Family Violence Red Flags

Okay, I was telling you yesterday about the marriage and divorce stats and I found it fascinating. So when I saw more on it, I thought I got to tell you about this too, okay? Apparently, we, along with Australia, lead the world on the decline of marriage. Like we are heading down this path faster than anybody else. else. Among women in their late 40s, 14% here have never been married. Worldwide, the average is only 4.3%. So 4.3% everywhere else, here 14%. We are more than three times the world average. The pace of change has also been the fastest for us. So between 1990 and 2010, the share of women who've never been married in their late 40s went up by 9.7 percentage points. You basically round it up, so it's 10. That is the largest increase of any region in the world. People in Australasia also marry later than they do in other parts of the world at an average age of about 31.5 for men and 30 for women. For women in their late 40s, more than one in five are divorced or separated, which again is higher than any other region. Now, you're going to think that your automatic reaction to this, I wouldn't blame you if it was, oh, that doesn't sound very good at all, that's very bad for New Zealand. Actually, it's not bad. It's not bad for women. It's not bad for women to marry later in life because it enables women to complete their education, to gain a stronger foothold in the labour market and to support themselves financially. And getting divorced is also apparently quite good for women because it lowers our rates of suicide, it lowers the incidence of domestic violence and fewer women are therefore murdered by their spouses. So I just want you to reflect on that, blokes. Just reflect on that. Might be better for us to be out of the marriages. trouble of course is we end up poorer so it's the money or the depression really we're having to choose we're like oh should we stay for the money or do we want to be that depressed anyway how fascinating are those figures 626