Divorce Rate Up .2% for military with Country’s 9th Year at War more women in military divorce
I saw this headline on WTOL then did some further searching to see if additional information was reported. The basics:
WASHINGTON (AP) – The divorce rate in the armed forces increased slightly again in the past year as military marriages continued to bear the stress of the nation’s ninth year at war.
The Pentagon says that in the budget year that ended Sept. 30, there were an estimated 27,312 divorces among the nearly 765,000 married members of the active-duty Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
That’s a divorce rate of about 3.6 percent, compared with 3.4 percent a year earlier.
An increase of .2% doesn’t seem high, until you compare it with this information reported by CBS News:
Friday’s reported 3.6 percent rate is a full percentage point above the 2.6 percent reported in 2001, just as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America propelled the United States into the war in Afghanistan.
“The force is under tremendous stress, and that stress finds its way into marriages,” said Joe Davis, spokesman for the organization Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Yet, as CBS News also points out:
There’s no comparable annual system for tracking the national or civilian divorce rate, though the Centers for Disease Control said in 2005 that 43 percent of all first marriages end in divorce within 10 years.
This additional link was interesting, it doesn’t have the numbers for 2009, but in 2006, 2007 and 2008 female members of the military experienced more divorces than their male counterparts, by quite a bit higher of a percentage…That made me wonder as to why that is. It would be interesting to learn who actually filed for divorce, was it the female military members or their husbands at home versus was it the wives at home who filed or the husband’s at war…this article, while not recent offers some speculation:
Benjamen Karney, lead researcher for the Rand Corp., which studied divorce in the military from 1996 through 2005, said there haven’t been any studies on the military divorce rate for women. “It wasn’t until my report came out in 2007 about divorce in the military that we learned that divorce in the military was substantially higher among females than males.This has been true for more than the last decade even when there was no war going on.”
Karney said there is speculation, however. “One thought is that support services available for military families are geared for supporting civilian wives of male servicemen,” he said. “Another possibility is that women who are service members are different than men in the military in important ways. It has been said that the military recruits the most traditional men in our society. But the military recruits the least traditional females in our society. They are not the women who are most invested in the general role assigned to women. A third possibility is that it may be more stressful to be a civilian husband of a military wife than it is to be a civilian wife of a military husband. We don’t know the answers. But we recommend there needs to be more research done on women in the military.”
What is happening to the sanctity of marriage?!?
November 27th, 2009 at 2:49 pmI’m the wrong one to answer that one.
Seriously though, I thought it was interesting in the differences in the divorce rates and I’m sure part of it has to be related to the length of the war and the deployment and re-deployment our troops and their families have to keep going through.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:27 pmThere is a lot to discuss with this issue. Too many times the media knee-jerks that it’s the deployments and the war. The fact that military women’s divorces are rising I think can be a telling fact.
I once had a OIC (Officer-in-Charge) tell me before I got married “A deployment will make a strong marriage stronger and a weak marriage weaker”. I have seen this to be true.
There is a Gunny who is here with me who has been married through 4 deployments. This last was the easiest on him and his family yet they’re getting a divorce. If you ask him the military had very little in his decision. He had PTSD after his first deployment but the last few he saw less and less and thus it was easier to transition.
Plus Marines always have a higher divorce rate than the other services yet the military as a whole mimmicks society pretty closely. I wonder if the economy has something to add to it.
Additionally the part on military women makes me wonder about fidelity. It’s always been an issue in the military. I remember my first year in being told to stay away from base housing because the deployed spouses were playing “red-light/green-light” which was a green light in the front porch light meant the husband was deployed and it was “all clear”.
Military members deployed also have issues of infidelity. As the #’s of women in war zones have increase so have combat “hook-ups”. A close friend of mine (no longer a Marine) has a child from a combat hook-up with a then-married Air Force member.
I remember when the first Army unit came home in 2003 two soldiers killed people within days of coming home. In the media they blamed PTSD. In the insuing trials they learned these two soldiers walked in on their wives with their boyfriends. This could easily be a story from Toledo and no one would assume PTSD.
So my big takeaway from this is it’s probably a more complicated issue than the media believes.
Stories like this remind me of Jim Croce’s song “Operator” which he wrote while in the Army sitting next to a phone booth while soldiers called the women who had sent them Dear John letters.
November 28th, 2009 at 1:27 pmThanks Mikey, I agree it’s more complicated than the media shares and probably could share. It might even be too complicated to get into on a blog, but, I thought it was worth a try. Especially since I know some of you who read here were in the military or have family that is still in the military.
I’ve had similar experiences with friends, where the wives would be faithful or unfaithful with some of their spouses being either the victim or the one who was unfaithful to them. The fair way to actually compare this would be to look at long distance relationships and compare the fidelity aspect, while the additional stressors of being at war can not be duplicated, it might create some additional insight.
November 28th, 2009 at 1:33 pm