Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang asked the Minister for Social and Family Development for each year in the past five years, what is the respective breakdown of the number and percentage of divorce cases where shared care and control of the children was awarded.
Answer
The data on care and control outcomes for civil divorces is currently not coded for ready retrieval. As such, there is a need to read each divorce judgment, which is written in free text, in order to determine the care and control outcome, and then to extract, codify and verify the data for each case.
2 There are about 27,000 cases for divorces finalised from 2016 to 2020. While we have been working closely with the Family Justice Courts to ensure that such data is extracted, the process is time-consuming and manpower-intensive due to the large volume of cases.
3 We seek the Member’s understanding that MSF is unable to provide the statistics at this point in time as the data extraction process is on-going. We will share the statistics when ready.