The family
In a June 2006 poll of 1,736 mothers in the 21st Century Family Life Survey, 88% said there has been a breakdown in family life in this country.
The evidence strongly supports this view. Today, 40% of all children can expect to see their parents split up before their 16th birthday. At least half of family breakdown takes place within the first three years of childhood. (Source: analysis of the Census, the Family and Children Study and the British Household Panel Survey, in Married and Unmarried Family Breakdown: Key Statistics Explained, Harry Benson, Bristol Community Family Trust, January 2009, p 3). However, the latest study from the Centre for Social Justice and the Bristol Community Family Trust estimates that, of children born today, no less than 48% will see their parents split by their 16th birthday (source: CSJ, 6 December 2010) . According to the Families Minister, Maria Miller, there are now 3.5 million children in broken homes (Daily Mail, 21 January 2011)
OECD research has shown that, of all countries (not just the 30 member countries), the UK has the fifth highest lone parent rate, after Latvia, Estonia, the Czech republic and the US. (OECD Family database, 2009).
Numbers of divorces were under 1,000 per annum from 1858 (when records began) to the First World War. There was a jump from 703 in 1917, to 1,111 in 1918, 1,754 in 1919, 3,090 in 1920 and a peak of 3,522 in 1921. The numbers than stayed broadly in the 2-5,000 range until the second world war and its aftermath, with the number shooting above 10,000 in 1943 for the first time, and then 15,634 in 1945, 29,829 in 1946, 60,254 in 1947 – before falling back to the mid 20,000s – until 1962, when it started shooting up again.
Divorce rates have gone up about six fold since 1960. There were about 2 per 1,000 at the beginning of the 1960s. They had doubled to 4 per 1,000 by the end of the decade (before the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, making divorce easier, came in), more than doubled again to 11.2 in 1979; since which time things have been more stable (11.9 per 1,000 in 2007).
According to the 2001 Census, 59% of households with children are married, 11% are co-habiting and 22% lone parents. In 2003, an estimated 88,000 children under 5 were affected by the separation of their unmarried parents, compared with about 31,000 children under 5 whose married parents divorced. Thus, three quarters of all family breakdowns affecting young children now involve unmarried parents. (Research by Harry Benson, director of the Bristol Community Family Trust, quoted in The Times, 5 February 2005). “The evidence is irrefutable. Unmarried parents are five times more likely to break up than married parents”.
It is estimated that 15% of babies are born without a resident biological father. (Kiernan, K and Smith, K, Unmarried Parenthood: New insights from the Millennium Cohort Study, 2003;
A survey of 530 recently married couples found that nine in ten had previously been living together. Of 505 other couples who married 25 years ago, only a tenth said they had cohabited before getting married (Survey by website eHarmony.co.uk, reported in The Times, 25 April 2011).
In a large-scale survey by the NHS Information Centre published on 15 December 2011, 27% of women in the 16-24 age group said they first had sex before the age of 16, compared with 4% of those now aged 55-69 - a seven fold increase in a generation. Diane Abbott, Shadow Public Health Minister, said in response that "The rising number of girls having under-age sex is alarming. It poses public health policy challenges and social challenges. The underlying cause must be the 'pornification' of British culture and the increasing sexualisation of pre-adolescent girls. Too many young girls are absorbing from the popular culture around them that they only have value as sex objects. Inevitably, they act this notion out". (Quoted in The Times, 16 December 2011).
A University of Iowa study, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family (April 2011), found that 47% of women who had sex for the first time as teenagers divorced within 10 years of marriage, while divorce within 10 years was only experienced by 27% of women who delayed sex until adulthood. The figures for those divorcing within five years of marriage were 31% and 15% respectively.
Meanwhile, births outside marriage were about 60 or 70 per 1,000 live births during the 1840s and 50s, falling to the 50s and 40s from then until the Second World War, when they rose briefly, before falling back to the 40s again; 54.4 in 1960, 82.8 in 1970, 117.9 in 1980, 283.2 in 1990, 394.8 in 2000 and 452.6 per 1,000 in 2008.
The world had changed vastly from the mainly rural mid 19th century to the mainly industrialised and technological mid 20th century. But the level of births outside marriage stayed broadly stable for those 100 years, before rocketing nearly ten fold in the last 50 years.
Research by the Centre for Social Justice into the 'pathways to poverty' and how to close them, "has consistently shown that has to begin with preventing family breakdown and the havoc it wreaks among adults and children" (Strengthening the Family and Tackling Family Breakdown, October 2011).
“The threat to human communities in their continuity represented by the decline and fragmentation of the family poses the greatest long-term challenge facing Western countries” (Professor Brenda Almond, The Fragmenting Family, Oxford, 2006, p 20).