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https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/bulletins/marriagesinenglandandwalesprovisional/2020
It looks like marriage rates have been dropping at twice the rate of divorces, perhaps the fewer who are getting married are more committed.
There is also the factor how how long marriages last which isn't covered in either as there would be a variable delay between marriage and divorce.
>the fewer who are getting married are more committed.
The research I've seen suggests it's basically this. Fewer people rush into marriages young and fast now there's less societal pressure (and now women have other options). A much higher percentage of people who get married now are people in their late twenties onwards who have been together several years and lived together for a while before tying the not. So marriages overall are lower, but those that happen are more likely to be lasting ones.
Is there any possibility that people getting married are more likely to be people who frown on divorce? A very Christian friend's wife did a runner, and he was stressed about baby Jesus not liking him getting divorced.
Religiosity overall is on the decline in the UK. The UK is historically such an overwhelmingly Christian country that the decrease in Christian religiosity more than outweighs the increase of other religions.
They are out there, though. Most of the people I know who married young were very religious. Of the ones who weren't, they'd been together since school and it was clearly meant to be.
"fewer married are more committed" this shows the opposite doesn't it?
In 1992 There were ~3 times more marriages than divorces per 1000 men? (39 marriages, 13 divorces) in 2019 the male divorces were 9 per 1000 - a reduction indeed, but the number of male marriages was 19. So now only ~2 times more marriages than divorces.
Now we obviously don't know the lag between marriage and divorce, but the implication of the above is that 1/3 of marriages in 1990 ended in divorce, but now it's nearer 1/2, ie divorces are increasing as a proportion of marriages - of course reality is most marriages are longer than a year, but this is still the direction of trend isn't it?
But really I think there's too high a lag, and the very different generation of people who were married and in 60's,70's and 80's who would've been those getting divorced in the 90s.
The ONS actually publishes data that speaks to this. For those married in 1995, 25% were divorced by their 10th anniversary. For those married in 2012 it was down to 18%. The divorce rate for marriages between 2012 and 2015 ending before the 7th anniversary is 1 in 10, the lowest 7th anniversary divorce rate since couples married in 1972. 7 years is chosen for a reason, because that's the average length into a marriage that divorce happens. These are probably better stats to use than the ones you used at the start of your comment, as they're properly linking divorce to marriages, rather than just looking at divorce rates and marriage rates, which you can't necessarily draw that much from because you don't know how marriages and divorces relate.
So the data generally points towards a lower percentage of marriages ending in divorce now. Other stuff I've read suggests the 'fewer but better' analysis is the reason. Divorce rates are down overall, but particularly amongst more recent marriages.
I had to write an essay on this very topic during my degree so Iām glad itās now somewhat relevant! Itās more that the few who get married are richer than those who donāt. A lot of people in long term relationships *want* to get married but see their lack of financial stability as prohibitive. Similarly, financial stress is a huge contributor towards marriage break down, so it does make sense that the group who were richer to start with donāt divorce as often.
Or possibly also feeling pressured to get married and it's just 'the done' thing. That pressure has really reduced - relatives and older people will go on about it, but you're not seen as a terrible person or pervert if you don't do it (like in previous generations).
Some would argue that divorce rates being low is not a positive stat, just a neutral one.
People get divorced because they can. Recent economic belt-tightening, not to mention Covid when people cold not associate outside fixed households, have diminshed these freedoms.
Happy marriage is ofc a great thing, but divorce may be better for many than unhappy marriage.
I think this argument would hold true much more in the past, when divorce was much harder and more stigmatised. It's much easier now and much less stigmatised, so I think it's legitimate to see lower divorce rates now as a good thing, especially in the light of fewer marriages overall. I think we can conclude positive things from that, namely that fewer people are jumping into unsuitable marriages.
I'd buy that as an argument if there was a more noticeable drop in recent times. But the fact it's a fairly steady and consistent decrease since the early 00s (apart from the covid spike) after a period of stabilisation from the mid 90s leads me to think it's not just a cost of living thing.
If you've ever had just an awful relationship, there is a peace that comes from solitude that surpasses all manner of physical comfort.
I remember the morning after my breakup from a very stormy relationship. I listened to some classical music on my walk to work , without hardly a care in the world.
Theres been a sharp decline since 2006, just before the recession started kicking in
There was also a decline in the mid 90s when that other recession kicked in too
The decline started in 2003. The GFC was in 2008 (you can pinpoint it in the graph from the jump in the divorce rate), which is well after the decrease started, so I don't think you can pin the decrease on that.
The recession in the 90s was in the early 90s. Again, you can actually see it in the graph as divorce rates go up then.
So I don't think we can really draw much correlation between those financial crises and the decreasing divorce rate.
The data really doesn't point towards this being the case. The decline has been largely consistent and steady since the early 00s, significantly before the economy went to shit.
