Increasing International Divorce and Decreasing International Marriage in South Korea

Dear Editor-in-Chief

South Korea has a population about fifty million. In 2011, 329,087 couples got married among Korean (1). It was increased about 4.7% compared to annual cases of 2005. Annual number of local marriage was maintained over three hundred thousand from 2005 to 2011. Local divorce was decreased about 10.7% during same period. However, international marriage and divorce with Korean have different aspects during this period. The number of international marriage was declined from 42,356 to 29.762 about 30% between 2005 and 2011 (Fig. 1). International divorce was 3,300 cases in 2004, and continued to grow up to 11,495 cases about 3.5 times in 2011 (Fig. 2). Most intriguingly, divorce of foreign wives had a explosive increase from 1,567 to 8,349 while the cases of foreign husband was gradually increased from 1,733 to 3,146.

Fig. 1:

Decreasing international marriage in South Korea (Statistics Korea)

Fig. 2:

Increasing international divorce in South Korea (Statistics Korea)

All the children require a lot of parent’s care and education. They are more vulnerable to surrounding prejudice especially in intercultural divorce. The ethnic and cultural composition of population is becoming more diverse in South Korea (2). The policy to international divorce should be considered in aspect to parents and children.