Short note: Social consequences of increase in the rate of divorce. (1992)
Divorce, the legal dissolution of marriage, has risen sharply in industrial societies since the 1960s. In India it remains low but is rising, especially in cities. Census 2011 counted about 13.6 lakh divorced persons, 0.24% of the married population, and nearly three times as many separated. William J. Goode linked the rise to women’s economic independence, secularisation, easier laws and higher expectations of marriage. Its consequences are debated: they can be read as family breakdown or as adaptation.
Consequences for individuals
- Women. Lenore Weitzman (The Divorce Revolution, 1985) found that women’s living standards fall sharply after divorce while men’s often rise, which feeds the feminisation of poverty. In India, stigma, weak property rights and long maintenance disputes add to this burden. In 2020 the Supreme Court laid down guidelines, including mandatory disclosure of assets, to speed up maintenance.
- Children. Judith Wallerstein and Joan Berlin Kelly (Surviving the Breakup, 1980) reported lasting distress. Later research, notably Paul R. Amato’s, suggests that conflict before divorce, lost income and loss of contact with a parent do the damage. One stable parent may be better than two parents in constant conflict.
- Men. Many lose daily contact with their children and their domestic support. They also remarry faster than women.
Consequences for family structure
- Single-parent households, mostly headed by mothers, increase.
- Remarriage produces reconstituted (step) families and what Constance Ahrons called the binuclear family: two households that together still form one family system for the children.
- Kinship becomes more complex rather than smaller. Step-kin, half-siblings and ex-in-laws form new networks. Carol Smart and Bren Neale (Family Fragments?, 1999) show parents negotiating “post-divorce parenthood”.
- In India, divorce also unsettles joint property, dowry claims and custody. Kin and caste elders are often drawn in to mediate.
Consequences for society: rival readings
| Perspective | Reading of rising divorce |
|---|---|
| Functionalist / New Right | Weakens socialisation and social control; linked to delinquency, welfare dependency and an “underclass” (Charles Murray) |
| Liberal / late-modern | Marks higher expectations of marriage. Ronald Fletcher argued that high divorce reflects the high value placed on marriage, and high remarriage confirms it; Anthony Giddens sees the pure relationship lasting only while it satisfies both partners |
| Feminist | Divorce is emancipatory, an escape from oppressive or violent marriages, though it carries economic penalties for women |
| Postmodern | Part of family diversity, the “normal chaos of love” (Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim) |
Institutional and legal responses
- The Family Courts Act, 1984, mediation and counselling centres aim at less adversarial settlement.
- In Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan (May 2023), a five-judge Supreme Court bench held that it may dissolve marriages that have irretrievably broken down under Article 142, and may waive the six-month waiting period for mutual-consent divorce. The law is moving from fault towards recognising breakdown.
- Divorce slowly loses stigma as it becomes more common and legally simpler.
Conclusion
Rising divorce transforms rather than destroys the family. It creates real hardships, concentrated among women and children, while widening freedom to leave unequal or violent marriages. The sociological task is to reduce these costs through maintenance, custody and social support, rather than to read every divorce as moral decline.