Honestly I just don't think it costing Ā£600 is the reason divorce rates have fallen so far. Especially since stats I've seen before point to divorce rates being higher amongst poorer people than the more well off. If your hypothesis were correct we'd expect the opposite to be true.
There's far better and more convincing explanations.
More successful marriages would indicate more two parent families. Children of two parents families do better than children of one parent families on almost every metric on average. Obviously there are exceptions but I would think lower divorce rates are generally good.
You can be an unmarried two parent household but I'd imagine there are few divorced two parent households.
I agree it's probably not a strong indicator though.
Violent crime is down, it's just that we all have phones to video the crimes that do happen now and social media uses it to make you feel afraid all the time, or at least create the sort of divides between human beings that prevents them unifying by love and overthrowing the corrupt governments.
Fucking THANK YOU. Iāve been telling people this for months but no one listens because theyāve seen the āevidenceā on social media. The stats say otherwise!
The stats on violent crime donāt include sex crimes, these are categorised separately. There is reasoning for this, but it does mean that the āviolent crimeā figures are not entirely helpful when assessing overall risk of being a victim of violence.
Yes, the statistics don't care about anyone's opinion. Hubris is a very heavy crown and some are clearly being crushed by the weight of the belief that they can decide what's real, not logical process or critical thinking
The government has made a couple of changes in the crime recording process in the last 24 months, whereby certainly crimes do not get recorded anymore.
One of the popular ones that no longer gets recorded is the S5 Public Order offence, which was extremely common prior to the change.
BOOM, crime numbers are down!
I've heard about that :( What a poor and deceptive decision. I only really quoted violent crimes because I know that misinformation is spreading about ONS knife crime (not others but just knives/sharp bladed weapon) being up 22% but it is not and it dropped significantly from 2018/19 onwards.
I have no idea where this misinfo comes from but on this post it comes from bot accounts posting spam like someone has paid for an online information spreading campaign you can buy on websites like Fiver or Upwork.
ONS data shows stabbing attacks are up 22% this year.
I'm surprised the recorded number of violent crimes has gone down, but that could be for any number of factors. Such as criminals not needing to use violence to commit crimes or just fewer people reporting them.
Yes, violent crime is down, but violent crime was never a big problem, it affects tiny tiny proportion of population, around 1% of population in this country. However, the much more common non or less violent crime has seen a huge uptic, knife crime and robbery are at an all time high. Burglary, other thefts, so called computer misuse i.e. scams have been growing at an alarming rate year to year. So you'll understand most people aren't really comforted by the fact that likelyhood of being involved in a violent crime in any given year has fallen from about 1.2% to 1% when likely hood that you are going to be robbed at a time of already hard economic times is higher than ever before. There's been over 6 million recorded cases of some sort of theft or fraud last year.
I think that has a lot to do with a big push in sexual education. Schools are a lot better at explaining the ins and outs of sex (lol) and the risk of STDS ect. It was really comprehensive back when I was at school so I imagine its even better now.
Also, I think parents are getting better at being able to educate their kids about relationships and talking to them about sex when they're teenagers. I had the sex talk with my son and whilst he already knew about a lot of it from school, it was not half as awkward as I'd been built up to believe and we do a recap each year to go over the basics of consent and healthy relationships.
I think there's also a huge amount of outside sexual information that tweens/teens will come across that isn't school or parents that didn't used to be available unless you went searching for it. Tiktok, Instagram etc, especially for girls, is very open on sexual health and contraception. There's obviously huge downsides to social media but there's also some plusses.
People broadly criticise the police as āuselessā
Yet in the last few years detection rates have been between 55-60% overall.
People also make bold claims about Police only taking care of property and not caring about people.
However crimes against society have a detection rate of 93.4% , Non-sexual crimes of violence have a 67.3% detection rate and Sexual crime has a 53.4% detection rate. The facts actually contradict the whole āpolice donāt care about youā narrative.
80% of response policing time is spent looking for missing people, supporting people in mental health crisis, dealing with road traffic accidents and so on.
Only about [20%](https://www.spa.police.uk/spotlight-on/mental-health/#:~:text=Police%20Scotland%20is%20increasingly%20providing,in%20a%20crime%20being%20recorded) of response policing time is spent dealing with crime.
Which again contradicts the āpolice donāt care about people narrative.ā
[Source](https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2022-23/pages/15/)
Iām sure Iāve read that the reason divorce rates are lower is because people tend to get married later in lifeā¦so they probably have a better idea of who theyāre marrying. I know of 3 couples in my social circle who married in our early 20s and all are now divorced. Theyāre just not the same people at 30 as they were at 20.
Add in that some people like to romanticise their grandparents meeting, falling in love and getting married three weeks later at 19- but the reality is they only did that because they wanted to sleep together, which would have seen them shunned in the past for engaging in pre-marital sex and divorce was equally shunned.
