This evening i trotted off to my Korean language classes, same time, same place every week. I was dreading it a bit because we've just had 3 weeks off for holidays, and i was feeling pretty rusty. Anyway, it was nice to see everyone, especially our lovely teacher, Sarah.
The class got started as usual, and with todays focus being on reviewing what we did in our last class; numbers, prepositions, question words...then we got onto family. Someone in the class (bearing in mind there are only 5 of us, on a good day) put their hand up to ask for the Korean word for step mother. Sarah looked a little confused, but then offered us a word. Then words like step brother, ex wife, ex husband, and finally I asked for the Korean word for divorce. Sarah took a while in answering this, and eventually gave us the word 이혼 (pronounced eehon). She then proceeded to tell us that this word is almost never used in Korea, and "in olden days" there was no divorce, but now, "a little" but most people don't say the word. To this, someone else rudely asked, "So then do people in Korea just stay together and be unhappy?". I thought this was a rather obnoxious thing to say, as Korean culture is completely different to western culture, and sweeping generalizations like this can't be made.
Suddenly, i felt very sad. I looked around and realized that 5 out of 5 of us needed to know the above words; basically meaning that all of our families are divided, or split up because of divorce, and Sarah was almost bewildered as to why we needed to know these words.
So this got me thinking about statistics, and I did a little bit of research. The following are some of the divorce rates for the countries listed: