Statistics

The divorce rate is low among Muslims compared to other groups; some think that the rate is slowly rising. For example, in 2004 in Singapore (which has an 18% Muslim population), many feared that the divorce rate among Muslims had risen too high: 9 out of every 1000 marriages, a ratio three times higher than Malaysia and five times higher than Indonesia.

In the United States in 2003, there were 7.5 new marriages per 1000 people and 3.8 divorces per 1000, a ratio which has existed for many individual years since the 1960s. As many statisticians have pointed out, it is very hard to count the divorce rate, since it is hard to determine if a couple who divorce and got back together in that same year should be considered a divorce, so there is in fact no predictive relationship between the two annual totals. Nonetheless, the claim that "half of all marriages end in divorce" became widely accepted in the U.S. in the 1970s on the basis of this statistic and has remained conventional wisdom. Pollster Lewis Harris in his 1987 book "Inside America" wrote that "the idea that half of American marriages are doomed is one of the most specious pieces of statistical nonsense ever perpetuated in modern times."

To establish an actual divorce rate requires tracking and analyzing significant samples of actual marriages through decades, not an easy task. Recent U.S. scholarship based on such long-term tracking, reported for example in The New York Times on April 19, 2005, has found that about 60 percent of all marriages that result in divorce do so in the first decade, and more than 80 percent do so within the first 20 years; that the percentage of all marriages that eventually end in divorce peaked in the United States at about 41 percent around 1980 and has been slowly declining ever since, standing by 2002 at around 31 percent; and that while in the 1960s and 1970s, there was little difference among socioeconomic groups in divorce rates, diverging trends appeared starting around 1980 (e.g. the rate of divorce among college graduates had by 2002 dropped to near 20 percent, roughly half that of non-college graduates).

Many in the U.S. are under the impression that the decades following introduction of no-fault divorce laws saw an extraordinary increase in divorce rates, though more recent research has clarified that U.S. divorce rates had been generally rising since the 1890s (with a short-term decline during the Great Depression and a spike just after World War II). The long-term rate of increase steepened with the advent of no-fault divorce laws in the late 1960s; the gradual decline starting in the early 1980s has continued for a quarter-century thus far.

According to Brinig 2000, women currently file slightly more than two-thirds of divorce cases in the U.S. There is some variation among states, and the numbers have also varied over time, with about 60% of filings by women in most of the 19th century, and more than 70% by women in some states just after no-fault divorce was introduced, according to the paper.

States in the U.S. handle billions of dollars in alimony and child support arrangements, which commonly result from divorces. (According to a 2003 U.S. census report, 43.7% of custodial mothers and 56.2% of custodial fathers are divorced or separated.) A 2005 Census Bureau Report found that in 2002, $40 billion had been paid in support arrangements by 7.8 million payers, 84% of whom were men. States also collected federal incentives to collect support payments, with a potential incentive pool of up to $454 million in fiscal 2004. A media kit for the National Child Support Enforcement Association, a child support advocacy group, claims that 60,000 professionals work to administer and enforce child support arrangements.