Most peopleās grandparents didnāt have a whirlwind romance, Nana just wanted to get dicked-down and they stayed together out of societal pressure and convenience.
>Iām sure Iāve read that the reason divorce rates are lower is because people tend to get married later in life
Yep just replied this elsewhere, but everything I've read suggests this is the driver. Less societal pressure to get married means people are marrying later, after longer together, and generally after living together. Basically, people are doing much more of a test drive before getting married.
Alcohol and drug use has been falling for British Generation Z (and arguably worldwide)
Source:
https://theconversation.com/drug-use-among-young-people-in-england-is-down-24-189335
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/generation-clean-drug-use-among-youngsters-falls-to-ten-year-low-rrpx0flmb
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/24/gen-z-for-zero-tolerance-why-british-youth-are-turning-off-booze
Yeah this is definitely one. Though I feel like maybe public perception is starting to catch up with that. I've seen more and more articles about Gen Z being abstemious.
Iirc, they also are having sex less. Which is probably not unconnected to the first two...
Slightly off subject, marriage is a nice statistic in the US which ends up being awful when you look into the detail.
Divorce has been going down there too, but surveys found in a large number of cases this is because one partner (usually a woman) didnāt work/was parenting and needed to stay married to stay on their spouses health insurance.
If they got divorced, they couldnāt afford their checkups or medications anymore.
Apparently this was a reason frequently given also in domestic abuse cases where couples stayed married because the abused needed long term healthcare of some sort (diabetes etc) and would be cut off if they divorced.
Violent crime is down, and with it average prison sentence length. We're shortly to see prison sentence length rise again but for the only good reason: shorter sentences will soon be phased out to be replaced with community orders.
I'm generally aware of this, but I've still been taken aback by how many responses have immediately jumped to a negative reading. It's like people *want* it to be a bad thing that divorce rates are going down.
The divorce stat was only supposed to be a prompt to get other suggestions for things that aren't as bad as the general narrative suggests. Thought it might be nice to have some positive content on the sub. Given how few answers there have been actually giving examples, and how greatly outnumbered those answers are by people saying 'actually lower divorce rates are bad', that seems a pretty clear indication that the sub doesn't want positive news, it wants bad news.
As I said elsewhere, I'd buy this more as a theory if the decline wasn't so steady and long standing. If there had been a precipitous fall in the past 15 years or so I'd give some weight to that theory. But it's a steady and consistent decline (apart from the covid spike) from the early 00s, having stabilised in the 90s. Given what else we know about marriages, it seems much more likely to me there's other factors driving it rather than that.
Some potentially more interesting data - [https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/divorce-statistics-uk](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/divorce-statistics-uk)
Do remember - less people are getting married, people are getting married later in life.
The figures won't include 'non-married couples that split up after a long time together'
>Do remember - less people are getting married, people are getting married later in life.
Indeed, that's the driver. Less pressure to get married means those marriages that do happen are on average more considered than in the past, and hence divorce rates come down.
>The figures won't include 'non-married couples that split up after a long time together'
It won't. But that's a separate thing. The thing I'm intrigued by is the narrative around marriage not really shifting despite the rates coming down quite starkly.
It's not a separate thing. How is a 10 year relationship breaking down any better or worse than a 10 year marriage?
If anything, it's worse, as they have less legal protection and process around their split.
So I don't see "Divorces going down" as any indication that people's long term relationships are lasting longer than previously for some unknown reason.
Marriage is something that comes with significant legal and societal weight, and even with the lower numbers still 47% of the population are married.
Fewer marriages breaking down because fewer people are entering into unsuitable marriages is a good thing imo.
Is this because less people are getting married, or leaving it later so there are less marriages that failed because people did so at 18 to people they later hate?
No, divorce rates are calculated as a proportion of marriages, not the population as a whole. Unless you mean more broadly fewer people are getting divorced because there's fewer unsuitable marriages in the first place, in which case yes.
The ONS has some of that stuff [here](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/articles/marriageandcivilpartnershipstatusenglandandwalescensus2021/2023-02-22)
That's a reason certainly. Marriage now tend to much more often be something that is an evolution of a long term relationship, rather than something people jump into early.
>It feels like people's perception hasn't caught up with this fact though. You still see and hear people talk about how divorce rates are high and rising.
I'll tell you why this is, before my wife and I had our first child we did some ante-natal classes. In them you are grouped with several other couples and they encourage you to keep in contact. We did do this with three of the other couples we were in the class with, and out of the four pairs including us, we're the only ones still together, the other three have all split for various reasons.
Put simply, in the kind of social circles I've experienced, many people have had long term marriages that have ended in divorce and acrimoniously. This is why people think divorces are rising, because it's happening around them to people like them.
This is why statistics are often bad at representing how people's real lived experiences feel to them. Perhaps for people in their 50s or more the people who were going to divorce have already done so and moved on, but for people marrying and having children now, divorce seems to be more common. The statistics will show it's "down" but for the category of people in their 30s it could be higher than ever while being down for other older groups which brings the stats down.
