Dessy Sagita – Domestic violence and extramarital affairs are the top causes of divorce in the country, with new figures indicating the rate of broken marriages jumped 40 percent compared to five years ago, a senior official from the Ministry of Religious Affairs said on Monday.

"There are at least 13 different reasons why people got divorced in that period, but mostly it was because of domestic violence and extramarital affairs," the ministry's director general of religious guidance, Nasaruddin Umar, told the Jakarta Globe.

Other reasons include polygamy and financial problems. He said a law meant to curb domestic violence enacted five years ago has not been effective.

Umar said that roughly 200,000 couples get divorced annually – equivalent to 10 percent of all couples who tie the knot each year.

He said the high divorce rate could have a dramatic effect on the country's youth. "Most of the drug users in Indonesia are young people and many of them have mentioned that their parents' divorces have caused them to turn to drugs," Umar said.

Dadang Hawari, a prominent psychiatrist turned marriage counselor, said the rising divorce rate was caused in part by a shift away from traditional roles in which women remain isolated in the home.

"Women go to work, they have more interaction with men and they also no longer tolerate domestic violence because they know more about their rights," he said.

Dadang said pre-marriage counseling was a key tool for curbing the rate of divorce.

"We need to teach the young people that perfection doesn't exist. They need to accept their partners for who they are, but at the same time we need to tell them that domestic violence is intolerable, no matter the circumstance," he said.