Hell and purgatory
Are your parents divorced too? Do they have new partners? How do you feel about it? Is it really awful, or do you maybe find it easy to live with the situation? In any case, for Cayetana from Peru, it feels like the whole world is falling apart.
It seems that divorce is a serious misdeed in Peru. To a large extent this is related to religious issues: In Peru, 81.3% of the population is Catholic, and in general the Roman Catholic Church will not accept the divorce of a married couple because matrimony is one of the seven sacraments ordained by God himself. The vow that both partners take in a church ceremony does, after all, state: "till death us do part..."
Allowing a marriage to "fall apart" is considered a sin, but it can be forgiven by performing the sacrament of penance. However, it is then expected that the divorced couple do not enter a new marriage. If they do this, or even worse, form a patchwork family, the judgement handed down is: "hell or endless purgatory". This implies that the family and even the children are tarnished and have a bad standing in the community.
In Germany too, children face enormous psychological strain when their parents separate. However, they do not usually face discrimination from their peers as a result. In 2007, almost 200,000 marriages ended in divorce, and in almost half the cases there were children involved. It is quite common for patchwork families to form from these broken families, and in Germany today, one in seven of all families is a patchwork family. And although this is not always easy for the children (or the parents), it is nonetheless neither "hell" nor "purgatory" in most cases.