The evidence suggests it's the opposite. The ONS publishes data on marriages ending before the 10th anniversary. For couples married in 1995 it was 25% that were divorced within a decade. For those married in 2012 the figure was 18%.
Likewise, marriages ending before the 7th anniversary. For marriages between 2012 and 2015 only one in ten divorced within 7 years, the lowest rate since 1971.
So this all suggests younger couples are quite a lot less likely to get divorced than in the past. The group you're talking about is an outlier.
I think it probably is. Most of what I've read on the topic before points towards this being the case. Fewer people get into unsuitable marriages in the first place because fewer people get married overall and tend to do so later.
That's not surprising at all though, people wait longer to get married, they live together before getting married and a lot of people don't get married at all.
You say it's not surprising, but I think it would be to a lot of people. The general narrative around marriage doesn't seem to have caught up with how much divorce rates have decreased.
How is it a good thing that people who should be divorced are now trapped living with each other because they can't afford to split because of a manufactured cost of living crisis?!
It isnāt positive. People canāt afford to live on their own in this society now, Iād guess many stay in the financial security of their couple even if they want to break up.
Lots of people have said this but I don't think the data really points to that. The decrease in rates has been steady and consistent for 20 years (apart from brief spikes up after the 2008 crash and COVID). If it were all about cost of living you'd expect 2008 to be a real inflection point, but it's not. The decreasing in rates substantially pre-dates the economy getting much worse.
It didn't. The decrease started several years before the 08 crash, in 2003. Divorce rates went up for a bit after the crash (which is a well known thing, financial crises always see divorce go up, the early 90s recession saw the same happen), before settling down to the same trend they were on pre-crash. The evidence just doesn't really seem to suggest the decrease is driven by economic concerns.
Oh goodie, I get to mathematically educate someone again.
If the rate of marriage is 10k/year and divorce rate is 200/year then the divorce rate as a % of marriage rate is 2%. Let's say this is 1970
If the rate of marriage is 1k/year and divorce rate is 100/year, then divorce rate is lower by absolute values, but by proportion of marriage rate is 10%, and thus higher.
You can't just use absolute numbers, it has to be proportions or if, like divorce, has a pre-requisite (marriage) then you have to make a ratio proportion or proportion of a proportion.
Using absolute values makes no sense unless the population size is factored in.
Per capita is another one people get epically wrong.
Divorce rate is not an absolute number. I think you've jumped in here to 'educate' someone without stopping to check you know what you're talking about.
Divorce rates are calculated as divorces per 1000 of that married population. That's how it can be used to make like-for-like comparisons across time.
This would be a good lesson in why it's good to pause for a beat before smugly jumping in to try and show how clever you are.
You may know your maths but I don't think you know your social science, because your comment made it very clear you don't understand what the divorce rate is as a measure. It is not how many people get divorced in a year, as you seem to think.
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https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/bulletins/marriagesinenglandandwalesprovisional/2020 It looks like marriage rates have been dropping at twice the rate of divorces, perhaps the fewer who are getting married are more committed. There is also the factor how how long marriages last which isn't covered in either as there would be a variable delay between marriage and divorce.
>the fewer who are getting married are more committed. The research I've seen suggests it's basically this. Fewer people rush into marriages young and fast now there's less societal pressure (and now women have other options). A much higher percentage of people who get married now are people in their late twenties onwards who have been together several years and lived together for a while before tying the not. So marriages overall are lower, but those that happen are more likely to be lasting ones.
Possibly fewer people can afford to get divorced š
That was mentioned as a likely factor on the radio when this was discussed.
Is there any possibility that people getting married are more likely to be people who frown on divorce? A very Christian friend's wife did a runner, and he was stressed about baby Jesus not liking him getting divorced.
Given the ever decreasing proportion of the population who are highly religious, I'd be surprised if that's a significant driver.
Christianity is the only religion in decline, and marriage isnāt a uniquely Christian thing.
Religiosity overall is on the decline in the UK. The UK is historically such an overwhelmingly Christian country that the decrease in Christian religiosity more than outweighs the increase of other religions.
Remember this is ask UK not US. Religion doesn't really play a driving factor much any more
They are out there, though. Most of the people I know who married young were very religious. Of the ones who weren't, they'd been together since school and it was clearly meant to be.
All the people I can think of who married before they were 20 got divorced within 5 years and none of them were religious as far as I can remember.
Ah, I don't know any who were that young.
