Are we getting married to get divorced?
by
İHSAN İKİZER*

There have been changes in our world not only physically, such as the global environment or ozone depletion, but also socially, among them in science, technology, advanced communication, rapid transportation and increased living standards. But how are we faring in terms of our happiness? Do people form happy marriages or partnerships that last? Unfortunately, no. Although it might be thought that marriage concerns only couples and their children, should they have them, this is not the case. Taking into consideration that family forms the nucleus of society, any problem occurring in this nucleus affects the periphery or, in other words, the whole of society.

In social exclusion, which has been a domain of great interest in the academic world, the number one risk group is children of single parents. The concept of “social exclusion” has been developed to explain the situation of a variety of groups that have loose bonds with the rest of society. Like all other concepts, social exclusion has been defined by numerous scholars through the perspectives they stand on. One of the catch-all definitions adopted by the EU is as follows: “Social exclusion is a process whereby certain individuals are pushed to the edge of society and prevented from participating fully by virtue of their poverty, or lack of basic competencies and lifelong learning opportunities, or as a result of discrimination.”

According to the European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions, 42 percent of children and adults living in single-parent households face poverty. Single-parent households are mostly the result of divorce, although there are other possibilities, such as the death of one parent, separation of never-married couples and teenage pregnancy. Why are children of single parents at the top of the groups most likely to be excluded from society?

Single parents are usually mothers who have to take care of their children. Mothers often hesitate between working and sending their children to daycare centers, which are costly, and taking care of the children at home by relying on single-parent benefits, which are usually insufficient. A third option might be for single parents to work on a part-time basis. But it is a fact that the employment rate among single parents is low. For example, in the UK, there are 1.69 million single parents and just 56.5 percent of them are employed. So, we can say that as the number of divorces increases, the probability of the children of these couples to be trapped by social exclusion or poverty increases. We are not talking about the psychological effects of divorce on a child, but sociologically, it is a fact that these children are more prone to be socially excluded.

After giving this brief account on the link between social exclusion and single-parent households, which is a result of divorce or separation, let’s see some divorce statistics in Europe. In the EU-25 (excluding Bulgaria and Romania, as they were not members at the time these statistics were prepared), 35 per 100 marriages end in divorce, which is four times more than the divorce rate in Europe in 1960.

Since the mid-1990s, in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Finland, Sweden and the UK, more than half of all marriages ended in divorce. Belgium leads in terms of the divorce rate in the EU as of 2005. In this country, the rate of marital breakdown is around 70 percent. In Germany, in 2005, around 375,000 couples got married while around 225,000 couples divorced. To make a comparison, in Turkey, an EU candidate, which has a population similar in size to Germany, around 640,000 marriages were registered while around 114,000 couples got divorced. The divorce/marriage ratio in Germany is 0.6 while it is 0.1 in Turkey.

In the EU-25, there were around 2.2 million marriages in 2004; however, there were also around 1 million divorces in the EU-25 in the same year. The ratio was almost 5:1 in 1980, or more specifically, for every 4.6 marriages there was one divorce in the EU. Between 1990 and 2005, over 13.7 million marriages ended, affecting more than 21 million children. In the US, around 40 percent of all marriages ended in divorce as of 2008.

This single-parent phenomenon is rapidly increasing in Europe. According to the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, almost 20 percent of European children live in single-parent households. In some cities, this rate is astonishingly very high. For example, in the capital of Scotland, in some areas, around 40 percent of households are headed by single parents. The children of single parents are at a greater risk for poverty and deprivation, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, suicide, poor educational performance, teenage pregnancy and criminality.

There are no EU statistics on the probability of children brought up by single parents suffering from social exclusion, but there was a study that was done in Britain by the Centre for Social Justice cited in the “Breakdown Britain” interim report, which might be more or less valid for all of Europe. According to it, if a child was not brought up in a two-parent family, s/he is:

 75 percent more likely to fail at school

 70 percent more likely to be a drug addict

 50 percent more likely to have an alcohol problem

 40 percent more likely to have serious debt problems

 35 percent more likely to experience unemployment/welfare dependency

Whether a legal marriage or cohabitation, whatever the type of union, one fact is that more and more people are ending their union and leaving children exposed to social problems. If the couples have no children, probable negative effects of this break-up are restricted to them. But if there are children, then severe social problems might emerge, especially when coupled with financial problems. All in all, policymakers need to take this bleak family picture into consideration when formulating all their policies as things are not going well in European families.

ihsan.ikizer@student.kuleuven.be