Divorce

• 1. Introduction

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  Divorce is one of the oldest legal acts in human history, yet it remains one of the most contested. In Classical Athens, a man could end his marriage simply by sending his wife back to her family. No court, no proceeding, no judge required. A woman, by contrast, had to appear before the city's chief magistrate and argue her case in public, a startling exception to a system that otherwise barred women from representing themselves entirely.

  Across the globe today, divorce is a formal legal process that touches nearly every dimension of a family's life: property, debt, custody, support, even where parents may live after they separate. The laws that govern it differ so radically between countries that what counts as a valid divorce in one place may not be recognized in another. Two countries still ban it altogether.

  What explains why divorce is treated so differently across history, religion, and national law? And what does the research actually show about what it does to the people who go through it, especially the children? These are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A World Divided by Law

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  Only two jurisdictions in the world prohibit divorce outright: the Philippines and Vatican City. In the Philippines, divorce for non-Muslim citizens is not permitted unless one spouse is an undocumented immigrant meeting specific conditions. Vatican City, as a theocratic state governed by the head of the Catholic Church, excludes it entirely.

  Everywhere else, the question is not whether divorce exists but how difficult it is to obtain. Two broad approaches dominate worldwide. The first requires one party to prove that the other did something wrong, a framework called fault-based divorce. The second requires no such proof: it is enough for one or both spouses to state that the marriage has broken down irretrievably. Countries including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States have moved fully to this no-fault model. Others offer both paths simultaneously, as is the case in many American states, France, and the Czech Republic.

  The pace of legal change has been striking. Italy did not permit divorce until the 1st of December 1970. Ireland and Malta approved it by referendum in 1995 and 2011 respectively. In the UK, a law that came into force in April 2022 removed the requirement for the spouse initiating divorce to blame the other party for the marriage's collapse.

  At the administrative level, some countries have pushed simplicity to its logical end. Portugal allows two people with no children, no shared property, and no alimony claims to file electronically for a no-fault divorce and complete the process within one hour.

• 3. Religion's Long Reach

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  Catholic doctrine, built on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and grounded in natural moral law, holds that marriage is a sacrament inseparable by human action. Under this teaching, the Catholic Church permits only annulment, which declares that a valid marriage never existed, not divorce. The Orthodox Church takes a different view, recognizing that in rare circumstances separation is the more compassionate outcome, particularly in cases of adultery or prolonged absence.

  Islam allows divorce but generally counsels against it, and either the husband or the wife may initiate it. Jewish law presents its own internal divide: Reform Judaism accepts civil divorce as sufficient, while Conservative and Orthodox Judaism require the husband to grant his wife a formal document called a get. If a husband refuses, or is missing without confirmed death, his wife becomes what is called an agunah, still legally married and unable to remarry. Under Orthodox law, children born from an extramarital affair involving a married Jewish woman are classified as mamzerim, a status that restricts who they may later marry.

  In several countries descended from the Ottoman Empire, including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, a system called the Millet arrangement persists. Each recognized religious community administers its own marriages and divorces separately. In Israel, marriages and divorces for Jewish citizens are administered by Orthodox rabbis, meaning civil divorce in a secular sense is unavailable for Jews residing there. Couples who want a different arrangement must marry outside the country.

• 4. Who Initiates and Why

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  A study published in the American Law and Economics Review found that women file slightly more than two-thirds of divorce cases in the United States. The figure from the UK mirrors this: research into web search behavior found that 70% of divorce-related inquiries came from women, a pattern confirmed by the Office for National Statistics report on England and Wales in 2012, which found that petitions from women outnumbered those from men by 2 to 1. In China as of 2019, women initiated more than 70% of divorces.

  A 2004 survey conducted in the UK by the management consultancy Grant Thornton, drawing on responses from matrimonial lawyers, broke down the reported causes. Adultery led the list at 27%, followed by family strain at 18%, domestic violence at 17%, and midlife crisis at 13%. Addictions and workaholism each accounted for 6%. Of the adultery cases, husbands were reported to have engaged in extramarital affairs in 75% of instances.

  The same 2004 survey found that 53% of divorces covered marriages that had lasted 10 to 15 years, with 40% ending after 5 to 10 years. Marriages that survive more than 20 years are unlikely to end in divorce. Research suggests that couples with high household incomes are less likely to divorce than those facing financial pressure, and regular attendance at religious services is also associated with reduced risk. Oddly, the wedding itself carries statistical weight: spending modestly but inviting a relatively high number of guests and taking a honeymoon trip is associated with a lower subsequent risk of divorce, while high-cost weddings may introduce debt stress that strains the marriage.

