Ties, damned ties and statistics

Parliament's Social Affairs Committee has called on researchers on "the family" to approach it to discuss "factors that unite and separate Maltese families". Hopefully, the committee will also be calling on the government to present certain statistics on actual household arrangements.

They are badly needed if Maltese family stability is to be better understood. Not having them weakens the government's claim to have families at the core of its concerns.

Currently, the Prime Minister is able to reel off a string of statistics to explain why he believes that (say) the low participation of women in the labour market is not as bad as it looks. He can and does slice up the problem in terms of age, education and work sectors and on this informed basis he extrapolates trends. But what statistics can he actually cite, one way or the other, about family stability?

Family stability is not exactly the same as marital stability but let us just focus on the latter. There is no (public) statistic that can be used to compare Malta with other European and Western countries. The court records of formal marital separations involve double counting. On their own, the absolute numbers of cohabiting and separated persons, available from the decennial national household census (last conducted in 2005), tell us nothing really meaningful.

However, the latest census can be used to work out some indicative statistics, even if it is limiting to have statistics for one year only. It would be useful to position Maltese rates of separation somewhere along the range of European divorce rates.

There will be technical matters to sort out. Demographers use more than one definition of a "divorce rate". The Maltese statistics would need to comply with the standard ones, especially the "refined divorce rate". But such matters can be sorted out easily by the right people.

It would also be useful to be able to make comparisons within Malta. A while ago, this column advocated the use of a modified Human Development Index (HDI) for marriage. By comparing life span, income and educational attainment (plus ready access to ICT) of married couples and their children with other relevant categories of households, we should be able to gauge something about the social consequences of marital separation in Malta, as distinct from elsewhere.

Equally, we should have a statistical breakdown for marital separation in terms of age, income group, educational attainment, number of children involved and the duration of the marriage. Some of those statistics would require new information to be collected. But it surely is worth knowing whether separations are really ballooning among young couples, if a major or minor proportion of separations directly involve children and if educational attainment matters one way or the other.

Obviously, such statistics should complement not displace qualitative research. But they would be relevant to understanding what keeps families together and what, if anything, public policy can do to help. Statistics would introduce more reason into public policy debates on the family.

A word about what statistics cannot do. They will not take politics out of public policy. If statistics do not take the politics out of economic policy, why should it be different for the family?

Indeed, one can expect that the wider the range of statistics we have, the greater will be the scope for political disagreement. One reason is that it will be necessary to select the statistics that require policy attention. And selection requires a political evaluation.

For example, US statistics show an interesting correlation for some states: suicide rates for women and rates of domestic violence both went down when divorce laws were liberalised to permit unilateral divorce (and hence, arguably, easier escape from brutal marriages). But other statistics correlate divorce to negative outcomes for children and certain categories of women. It may be possible for creative lawmakers to address both sets of issues; but usually they need to choose to prioritise one issue rather than another and priorities are driven by political judgment and agendas.

Indeed, in political practice the same set of statistics often fuels cries for two conflicting agendas of reform. Liberals tend to see family statistics as calling for greater deregulation of household arrangements, while conservatives call for greater government intervention to protect and privilege married heterosexual couples.

It is an entirely legitimate debate to have. The polarisation is sometimes silly (but that evaluation, too, reflects partisan judgment; that of a centrist). However, what is depressing is trying to understand our situation and debating it by bandying the statistics of other societies, rather than our own. Or is that mild depression preferable to looking more closely at ourselves?

ranierfsadni@europe.com