Divorce

The rate of divorce in Australia has be steadily increasing since 1901 with a large increase in the mid 1970’s. Today around 50% of marriages end in divorce but this seems to be levelling off. To understand this current phenomenon we need to understand how we got to being like this, that is take a look at history and identify significant changes in society that have resulted in a large increase in divorce.

Today people are delaying marriage, in the mid 1970’s the median age of marriage for men was just under 24 year and around 21 years for women now it is around 32 and 30 years respectively. People are also living much longer, life expectancy is now 77 years for men and 82 years for women, compared to 1910 where it was 59 years and 55 years respectively (ABS, 2004, Year Book 2004 Population, Deaths).. This combined with the fact that 40% of marriages fail within the first 30 years and the average lenghth of a marriage being 7.6 years (http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/laca/Famserv/chap2.pdf) shows that statically a high proportion of marriages will fail. Another interesting fact that in 1993 69% of men and 65% of women remarried. There has been a slight drop in the number of people getting married but this doesn’t indicates that peoples desire to get married has changed, rather there desire to be married to the one person is what has change. This phenomunum has been given the term �serial monogamy’ by sociologist and is backed up by evidence, in 1998 33% of marriages were remarriages, of those 13% where 3rd time remarriages and 1% were doing it for the 4th time (Willis ABS 2000 Australian social trends 1999 Family formation: Remarriage trends of divorced people, Canberra).

Two out of every three divorces are initialted by women (http://www.aph.gov.au/house/committee/laca/Famserv/chap2.pdf Through out history the ability for women to leave unhappy marriages has been further enhanced. 1940’s legislation which provided wealfare support for divorcees(Find this act) prior to this, a decision to leave a marriage was a decision to enter poverty. Also the creation of the CSA and division of assets legislation meant that if children were involved in a divorce, the parent who would take care of them, (almost always the mother), would be able to support themselves and the children financially.

Women have also been able to use birth control, such