• 5. Children in the Crossfire

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  Nicholas Wall, a former President of the Family Division of the English High Court, observed that post-separation parenting is exceedingly difficult, and that in his experience the more intelligent the parent, the more intractable the dispute. He noted that parents simply do not realize the damage they do to their children by the battles they wage over them.

  The research bears this out in stark terms. A child from a divorced family is twice as likely to drop out of high school as a child from a non-divorced family. Children of divorced parents achieve lower levels of socioeconomic status, income, and wealth accumulation on average. Academic problems peak during ages 7 to 12, with reading test scores showing the most heightened negative effect. A study led by the Centre for Health Equity Studies at Stockholm University and the Karolinska Institutet, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that children living with one parent after divorce suffer more frequently from headaches, stomach aches, tension, and sadness than children whose parents share custody.

  Research also shows that children can be affected as early as 2 to 4 years before the separation occurs, as parental conflict and diminished contact take their toll well ahead of any formal legal process. Preschool children, who tend toward egocentric thinking, may interpret marital conflict as something they caused, resulting in guilt and lowered self-esteem.

  Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak. Research conducted at Northern Illinois University on family and child studies found that divorce in marriages with high conflict can actually reduce the level of conflict in the home, and may benefit the family. Studies have also found that parenting skills, which decline in the year immediately following a divorce, tend to recover by the two-year mark, with re-stabilization occurring and skills improving.

• 6. Cooling Off and Counting Down

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  China holds one of the highest divorce rates in the Asia Pacific region. From a crude divorce rate of 0.96 in 2000, the figure climbed to 3.36 in 2019, which remains the highest recorded rate in the last two decades, before dipping to 3.09 in 2020. China has permitted no-fault divorce since the New Marriage Law of 1950, making it one of the very few Asian countries to do so.

  In January 2021, China introduced what it called the cooling-off rule, embedded in article 1077 of the Marriage and Family Edition of the Civil Code. The rule imposes a mandatory 30-day waiting period. During those 30 days, either party can withdraw the divorce application. After the period expires, both parties must appear in person to collect the divorce certificate. If they do not appear, the original application is treated as withdrawn.

  The Ministry of Civil Affairs reported a 72% drop in divorce rates in the quarter following the rule's implementation, which its proponents cite as evidence that many decisions were emotionally driven. Critics responded sharply. The China Digital Times reported that in 2021 a woman named Kan Xiaofang was murdered by her husband during the 30-day period after she had filed for divorce. Chinese feminists argued that the rule undermines personal freedom and fails to account for the reality of domestic violence within households.

• 7. The History Behind the Law

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  John Milton wrote four divorce tracts between 1643 and 1645 arguing for the legitimacy of divorce on the grounds of spousal incompatibility. At the time, even raising the subject was seen as scandalous, and religious figures sought to have his tracts banned. His argument for something resembling no-fault divorce was more than two centuries ahead of its widespread legal adoption.

  In England before 1857, divorce required a private Act of Parliament costing approximately £200, a sum available only to the very wealthy. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 transformed the process into a civil matter handled by a dedicated court in London, bringing the cost down to around £40 and making divorce feasible for the middle class. The Church of England resisted further reforms for decades. A lasting precedent in English law had been set as far back as 1670, through the Lord Roos Divorce Act, which granted Lord John Manners a divorce from Lady Anne Pierrepont, establishing that Parliament could act in such matters.

  In Prussia, King Frederick II issued a decree in 1752 declaring marriage a purely private concern and permitting divorce on the basis of mutual consent. This stance influenced neighboring Austria under Emperor Joseph II, where similar rules were extended to non-Catholic subjects. In France, divorce was legalized after the Revolution, then abolished when the Bourbon dynasty was restored in 1816, only to be reinstated later.

  Spain's path was similarly turbulent. The 1931 Constitution of the Second Spanish Republic recognized a right to divorce for the first time, and the Divorce Act of 1932 passed despite opposition from the Catholic Church and allied parliamentary groups. General Franco's dictatorship abolished the law. A replacement was finally passed in 1981, again against church opposition, and later amended under the socialist government of Felipe González Márquez, who expedited the separation and divorce process in what critics within the Church called express divorce.