Time for action on soaring divorce rates
It’s an idea whose time is long overdue. Mumbai’s Catholic Church is offering marriage enrichment cards and free weekend cruises to couples who opt for its marriage strengthening courses.
By getting couples to enroll, the church is hoping to counsel them to start working on their marriages and bring divorce rates down.
It’s time other communities took the idea of marriage counselling seriously. Officially, India has one of the world’s lowest divorce rates, pegged at 1.1% (that is, only 11 marriages in every 1,000 end in divorce). But like most statistics, this number conceals more than its reveals.
Given India’s patriarchal society and the low status of women, divorce is frowned upon, particularly in the rural areas, and couples find it much simpler to separate rather than go in for a legal divorce. This is particularly true for women.
But urban India has a different story to tell, and divorce rates are rising phenomenally. A news report two years ago said that Mumbai and Thane recorded a 40% divorce rate for the period 2002-07; that is, for every five weddings registered, two divorce pleas were filed in family courts during the same period. In Delhi and Bangalore, studies have shown that divorce rates have doubled or even tripled over the last decade.
This dramatic surge is the result of many factors: nuclear families and working couples with long working hours face stresses and strains that previous generations did not. Couples in the IT and BPO sectors have among the highest divorce rates. The absence of a joint family means that there are no elders to guide couples whose marriages may be going through a rough patch.
What makes it worse is that Indians are loath to seek out shrinks or counsellors to save sinking marriages. It is to change this mindset that the church is offering freebies. But, clearly, the time has come to launch a campaign to get couples to seek professional help when their lives are going through hell.
https://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/editorial_time-for-action-on-soaring-divorce-rates_1462362