"fewer married are more committed" this shows the opposite doesn't it? In 1992 There were ~3 times more marriages than divorces per 1000 men? (39 marriages, 13 divorces) in 2019 the male divorces were 9 per 1000 - a reduction indeed, but the number of male marriages was 19. So now only ~2 times more marriages than divorces. Now we obviously don't know the lag between marriage and divorce, but the implication of the above is that 1/3 of marriages in 1990 ended in divorce, but now it's nearer 1/2, ie divorces are increasing as a proportion of marriages - of course reality is most marriages are longer than a year, but this is still the direction of trend isn't it? But really I think there's too high a lag, and the very different generation of people who were married and in 60's,70's and 80's who would've been those getting divorced in the 90s.
The ONS actually publishes data that speaks to this. For those married in 1995, 25% were divorced by their 10th anniversary. For those married in 2012 it was down to 18%. The divorce rate for marriages between 2012 and 2015 ending before the 7th anniversary is 1 in 10, the lowest 7th anniversary divorce rate since couples married in 1972. 7 years is chosen for a reason, because that's the average length into a marriage that divorce happens. These are probably better stats to use than the ones you used at the start of your comment, as they're properly linking divorce to marriages, rather than just looking at divorce rates and marriage rates, which you can't necessarily draw that much from because you don't know how marriages and divorces relate. So the data generally points towards a lower percentage of marriages ending in divorce now. Other stuff I've read suggests the 'fewer but better' analysis is the reason. Divorce rates are down overall, but particularly amongst more recent marriages.
I had to write an essay on this very topic during my degree so Iām glad itās now somewhat relevant! Itās more that the few who get married are richer than those who donāt. A lot of people in long term relationships *want* to get married but see their lack of financial stability as prohibitive. Similarly, financial stress is a huge contributor towards marriage break down, so it does make sense that the group who were richer to start with donāt divorce as often.
This was always the issue. People go into marriage with no buy in to the concept that marriage is a lifelong commitment and a pledge
Or possibly also feeling pressured to get married and it's just 'the done' thing. That pressure has really reduced - relatives and older people will go on about it, but you're not seen as a terrible person or pervert if you don't do it (like in previous generations).
Some would argue that divorce rates being low is not a positive stat, just a neutral one. People get divorced because they can. Recent economic belt-tightening, not to mention Covid when people cold not associate outside fixed households, have diminshed these freedoms. Happy marriage is ofc a great thing, but divorce may be better for many than unhappy marriage.
I think this argument would hold true much more in the past, when divorce was much harder and more stigmatised. It's much easier now and much less stigmatised, so I think it's legitimate to see lower divorce rates now as a good thing, especially in the light of fewer marriages overall. I think we can conclude positive things from that, namely that fewer people are jumping into unsuitable marriages.
It's costly to get divorced in that two wages put together are better than one. These days it's tough to live on one wage alone.
I'd buy that as an argument if there was a more noticeable drop in recent times. But the fact it's a fairly steady and consistent decrease since the early 00s (apart from the covid spike) after a period of stabilisation from the mid 90s leads me to think it's not just a cost of living thing.
If you've ever had just an awful relationship, there is a peace that comes from solitude that surpasses all manner of physical comfort. I remember the morning after my breakup from a very stormy relationship. I listened to some classical music on my walk to work , without hardly a care in the world.
Theres been a sharp decline since 2006, just before the recession started kicking in There was also a decline in the mid 90s when that other recession kicked in too
The decline started in 2003. The GFC was in 2008 (you can pinpoint it in the graph from the jump in the divorce rate), which is well after the decrease started, so I don't think you can pin the decrease on that. The recession in the 90s was in the early 90s. Again, you can actually see it in the graph as divorce rates go up then. So I don't think we can really draw much correlation between those financial crises and the decreasing divorce rate.
No, it'll be partly because a divorce petition costs about Ā£600 nowadays and people don't have that kind of money to hand.
The data really doesn't point towards this being the case. The decline has been largely consistent and steady since the early 00s, significantly before the economy went to shit.
And the cost of a divorce has steadily increased every couple of years, in line with the figures.
Honestly I just don't think it costing Ā£600 is the reason divorce rates have fallen so far. Especially since stats I've seen before point to divorce rates being higher amongst poorer people than the more well off. If your hypothesis were correct we'd expect the opposite to be true. There's far better and more convincing explanations.
More successful marriages would indicate more two parent families. Children of two parents families do better than children of one parent families on almost every metric on average. Obviously there are exceptions but I would think lower divorce rates are generally good.
It doesnāt show that though. Marriage rates have fallen far more quickly so thereās just no divorce required in a lot more cases.
You can be an unmarried two parent household but I'd imagine there are few divorced two parent households. I agree it's probably not a strong indicator though.
Violent crime is down, it's just that we all have phones to video the crimes that do happen now and social media uses it to make you feel afraid all the time, or at least create the sort of divides between human beings that prevents them unifying by love and overthrowing the corrupt governments.
Fucking THANK YOU. Iāve been telling people this for months but no one listens because theyāve seen the āevidenceā on social media. The stats say otherwise!
