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Jakarta Post

Have messaging apps boosted divorce rates in Jakarta?

Indra Budiari (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, September 24, 2016

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Have messaging apps boosted divorce rates in Jakarta? Illustration of divorce. (Shutterstock/Matt Benoit)

Ending a marriage is not always an easy thing to do, but more couples are getting divorced in the country, including in Jakarta.

There are plenty of reasons why people choose to split up. Financial reasons and infidelity are often cited as the main causes of divorce. Many unfortunate women also opt for divorce because they cannot handle staying in an abusive marriage. In Jakarta, however, social messaging services and urban lifestyles are being blamed for the spike in divorce.

Marriage Law No. 1/1974 contains very strict requirements for couples wanting to divorce, which include being able to present many witnesses to prove the marriage is failing. The rise of communication technology seems to have changed that.

Fernandes Raja Saor, a divorce lawyer, said with the ubiquity of smartphones couples were no longer required to present the necessary witnesses in court.

“Now we can use a screenshot of WhatsApp messenger chat to show the judges that a husband [or wife] is having an affair or a couple is fighting a lot,” he said.

Data released by the Jakarta Religious High Court suggested that divorce petitions were piling up at the court’s desk, where progressive increases in the number of cases could be seen with 9,654 petitions in 2012 to 12,770 in 2014 and 12,792 last year.

The court’s data also found that in Jakarta, wives are the party that filed most of the divorce petitions, accounting for almost 70 percent of the cases. Most of the women cited “disharmony” and “husband’s lack of responsibility” as a pretext for filing divorce.

JF Warouw, a sociology expert from the University of Indonesia (UI), believes that living in a big city like Jakarta could be another factor to why divorce seems to be more common.

He argues that the individualistic culture in Jakarta makes people less dependent on second opinion from their close friends in making important decisions.

Many studies have found that a culture of individualism is more conducive to divorce than that of more tight-knit cultures in small cities, he says.

Another reason why more couples are calling it a day to their marriage is because people have changed their views about marriage.

“The modern and relatively more educated society in Jakarta have a more open mind to divorce unlike people in small towns or villages,” Warouw said.

Nico Angelo, 28, said he nor his former wife were at fault for their marriage ending, which had lasted six years.

He believed that they married too young, before seeing their differences and eventually grew apart.

He and his wife then agreed that staying together was not ideal for them and their daughter. “We realized that there were too many differences between us and getting separated was the right thing to do,” he said.

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