'Facebook' Turning Up in More and More Divorce Petitions
The number of British divorces involving Facebook in some way, shape or form is on the up.
As technology progresses, the way we communicate with one and other changes and evolves. The advent of social networking has meant falling out of touch with old school mates, friends from our hometowns and coworkers has become less common. However, it seems social networking is also having an adverse affect on some marriages.
According to a study from Divorce-Online, Facebook is now being mentioned in one third of British petitions for divorce because of unreasonable behaviour. The study was a follow-up to a survey carried out in December 2009, when the divorce blog discovered that 20 percent, or one fifth, of petitions for unreasonable behaviour contained the word 'Facebook.' In December of 2011, Divorce-Online conducted the same study, using the same sample size of 5,000 behaviour petitions, and found that this 20 percent had risen to 33 percent.
"Social networking has become the primary tool for communication and is taking over from text and e-mail in my opinion," said Mark Keenan, a spokesman for Divorce-Online. "If someone wants to have an affair or flirt with the opposite sex then [Facebook is] the easiest place to do it. Also the use of Facebook to make comments about ex partners to friends has become extremely common with both sides using Facebook to vent their grievances against each other," he continued. "People need to be careful what they write on their walls as the courts are seeing these posts being used in financial disputes and children cases as evidence."
The top three reasons where Facebook appeared in behaviour petitions were:
1) Inappropriate messages to members of the opposite sex.
2) Separated spouses posting nasty comments about each other.
3) Facebook friends reporting spouse's behaviour.
Interestingly, while Facebook seems to appear in rather a lot of petitions for divorce, Twitter was only found in 20 of the 5,000 petitions.
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It's a written record, perfect for presenting as evidence. I wouldn't say it's having an adverse effect, it's merely bringing to light adverse behaviour.
People, no wait adults need to grow up from this whole Facebook cheating mess, you see it mentioned on Jeremy Kyle every two minutes. Grow the hell up, act your age and try to be role models.
I've been looking into this and suspect that the original press release may have contained fabricated information.
Firstly, the same company released a press release on the 21st December 2009 (http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=52628) within which it was claimed that they had dealt with over 60,000 divorces.
Now, the company's website (www.divorce-online.co.uk) features a counter which shows the number of divorces that they've dealt with since their inception, yet this graphic clearly shows that the company have dealt with just 67,360 divorces (at the time of writing) so the company have drafted 7,360 petitions since that date. Now, this really doesn't add up.
This means that 70% of Divorce Online's customers would be filing for a divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour. This is in spite of the fact that Grant Thornton's recent study into divorce revealed that only 17% of divorce petitions that are filed in the UK rely on this ground. It would be fair to expect some difference in the two company's findings, of course, but a difference of 53% seems ridiculous.
The manner in which the papers reported on what should have been an irrelevant finding were undoubtedly lazy, but providing them with what I can only believe to be a press release containing fictional information is absolutely disgraceful.