Statistics for failed marriages

I hope readers will bear with me if I correct some of the figures used by Kenneth Zammit Tabona in his otherwise helpful Talking Point of May 28, For Worse Or For Better?

For the record, the correct figures used in my think-tank report, For Worse, For Better: Re-marriage After Legal Separation, give the total number of individuals whose marriages were annulled/divorced or who were legally separated in 1995 as 5,098. This figure rose to 13,354 individuals in 2005 - not 17,000, or even 34,000, as inadvertently mentioned in the Talking Point.

In the three years from 2005 to 2008, there have been over 460 new ecclesiastical annulments and over 560 civil annulments, with over 570 cases pending in the ecclesiastical tribunal and over 270 in the civil court. Over the same three-year period there have been about 3,500 sworn separation applications submitted or mediations introduced, with over 1,000 separation cases pending. It has been estimated that the number of failed marriages in Malta will exceed 35,000 by 2015.

The thousands of people in Malta whose marriages have broken down are an impressive statistic. But each individual marriage breakdown represents a human tragedy. Raw statistics alone cannot begin to tell the full story. They certainly cannot begin to express the suffering of all those who are involved in the breakdown of a marriage - spouses, children and the wider family and social circle.

What the figures clearly show, however, are the trends in our society and the looming social pressure points which an enlightened government can no longer ignore. The starting point for any discussion must be an acknowledgement that marital breakdown is now a fact of Maltese life and it would be hypocritical to ignore it.