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LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, November 29, 2002: According to The Center for Policy Studies, children are suffering because family stability in Britain is in decline, with marriage rates the lowest on record and the number of divorces the highest in Europe. Titled “Broken Hearts,” the report charts the unfolding tragedy of family decline and the consequences for society in Britain. It serves as an excellent reminder to men and women everywhere on the importance of marriage, especially to the happy and good upbringing of children. If parents separate, children are more likely to develop behavioral problems, perform less well at school, become sexually active at a younger age (often to compensate for a lack of love at home), suffer depression and turn to drugs, smoking and heavy drinking. Although most husbands and wives think that in an unhappy marriage, divorce is best to avoid conflict, their separation is more devastating and traumatic for children than living in a home where arguments take place, the study says. Parental separation forces children to acknowledge that there is division between the two people they love most in the world and to choose where their loyalties lie. Even if a parent takes a new partner, children were more likely to suffer health, social and educational problems than children in homes where parents remained together. In Britain it is believed there is collective insecurity and a sense of social disintegration. The accumulating evidence states that the main factor was the rapid decline of traditional family life, with the resultant severe consequences on children. Britain was experiencing a record low in marriages and at the same time had become the divorce capital of Europe. Despite a far higher population, there are now fewer than 300,000 marriages in Britain each year, down from 480,280 in 1972. There are more than 150,000 divorces annually, a massive rise over the 27,150 in 1961. Four in 10 children were now born outside marriage. More children are conceived outside marriage than within, with 33 per cent of conceptions outside marriage being aborted, compared to 8 per cent within marriage. Britain had more teenage girls becoming pregnant than any other country in Europe by a huge margin. The rate in 1996 was over 30 per 1,000 women under 20, the next contender being Portugal with under 20 per 1,000 and in France there were fewer than 10 per 1,000. An astonishing 90 percent of British teenage girls who become mothers are not married.

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