ONE DIVORCE IN EVERY TEN MINUTES IN MALAYSIA?

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia ― Civil servant Jamilah Baharuddin (not her real name) and her husband divorced in 2012 after 12 long years of conflict with his family who did not approve of their marriage.

The 35-year-old woman, who earns about RM6,500 a month, says they likely would not have split up if she wasn’t working because she would have been forced to rely on her husband to support her and their three children financially.

“That’s one of the reasons why a lot of Malay women in rural areas are scared to step forward and get a divorce when they are abused ― they can’t survive without their husband’s assistance,” Jamilah told The Malay Mail Online recently.

• The number of divorces in Malaysia has more than doubled in just eight years from 2004. In 2012, a whopping 56,760 divorces were recorded, which is equivalent to a marriage breaking down every 10 minutes.
• According to statistics provided by the Syariah Judiciary Department Malaysia (JKSM), the number of Muslim couples getting divorced rose by 2.3 times from 20,916 in 2004 to 47,740 in 2012, and to 49,311 last year.
• The number of non-Muslim marriages, however, broke down at a slightly higher rate from 3,291 divorces in 2004, increasing by 2.7 times to 9,020 cases in 2012, the most recent year where statistics are available from the Statistics Department.
• While couples are increasingly splitting up, the number of marriages, however, are also going up.
• A total of 112,262 Muslim couples tied the knot in 2004, a number that has risen steadily in general over the years to 148,806 marriages in 2012, according to the Department of Islamic Development Malaysia (Jakim). But the pattern for non-Muslim marriages is more erratic.

A total of 57,530 non-Muslim couples got married in 2004, a number that declined the following year, after which the figure rose and fell until 65,993 marriages were registered in 2012.

Source: Agencies