The problem of collusive divorce in Turkish social security law and policy recommendations

In Turkish social security law, the survivor's pension system, while aiming to protect beneficiaries, has in practice evolved into a structure that reinforces economic dependency, encourages informal employment, and creates a conducive ground for sham divorces. Collusive divorce refers to the practice whereby daughters, despite lacking a genuine intention to dissolve the marriage, formally divorce their spouses in order to benefit from a survivor's pension while continuing to live together de facto. The aim of this study is to examine the phenomenon of sham divorce within the context of the survivor's pension regime through a multidimensional approach and to reveal the legal, economic, and social factors underlying this phenomenon. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were employed in the study. In this context, 157 decisions rendered by the Court of Cassation (Yargıtay) between 2010 and 2025 were analyzed; in-depth interviews were conducted with 8 Social Security Inspectors and 15 attorneys. In addition, calculations based on the 2024 Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS) microdata set of TURKSTAT were used to analyze the consistency between legal practice and statistical evidence. The findings reveal that women constitute the overwhelming majority of survivor's pension beneficiaries, that the average age of divorced women entitled to survivor's pensions is 53, and that a strikingly high proportion of this group (61.7%) is engaged in informal employment. These findings strongly suggest that divorce functions primarily as an economic strategy rather than being driven by familial considerations. Furthermore, the identification of approximately 90,000 individuals who are legally married yet receive survivor's pensions, with an average age of 47, underscores the vulnerability of the current legal framework to abuse. A significant correlation is also observed between sham divorce, poverty, and informal employment. The most salient drivers of sham divorce are the absence of an age threshold in survivor's pension entitlements and the lack of judicial scrutiny of intent in consensual divorce proceedings. Accordingly, this thesis demonstrates that sham divorce constitutes not a marginal anomaly but a structural by-product of the survivor's pension regime.