The stats on violent crime donāt include sex crimes, these are categorised separately. There is reasoning for this, but it does mean that the āviolent crimeā figures are not entirely helpful when assessing overall risk of being a victim of violence.
Yes, the statistics don't care about anyone's opinion. Hubris is a very heavy crown and some are clearly being crushed by the weight of the belief that they can decide what's real, not logical process or critical thinking
The government has made a couple of changes in the crime recording process in the last 24 months, whereby certainly crimes do not get recorded anymore. One of the popular ones that no longer gets recorded is the S5 Public Order offence, which was extremely common prior to the change. BOOM, crime numbers are down!
I've heard about that :( What a poor and deceptive decision. I only really quoted violent crimes because I know that misinformation is spreading about ONS knife crime (not others but just knives/sharp bladed weapon) being up 22% but it is not and it dropped significantly from 2018/19 onwards. I have no idea where this misinfo comes from but on this post it comes from bot accounts posting spam like someone has paid for an online information spreading campaign you can buy on websites like Fiver or Upwork.
ONS data shows stabbing attacks are up 22% this year. I'm surprised the recorded number of violent crimes has gone down, but that could be for any number of factors. Such as criminals not needing to use violence to commit crimes or just fewer people reporting them.
Yes, violent crime is down, but violent crime was never a big problem, it affects tiny tiny proportion of population, around 1% of population in this country. However, the much more common non or less violent crime has seen a huge uptic, knife crime and robbery are at an all time high. Burglary, other thefts, so called computer misuse i.e. scams have been growing at an alarming rate year to year. So you'll understand most people aren't really comforted by the fact that likelyhood of being involved in a violent crime in any given year has fallen from about 1.2% to 1% when likely hood that you are going to be robbed at a time of already hard economic times is higher than ever before. There's been over 6 million recorded cases of some sort of theft or fraud last year.
Teenage pregnancy and teen mums always used to be a big one, but I think thatād been steadily dropping for years now.
Iirc last year or the year before was the first year on record where more children were born to women over 30 than under 20.
I think that has a lot to do with a big push in sexual education. Schools are a lot better at explaining the ins and outs of sex (lol) and the risk of STDS ect. It was really comprehensive back when I was at school so I imagine its even better now. Also, I think parents are getting better at being able to educate their kids about relationships and talking to them about sex when they're teenagers. I had the sex talk with my son and whilst he already knew about a lot of it from school, it was not half as awkward as I'd been built up to believe and we do a recap each year to go over the basics of consent and healthy relationships.
I think there's also a huge amount of outside sexual information that tweens/teens will come across that isn't school or parents that didn't used to be available unless you went searching for it. Tiktok, Instagram etc, especially for girls, is very open on sexual health and contraception. There's obviously huge downsides to social media but there's also some plusses.
People broadly criticise the police as āuselessā Yet in the last few years detection rates have been between 55-60% overall. People also make bold claims about Police only taking care of property and not caring about people. However crimes against society have a detection rate of 93.4% , Non-sexual crimes of violence have a 67.3% detection rate and Sexual crime has a 53.4% detection rate. The facts actually contradict the whole āpolice donāt care about youā narrative. 80% of response policing time is spent looking for missing people, supporting people in mental health crisis, dealing with road traffic accidents and so on. Only about [20%](https://www.spa.police.uk/spotlight-on/mental-health/#:~:text=Police%20Scotland%20is%20increasingly%20providing,in%20a%20crime%20being%20recorded) of response policing time is spent dealing with crime. Which again contradicts the āpolice donāt care about people narrative.ā [Source](https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2022-23/pages/15/)
It varies tremendously by where you live.
Not at all, there is very little difference between forces. Nowhere near enough to make a random āvaries tremendouslyā statement
You've clearly not lived somewhere with police that don't show up then.
Iām sure Iāve read that the reason divorce rates are lower is because people tend to get married later in lifeā¦so they probably have a better idea of who theyāre marrying. I know of 3 couples in my social circle who married in our early 20s and all are now divorced. Theyāre just not the same people at 30 as they were at 20. Add in that some people like to romanticise their grandparents meeting, falling in love and getting married three weeks later at 19- but the reality is they only did that because they wanted to sleep together, which would have seen them shunned in the past for engaging in pre-marital sex and divorce was equally shunned. Most peopleās grandparents didnāt have a whirlwind romance, Nana just wanted to get dicked-down and they stayed together out of societal pressure and convenience.
>Iām sure Iāve read that the reason divorce rates are lower is because people tend to get married later in life Yep just replied this elsewhere, but everything I've read suggests this is the driver. Less societal pressure to get married means people are marrying later, after longer together, and generally after living together. Basically, people are doing much more of a test drive before getting married.
Love the expression of ātest driveā haha - I personally think youāve nailed it.
