Divorce: stats still matter

In reading the reports on the Parliamentary discussion of the divorce law, I have come to realise that some people have never returned from Zog, the planet of black and white, devoid of all resources of nuance, where the two sides conducted their campaign.

For, as our MPs stand up and spout, preening themselves on whatever opinion they had held during their campaign, there is barely any acknowledgment that, for the divorce law to be implemented in the best possible context, both the anti and pro sides are going to have to swallow some of the pet sound bites of the campaign.

By the best possible context I simply mean the best possible setting, given the available resources, in which the divorce law can be implemented. For example, marital education courses and mediation services keep being mentioned. But on the basis of what information are such courses and services going to be offered so that they are as efficacious as possible and not simply state-sponsored exercises in pious hope?

Evidently, we are going to need sophisticated statistical information on marital breakdown and some of its social consequences. I don’t mean the long-term sociological studies of family structures that require many years of collaborative research. Obviously, that’s useful but our knowledge is so rudimentary that even information that can be collated fairly quickly would help a great deal.

Common sense suggests that some marriages are more vulnerable than others. But we are not in a position to test common sense, sharpen it or throw it out the window by correlating vulnerability to certain factors, such as age, education attainment and income.

Simply to admit that we need such information would require both sides in the campaign to eat some of their words. The pro-divorce side would need to recognise the idiocy of Deborah Schembri’s repeated complaint that anyone who mentioned statistics was refusing to recognise the individual personal stories. As any sports fan will tell you, statistics enhance our qualitative understanding of the most personal of sagas – whether we want to understand the impact of Maria Sharapova’s shoulder injury on her serve or the uncanny use that José Mourinho’s teams make of home advantage. Statistics on marital breakdown would help us understand the objective constraints within which ordinary people have to lead their lives. But the anti-divorce side would also need to recognise the largely fatuous use it made of statistics during the campaign. To say that we need to divide the pool of married people into different cohorts is to reject the anti-divorce ploy of lumping all of them together.

We need to be able to discern if there are any trends. Is the rate of marital breakdown of those couples who married between (say) 1990-1995 higher or lower than of those couples married between 2000 and 2005? That is to say, which of those groups feature more in the registered marital breakdowns of 2010?

Answers to such questions would help us have a sharper understanding of what’s taking place. The separation statistics may be rising but, theoretically, they might not be reflecting the trend of the couples who married most recently. The distinction may sound excessively academic. As it happens, however, in the US and much of Europe divorce rates for 1960s cohorts tend to be higher than those of later ones. (In Ireland, there is a similar trend operating for the cohorts of the late 1970s and 1980s: a higher rate than for the 1990s cohorts.)

Or take educational attainment. There is a common-sense prejudice that more affluent, professional “liberal” couples divorce more than working-class couples. In the US, the statistics show that couples with lower income and lower educational attainment are markedly more fragile. Liberal Massachusetts has a lower divorce rate than the Bible belt.

Surely, if that pattern holds for Malta it should make a difference not just for marital preparation but also for pre-emptive policies? The same consideration goes if statistics reveal that the number of children make a difference to vulnerability to breakdown. If Malta, like Ireland, finds that families with one child break down more often than families with no children or two or more, such families may be more efficaciously targeted, say, during the mother’s pregnancy, instead of during a general course on marriage two or three years before the event.

There are several other points of detail that can be raised (including qualitative explanations for why some of the statistics I’ve just cited). But the central issue remains this: The divorce campaign is over. It is not just the result that needs to be accepted. There is also the fact that in the heat of the campaign many things were said by both sides that need now, implicitly or explicitly, to be rejected. If, that is, this new law is to be supported by the best possible policies.

ranierfsadni@europe.com