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Updated Sunday, July 10, 2011 11:35 pm TWN, The China Post news staff

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Taiwan divorce rate falling steadily: statistics

Taiwan's divorce rate has been dropping steadily since the early 2000s, with the average decreasing to 159 divorced couples each day last year, government statistics showed yesterday.

A total of 58,037 couples saw their marriages end in divorces in 2010, lower than the annual average of 63,230 for the period of 2002 to 2006, and 57,443 between 2007 and 2010, according to figures released by the interior ministry.

The number of divorces was 1.8 percent lower in the first half of this year compared to the figure of the same period of 2010.

The daily average of divorces last year was about 11 percent lower than the daily average of 179 cases in 2003.

The figures showed that the biggest divorce group last year was made of couples who had been married for five to nine years (31 percent), followed by marriages lasting less than five years at 27.7 percent.

The number of divorces decreased in 2010 as the years of marriage increased after the ninth year.

A further breakdown showed that in 2003, 40 percent of divorces took place less than one year into marriage, the with the percentage decreasing steadily after the first year.

But in 2010, the highest divorce rates were registered from two separate groups: one formed by those who had been married for one year and the other for six years. The two groups each accounted for 30 percent of the divorces last year.

Wang Yun-tung, a sociology professor from National Taiwan University, has pointed out that high divorce rates are related to women receiving more education and job opportunities, as well as the rise of individualism, according to the Central News Agency (CNA).

High divorce rates may not be bad, as the phenomenon reflects women's financial independence and their pursuit of their own futures, the professor was cited as saying.

But Wang noted that individualism, on the other hand, may also affect society's collective interests, according the CNA.

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Comments

July 10, 2011 zeugitai@

First comes the romance, then the marriage. What destroys them is the change that comes over the husband when his family begins to think of the wife as a piece of property in traditional terms. Usually very instrumental in this process is the husband's mother. She steps in, her son's thinking is programmed by her, and the happy marriage is a thing of the past. I have seen new wives used almost as slaves in the households of the in-laws; and once I even saw a new bride escaping out the window of an in-law's home at night.

July 21, 2011 curtisakbar@

zeugitai@ wrote:
First comes the romance, then the marriage. What destroys them is the change that comes over the husband when his family begins to think of the wife as a piece of property in traditional terms. Usually very instrumental in this process is the husband's mother. She steps in, her son's thinking is programmed by her, and the happy marriage is a thing of the past. I have seen new wives used almost as slaves in the households of the in-laws; and once I even saw a new bride escaping out the window of an in-law's home at night.

Get out of the pre-historic mindset and step into the modern world.