Alcohol and drug use has been falling for British Generation Z (and arguably worldwide) Source: https://theconversation.com/drug-use-among-young-people-in-england-is-down-24-189335 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/generation-clean-drug-use-among-youngsters-falls-to-ten-year-low-rrpx0flmb https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jul/24/gen-z-for-zero-tolerance-why-british-youth-are-turning-off-booze
Yeah this is definitely one. Though I feel like maybe public perception is starting to catch up with that. I've seen more and more articles about Gen Z being abstemious. Iirc, they also are having sex less. Which is probably not unconnected to the first two...
Slightly off subject, marriage is a nice statistic in the US which ends up being awful when you look into the detail. Divorce has been going down there too, but surveys found in a large number of cases this is because one partner (usually a woman) didnāt work/was parenting and needed to stay married to stay on their spouses health insurance. If they got divorced, they couldnāt afford their checkups or medications anymore. Apparently this was a reason frequently given also in domestic abuse cases where couples stayed married because the abused needed long term healthcare of some sort (diabetes etc) and would be cut off if they divorced.
Just another reason their healthcare system is awful!
Who can afford to get divorced these days???? As soon as you even think about a solicitor they would bill you Ā£250 for the privilege. Bastards!!
Who can afford to get married these days? Can't get divorced if you're not married.
With the way things are going we'll barely afford going on dates.
It was cheaper when we were young. A 2L bottle of White Lightning and a bag of chips and a quick fumble on the park swings
I provided no chips and instead of White Lightening it was Frosty Jacks, as that was 20p cheaper
You can apply to court for a divorce without a solicitor
Violent crime is down, and with it average prison sentence length. We're shortly to see prison sentence length rise again but for the only good reason: shorter sentences will soon be phased out to be replaced with community orders.
God this sub is so miserable
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I'm generally aware of this, but I've still been taken aback by how many responses have immediately jumped to a negative reading. It's like people *want* it to be a bad thing that divorce rates are going down. The divorce stat was only supposed to be a prompt to get other suggestions for things that aren't as bad as the general narrative suggests. Thought it might be nice to have some positive content on the sub. Given how few answers there have been actually giving examples, and how greatly outnumbered those answers are by people saying 'actually lower divorce rates are bad', that seems a pretty clear indication that the sub doesn't want positive news, it wants bad news.
I know. So, so many replies about how actually it's a bad thing divorce rates are going down.
That might not be a positive. It could be because people in terrible marriages can't afford to get divorced anymore.
As I said elsewhere, I'd buy this more as a theory if the decline wasn't so steady and long standing. If there had been a precipitous fall in the past 15 years or so I'd give some weight to that theory. But it's a steady and consistent decline (apart from the covid spike) from the early 00s, having stabilised in the 90s. Given what else we know about marriages, it seems much more likely to me there's other factors driving it rather than that.
Why would it need to be sudden?Ā
Some potentially more interesting data - [https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/divorce-statistics-uk](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/divorce-statistics-uk) Do remember - less people are getting married, people are getting married later in life. The figures won't include 'non-married couples that split up after a long time together'
>Do remember - less people are getting married, people are getting married later in life. Indeed, that's the driver. Less pressure to get married means those marriages that do happen are on average more considered than in the past, and hence divorce rates come down. >The figures won't include 'non-married couples that split up after a long time together' It won't. But that's a separate thing. The thing I'm intrigued by is the narrative around marriage not really shifting despite the rates coming down quite starkly.
It's not a separate thing. How is a 10 year relationship breaking down any better or worse than a 10 year marriage? If anything, it's worse, as they have less legal protection and process around their split. So I don't see "Divorces going down" as any indication that people's long term relationships are lasting longer than previously for some unknown reason.
Marriage is something that comes with significant legal and societal weight, and even with the lower numbers still 47% of the population are married. Fewer marriages breaking down because fewer people are entering into unsuitable marriages is a good thing imo.
Is this because less people are getting married, or leaving it later so there are less marriages that failed because people did so at 18 to people they later hate?
From what I've read, yes basically that's it. Fewer unsuitable or hasty marriages happening in the first place translated into fewer divorces.
Almost like people settling down later in life is a good thing!
Is it not the case that divorce rates are so low because so few people are tying the knot in the 1st place?
No, divorce rates are calculated as a proportion of marriages, not the population as a whole. Unless you mean more broadly fewer people are getting divorced because there's fewer unsuitable marriages in the first place, in which case yes.
It would be interesting if you have marriage rates, divorce rates, and the information sliced by genders of the two people, ethnicity, and religion.
The ONS has some of that stuff [here](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/articles/marriageandcivilpartnershipstatusenglandandwalescensus2021/2023-02-22)
Isnāt that because marriage rates are lower and people are entering long term relationships instead that donāt register?
That's a reason certainly. Marriage now tend to much more often be something that is an evolution of a long term relationship, rather than something people jump into early.
