How Divorce Screws Women …

…and kids too. I’m the last person to advocate that people who shouldn’t be together stay in a bad relationship, especially for the misguided notion that it will be better for the kids (it never is). But it (pretty unsurprisingly) turns out that it’s usually the woman (and almost always the kids) that get screwed over in a divorce.

Far from the cliché that women take their ex-husbands to the cleaners when they split, a new study from the Institute of Social and Economic Research found that the incomes of ex-husbands rose by 25 percent after divorce, while ex-wives incomes fell sharply, and 27 percent of the women in the survey wound up living in poverty (three times the rate of the ex-husbands).

The reason was usually the kids—the dads leave, and the moms (who may have left work to take care of the kids, or at least paused their careers) are left to take care of the kids on their own, add not only the new additional expense of more childcare, but subtract his contribution (and most likely ANY future contributions, the study found that only 31% of fathers actually pay child support for their children).

As many people who grew up with a dad who only occasionally made any kind of financial contribution can attest, it makes the business of making ends meet for single mother extremely difficult. The problem lies not only in the fact that so many men don’t bother to contribute to the raising of their children, it’s that the system works in their favor. So many payments can be missed before anything is done and the hassle of going to court is often more than a single working mother can swing, or even when she does, a ridiculous amount of time can pass before anything is done, and even when it is (garnished wages, warrants for arrest) it does little to help the family that needs the day to day money to survive. In I’m sure many cases (as was with my family), all of these avenues are pursued to little avail, many years pass, the family struggles by, the kids reach 18, the thousands of dollars owed are no longer worth it to the overworked system, and the guy gets another free pass.