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THE HIGH PRICE WE PAY FOR DIVORCE

It is not often that "dry as a bone" statistics can hold one's interest (unless, of course, one is an accountant)!

Occasionally though, statistics can grab our attention because they reveal startling facts about ourselves and give us insight into the direction society is heading.

For example, we now know that our no-fault divorce, which came into effect in Canada in 1986, has led to some unintentional consequences, which include the following:

1. Child Poverty

We frequently hear laments about the large number of Canadian children living in poverty. Nobody mentions the reason why so many children are living in poverty. The reason? Out of wedlock births, divorce and separation, which leave lone parents to raise the children. According to Statistics Canada 1996 (Statistics Canada Catalogue 13-207), the incidence of low income among families with children in 1996 was as follows:

Children in lone-parent families headed by women in 1996 were more than five times as likely to be in a low-income situation than children in two-parent families. This pattern continued in 1997, when 56.0% of children in female, lone-parent families had a low income, compared with 12% of those with two parents. The low income incidence for female lone-parent families has been consistently above 50% since the early 1980s. So what is the answer to this problem of child poverty? Strengthen marriages and keep families together. This will not only increase a child's chances to succeed in life, but will also make his/her growing years healthier and happier.

This can be done by programs that promote marriage as a personal and social good, such as realistic marriage education programs starting in high school, tax exempt marriage counselling and, above all, amending the 1986 Divorce Act to eliminate no-fault divorce, which now permits a spouse to walk away from a marriage at will.

Some U.S. states have shown the way to provide marriage education programs. These have been established in the states of Florida, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Tennessee. To encourage participation in the programs, some of these states have also reduced marriage license fees for couples who have participated in the programs. Utah offers marriage conferences, and provides a "healthy marriage" video at county clerks' offices. U.S. President Bush has proposed a "healthy marriage" program to provide states with a $300 million fund for education and promotion of healthy marriages.

Why isn't something like this being done in Canada in order to establish marriages and aid those in trouble, in order to reduce child poverty? Instead, we pump more and more tax dollars into government programs to assist low income families after the fact of single-person parenting and of separation/divorce - never trying to assist the family either to form in the first place or stay intact.

2. Financial and Psychological Costs of Broken Marriages

Marriages that do not form, or that fail, create not only a financial burden on the individuals themselves, who must now pay the costs of maintaining two separate households, but also create a heavy financial burden on the taxpayer as well. This is due to the fact that following divorce, many divorced individuals require welfare assistance, extensive support systems such as child care subsidies and more support from the health system because of the emotional consequences of the break-up on family members.

A recent study (2003) by researcher David Schramm at Utah State University entitled, The Costly Consequences of Divorce in Utah: The Impact on Couples, Communities and Government, outlined the high annual cost of divorce to the taxpayer. It works out to $33.3 billion dollars annually, $312 per household, or $125 million per one million of the population across the U.S. There were 1.1 million divorces in the U.S. in 2000, or a divorce rate of 4.7 divorces per 1,000 of the population. In Canada, in the year 2000, there were 71,144 divorces, with a divorce rate of 2.36 per 1,000 of the population - half that of the U.S. Nonetheless, this still means, according to the Utah study, that Canadians may also be paying out at least a hefty $16 billion annually to cover the fall-out from divorce. This figure does not include the high cost in broken lives, such as juvenile delinquency, school drop-outs, unmarried pregnancies, etc., which are much more prevalent in single-parent families, according to a 1996 Statistics Canada longitudinal study of 23,000 children.

Divorce apparently has an especially alarming impact on adolescents. The latest evidence of this comes from the Netherlands - perhaps the most "progressive" and "tolerant" country on earth when it comes to diverse family forms. The study indicates that the problems of children living in broken homes spring from something other than the prejudice of benighted traditionalists!

In this study of 1,120 Dutch adolescents 11 - 18 years of age, researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Mental Services Research found that compared to peers living in an intact family, Dutch adolescents living in a one-parent family were more than twice as likely to need psychological help and more than three times as likely to be referred for mental health services. If a divorce in the family actually occurred during their adolescent years, Dutch teens were nearly five times as likely to need psychological help, and almost 10 times more likely to be actually referred for mental health services as children living in intact families.

Some people think marriage and divorce are private matters in which others have no business. They are wrong. We are all involved with the consequences of each family that does not form and with each family in which a divorce occurs.

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