Divorce rate hits all-time high in Brazil

As a largely Catholic country, the Brazilian government has historically been tough on divorce. Under the country’s family laws, couples who wished to divorce in Brazil were required to live separately with the approval of a judge before they could file for and be granted a divorce. These restrictive laws resulted in Brazil having some of the lowest divorce rates in the world for many years.

However, that no longer appears to be the case. Recently, the Brazilian government changed it laws to make it easier to divorce in the country. Now, the number of Brazil residents who are getting divorces is growing exponentially, reaching an all-time high last year and continuing to rise.

In 2011, more than 350,000 divorces were granted in Brazil, according to the country’s IBGE statistics agency. That is a 46 percent increase from the divorce rate in 2010 and the largest number of divorces recorded in the country in a single year since the statistics agency began tracking the divorce rate in 1984, nearly 30 years earlier.

The increase is largely attributed to the change in the country’s laws which make it much faster and easier to get a divorce. Couples must no longer wait a year or more to end unhappy marriages, which probably also makes the process much less costly.

Thankfully, those restrictive divorce laws do not exist in Las Vegas. In Nevada, couples do not need to prove that either spouse was at fault for the divorce, and marriages can be terminated within a relatively short amount of time, depending on the financial situation of the couple and whether they have children.

Source: Las Vegas Sun, “Brazil sees record number of divorces,” Dec. 17, 2012