Sex syndrome blamed for divorce rates

Sex and the City actors (from left) Kim Cattrall, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis - are they to blame for Australian marriage breakdowns? Source: Supplied

SEX and the City syndrome is being blamed for causing the breakdown of a growing number of Australian marriages.

In a seismic shift from a decade ago, family lawyers say more men are pointing to their wives' excessive drinking and drug use when filing for divorce, with an increasing number of husbands being awarded sole custody of their children because of it.

Senior family lawyer at Slater & Gordon, Heather McKinnon, said about 30 per cent of the firm's cases before the Family Court involved substance abuse.

Of these, about half now related to the female partner, something that was ''practically non-existent'' 10 years ago.

''That's a really huge shift in my lifetime in the job,'' she said.

''Dads that have applied to have children living with them are now succeeding in about half the cases, and that's because there's deficits in the mother. I think this is a very serious shift.''

Ms McKinnon points the finger at so-called ''Sex and the City syndrome'' - the normalisation of binge drinking among teenage girls and young women that carries through to adulthood.

''If you go to any social setting in a capital city or a large regional town on a Friday or Saturday night you will see young women at the bar downing shots - that is a generational change,'' Ms McKinnon said.

''Girls are at an early age starting to abuse alcohol, they drink heavily through their twenties and by their early thirties they've become fully-fledged alcoholics. They don't stop drinking when adolescent experimentation is finished.''

Neither is the problem restricted to the poorer classes as it once was; two of the four cases Ms McKinnon currently has before the Family Court involve professional women from middle to upper class families.

Head of family law at Armstrong Legal, Peter Magee, agreed there was a growing problem and said court cases may only be scratching the surface.

''Allegations of mums abusing substances is on the rise, but only a fraction of the allegations would ever play out in court,'' he said.

''You need to have a case that is so strong to say 'I need the kids to live with me', before we will raise it.''

The 2010 National Drug and Alcohol Household Survey shows that while men overwhelmingly drink more than women, the number of women aged 20 to 29 drinking at risky levels increased between 2007 and 2010, while girls aged 12 to 17 outdrink boys by one-and-a-half per cent.

Relationships Australia counsellor Denise Reichenbach said drinking was becoming a more common way for women to deal with stress.

''What we often hear about is people who drink get more aggressive so anger can come into it, violence can come into it,'' she said.

''The children often feel quite responsible for the parent who is drinking as well, and the level of concern for that person gets really high.''

There were 48,935 divorces granted in Australia in 2011, with the average age of divorcees falling between 40 and 44.

The number of divorces across the country has fallen nearly 12 per cent in the past decade.

Hit US TV comedy-drama Sex and the City ran from 1998 until 2004 and followed the very social lives of a group of four women - three in their mid-thirties and one in her forties - in New York.

It was widely popular in Australia and re-runs still air on pay-TV.

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