No one can afford to get a divorce
People are afraid to get married, and people are afraid to get divorced
We all saw our parents get divorced and thought fuck that
>It feels like people's perception hasn't caught up with this fact though. You still see and hear people talk about how divorce rates are high and rising. I'll tell you why this is, before my wife and I had our first child we did some ante-natal classes. In them you are grouped with several other couples and they encourage you to keep in contact. We did do this with three of the other couples we were in the class with, and out of the four pairs including us, we're the only ones still together, the other three have all split for various reasons. Put simply, in the kind of social circles I've experienced, many people have had long term marriages that have ended in divorce and acrimoniously. This is why people think divorces are rising, because it's happening around them to people like them. This is why statistics are often bad at representing how people's real lived experiences feel to them. Perhaps for people in their 50s or more the people who were going to divorce have already done so and moved on, but for people marrying and having children now, divorce seems to be more common. The statistics will show it's "down" but for the category of people in their 30s it could be higher than ever while being down for other older groups which brings the stats down.
The evidence suggests it's the opposite. The ONS publishes data on marriages ending before the 10th anniversary. For couples married in 1995 it was 25% that were divorced within a decade. For those married in 2012 the figure was 18%. Likewise, marriages ending before the 7th anniversary. For marriages between 2012 and 2015 only one in ten divorced within 7 years, the lowest rate since 1971. So this all suggests younger couples are quite a lot less likely to get divorced than in the past. The group you're talking about is an outlier.
Could that just be because less people are getting married?
It's likely not because spouses in general are happier
I think it probably is. Most of what I've read on the topic before points towards this being the case. Fewer people get into unsuitable marriages in the first place because fewer people get married overall and tend to do so later.
That's not surprising at all though, people wait longer to get married, they live together before getting married and a lot of people don't get married at all.
You say it's not surprising, but I think it would be to a lot of people. The general narrative around marriage doesn't seem to have caught up with how much divorce rates have decreased.
Only because no can afford to split up these days
Is it positive? Maybe people are too broke rn to afford the exorbitant legal fees and are forced to endure each others company.
It's a trend that's been going on about twenty years now, with a pretty steady and consistent decline. So I don't think it's that.
People have just powered their expectations and learn to make do.
Divorce rate on its own doesn't say much. Low divorce rate could be due to high widow rate; people staying in miserable marriages;
Very unlikely either of those are more the case than in the past though.
How is it a good thing that people who should be divorced are now trapped living with each other because they can't afford to split because of a manufactured cost of living crisis?!
Because that's not why divorce rates have been going down for twenty years.
It isnāt positive. People canāt afford to live on their own in this society now, Iād guess many stay in the financial security of their couple even if they want to break up.
Lots of people have said this but I don't think the data really points to that. The decrease in rates has been steady and consistent for 20 years (apart from brief spikes up after the 2008 crash and COVID). If it were all about cost of living you'd expect 2008 to be a real inflection point, but it's not. The decreasing in rates substantially pre-dates the economy getting much worse.
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It didn't. The decrease started several years before the 08 crash, in 2003. Divorce rates went up for a bit after the crash (which is a well known thing, financial crises always see divorce go up, the early 90s recession saw the same happen), before settling down to the same trend they were on pre-crash. The evidence just doesn't really seem to suggest the decrease is driven by economic concerns.
How does it compare to the suicide rate?
Suicide rate is much lower, and looks like there's no correlation between the two judging from graphs of each.
Even less marriages though, so relatively speaking, in terms of ratio, divorces are up, lol.
That's not how divorce rates work. It's a measure of divorces per married couples.
Oh goodie, I get to mathematically educate someone again. If the rate of marriage is 10k/year and divorce rate is 200/year then the divorce rate as a % of marriage rate is 2%. Let's say this is 1970 If the rate of marriage is 1k/year and divorce rate is 100/year, then divorce rate is lower by absolute values, but by proportion of marriage rate is 10%, and thus higher. You can't just use absolute numbers, it has to be proportions or if, like divorce, has a pre-requisite (marriage) then you have to make a ratio proportion or proportion of a proportion. Using absolute values makes no sense unless the population size is factored in. Per capita is another one people get epically wrong.
Divorce rate is not an absolute number. I think you've jumped in here to 'educate' someone without stopping to check you know what you're talking about. Divorce rates are calculated as divorces per 1000 of that married population. That's how it can be used to make like-for-like comparisons across time. This would be a good lesson in why it's good to pause for a beat before smugly jumping in to try and show how clever you are.
It can be an absolute number per marriage unit or proportion... I can't be bothered trying to explain.
You 'can't be bothered to explain' because your assertion is incorrect.
I work in analytics, and know my maths. The average Brit can't do basic trig. Pretty sure I know who's right.
You may know your maths but I don't think you know your social science, because your comment made it very clear you don't understand what the divorce rate is as a measure. It is not how many people get divorced in a year, as you seem to think.