Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Divorce rate rises among "International marriages" in Korea

I'll be writing more on this bit of news later, where the Korea Times reports that while South Korea's overall divorce rate — which was in the stratosphere — has dropped, the divorce rate for those in so-called "international marriages" (국제결혼) continues to rise, especially for Korean men married to women from other countries.

Although I plan to delve into this in more detail later (I've got a bit of work to do over the next 48 hours), one point I'd like to make right now is that the South Korean government has, over the past few years, deliberately made it easier for foreign spouses to divorce their Korean spouse and still remain in the country.

In other words, by government design (and at the behest of NGOs and women's groups), foreign spouses are less tethered, legally speaking, to their Korean spouse than before when their ability to stay in Korea was utterly reliant on them staying married to their Korean spouse.

In the meantime, Brian has a discussion going on right now.

2 comments:

  1. OMG that dress is hideous. He should have chopped her up and buried her for wearing that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, that's not violent.

    Um, I'm guessing that they were planning on doing some South American dancing afterwards.

    ReplyDelete

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