In our divorce debate, the numbers sometimes seem obtained by rolling of the dice. And, depending on which side one's on, the dice may even seem loaded. The anti-divorce side hints darkly at a campaign that underestimates the sheer number of successful marriages. It is in turn accused of coming up with incredibly low numbers of marital breakdowns, numbers that just do not tally with experience.
Most puzzling of all, however, is that the statistics bandied about are never given in a form that makes them comparable to rates of marital breakdown in other industrialised, liberal democracies.
We discuss how much the number of separations has increased over the last 10 years, valuable in itself, but not with where that places us in the European league tables.
Since it is time someone did try to keep score, I'm having a go. (With a little help from my friends: the National Statistics Office, to whose staff I am much indebted; the 2008 demographic review for Malta and the 2009 Eurostat marriage and divorce indicators.) Any corrections, to the figures and provisional conclusions, are most welcome since my aim is to help move the debate from where it's stuck.
Why stuck? Surely we know that some countries (like the US, the UK and the Czech Republic) have divorce rates that hover around 50 per cent. We know that the lower end for European countries (with some exceptions) begins at around 30 per cent. And we know that the total percentage of married Maltese individuals whose marriage has been officially registered as broken down (by separation, divorce or annulment) hovers around eight per cent.
Problem: that compares apples with oranges. That 50 per cent (or whatever figure) is obtained by dividing the number of divorces registered one year by the number of marriages for that same year. The Maltese figure would be much higher than eight per cent if we did that.
For technical reasons, that way of calculating a divorce rate is considered by many experts to be largely meaningless.
More weight is given to the "crude divorce rate" or the number of divorces per 1,000 population. (Even better is the "refined divorce rate", that is, the number of divorces per 1,000 married women, but Eurostat does not provide those.)
The 738 marriage breakdowns (separations, divorces and annulments) registered in 2008 give Malta a crude "divorce" rate of 1.79. (The Council of Europe figures for 2002 gave Malta a rate of 2.8 but the source of the data is unclear. The NSO does not have data prior to 2003.) How does that compare with the rest of the Union (2006 figures)? The EU-27 average is 2.0 and the eurozone average is 1.9.
Malta places in the bottom third of the EU-27, with a crude divorce rate higher than Italy and Ireland (2005), both with 0.8, Slovenia (1.2), Greece (1.3), Romania (1.5) and Spain (1.7).
It is almost equal to the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Poland (1.9).
Among the Mediterranean countries, Malta is surpassed by France (2.2), Portugal and Cyprus (2.3).
Malta's crude rate of 1.8 may be compared to the 2001 figures for France (1.9), Portugal and Slovakia (1.8) and Spain (1.0) - figures obtained after roughly two decades with a divorce law in the case of Portugal and Spain and rather longer in the other two cases.
Admittedly, we are not quite comparing like with like. It is not just that, since 2006, Spain has considerably liberalised its divorce law, which is likely to be reflected in the statistics.
The problem with the crude divorce rate is that it does not allow that marriage rates may vary significantly between countries. Cyprus has a divorce rate of 2.3, higher than Sweden's (2.2) but, proportionately, more Cypriots marry than Swedes.
The Cypriot divorce rate is pushed up by the relative popularity of marriage.
This problem does affect Malta, whose "crude marriage rate" (for 2006) is 6.3, lower only than that of Cyprus, Latvia, Romania and, wait for this, Denmark (6.7, with a divorce rate of 2.6).
Italy may well have a very low divorce rate but its marriage rate is 4.1 (a marked decline since 1996, when it was 4.9). Spain and Portugal have seen their marriage rates decline, too. They have kept their divorce rates low because the marriage institution itself lost popularity.
This complicating factor (and there are others) is a reminder that statistics encapsulate slivers of people's lives, which remain messy, fuzzy and contradictory.
Just because we find mathematical ways of capturing patterns does not mean we have a mathematical understanding; we still need the interpretive arts of novelists.
So we should be cautious about drawing conclusions.
But let us not be paralysed. No matter how rough an indicator the "crude divorce rate" is, we can now tell that Malta's rate is in the European mainstream - the low end, but the mainstream nonetheless.
That does not quite add up to an irrefutable case for the introduction of divorce. It should, however, put a stop to the argument that we should not introduce divorce so as not to let our marital breakdown rates go "the European way". We are already there.
ranierfsadni@europe.com