divorces? Well the statistics say that most people who do choose to get
married, half of those end up getting divorced. That's not that far-fetched or illogical.
However, it makes one wonder why go through the
hassle of being married, only to be divorced – when the government does
offer cohabitation benefits.
That is why most reputable statistics on any marriage,
divorce and cohabitation percentages actually have footnotes, excerpts etc explaining
what they used to determine their statistics for Sweden and other European
countries that have similar anomalies – so that they make sense and such
discrepancies are explained. This statistic list did not have such footnotes
explaining numbers, which makes me highly suspicious. Most sociological
studies, feminist studies like the Rutgers university study have shown that the
Swedish divorce rates while alarmingly high and increasing, have always been
lower than the United States. Another caveat in this statistics.
Now the Divorce Magazine is just a magazine for legal and
other divorce help and information and has no reason to skew their statistics. However,
when I looked at their source they never compiled the list. They obtained the
statistic from a third party called Americans for Divorce Reform. This third
party is not a reputable research institute, nor are they known to have
conducted any real research into marriage and divorce. They are an evangelical
American group promoting what is called 'covenant marriage'. This is a legal
arrangement where a couple before marriage legally bound to make the marriage
work even if things go wrong. They can divorce only if certain pre-agreed
circumstances occur – like abuse, felony or adultery etc. There are several
problems with this arrangement. For example - even if a spouse is an out of
work alcoholic or junkie, but not physically abusive – there is no grounds for
divorce. This 'covenant marriage' is nothing but another way for evangelicals
to define marriage and divorce as how their church views it and dismissing
other social perspectives.
It is not beneath this group to skew statistics
based on its agenda. It is actually known to portray socially liberal European
countries in a negative light to show that social liberalism is not conducive
to healthy society and family. That is why this list appears to have higher
divorces in socially liberal countries, and lower divorces in socially
conservative countries. Yes it is true
that socially liberal countries do have higher divorce rates, but I would not
take it at face value based on this statistic. In fact marriage and divorce
stats are hard to uniformly gauge based on different rules regarding marriage.
For example Catholics have lower divorce rates, but that is skewed based on the
fact that Catholicism frowns on divorce and many Catholics attempt to annul the
marriage – which is a different statistic. Countries based on Islamic laws
allow polygamy, but it would be grounds for instant divorce in another country.
Its hard to compare it as apples to apples – that's why it is imperative that the
study have more substantial grounds
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