135 Divorce Complaints per Day

It is tallied that 135 couples filed the divorce complaint a day last year.

According to the report released by the Court Administration Agency, the number of divorce complaints filed nationwide last year with courts was 49,380 (i.e. 135/day), increased by 13.3%.

The number of divorce cases shot up from 29,356 in 1992 to 39,356 in 1997. After that, it stagnated for a while. Then, it skyrocketed again last year.

Divorce cases based on parties’ agreement, which do not require litigation, went up by 11.7%, or 145,283 in 2001.

In many cases, infidelity was the reason for the divorce (48.2%), followed by lack of respect for complainants (24.7%), negligence of the duty of cohabitation (12.4%), lack of respect for family members (6.7%), and more than three years of missing (5.4%).

In terms of cohabitation period, 23.3% of them maintained it for 3-5 years.

Especially, the divorce rates for couples of less than 5 years of cohabitation have been increasing year after year. Even couple of less than 1-year cohabitation occupied 8.3% of the total in 1997, but reached 11.4% last year.

In terms of age of parties, people in 30s (Man, 43.6%; women, 41.3%) topped the list, with 20s (Man, 24%; women, 37.1%) and 40s (Man, 23.6%; women, 16.1%) following behind. The number of “silver divorces” between couples of more than 60 years of age was decreased to 506 from 560 in 2000.

The number of children at the time of filing was 2 in 34.6% of the cases. In 17.7% of the cases, the parties had no children of their own.

43% of male parties were high school graduates, 28.4% college and 17.3% middle school. On the other hand, 42.8% of female parties were high school graduates, 22.8% middle school and 21.2% college.

Wi-Yong Jung viyonz@donga.com