Divorce rates up nearly two percent in Turkey

Divorce rates have risen nearly two percent in the last year, while marriage rates have decreased nearly one percent, according to new statistics.

Figures released by the Turkish Statistical Institute on Wednesday found there has been a 1.6 per cent jump in the number of marriage splits in 2013.

Data shows there were 125,305  divorces last year, up two thousand on the previous year.

The number of couples who got married in 2013 decreased by over three thousand compared to 2012. This equates to 600,138 couples marrying - compared with 603,751 the previous year. 

In 2013, 40 percent of divorces occurred in the first five years of marriage and 21 percent of divorces occurred in the marriages of 6-10 year duration.

The highest divorce rate in Turkey is in the Aegean region with approximately 2.25 divorces per 1,000 resident population.

Average age at first marriage was 27 for males and 24 for females in 2012. 

Separately, the Turkish Statistics Institute said in January 2014 that the country's population increased in 2013 by 1,040,480 people, reaching 76,667,864 -- an increase of 1.37 percent on the previous year.

Males made up 50.2 percent (38,473,360) of the total population, while 49.8 percent (38,194,504) were female. 

There are 51,926,356 people in Turkey between the ages of 15 and 64 -- 67.6 percent of the total population.

The population between the ages of 0 and 14 totaled 18,849,814 while people aged 60 and older make up 7.7 percent, or 5,891,694 people.