The Failure Of Child Support

Drawing on interviews with informants from a diverse range of 16 countries, including the US, the UK, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Peru, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Nigeria, this book examines how child support systems often fail to transfer payments from separated fathers to mothers and their children. It lays out how these systems are structured in ways that render them ineffective, while positioning women as responsible for their failures. The book charts the demise of child support as a feminist intervention, resituating it as gendered governance practice that operates by making the system inaccessible, failing to deliver outcomes, and condoning fathers’ irresponsibility. It identifies how the gender order is entrenched through child support failure and offers possibilities for feminist reform.

Drawing on interviews with informants from a diverse range of 16 countries, including the US, the UK, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Peru, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Nigeria, this book examines how child support systems often fail to transfer payments from separated fathers to mothers and their children. It lays out how these systems are structured in ways that render them ineffective, while positioning women as responsible for their failures. The book charts the demise of child support as a feminist intervention, resituating it as gendered governance practice that operates by making the system inaccessible, failing to deliver outcomes, and condoning fathers’ irresponsibility. It identifies how the gender order is entrenched through child support failure and offers possibilities for feminist reform.

On August 22, 1996, President William Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Media and goververnment sources portrayed this act as the most important welfare reform since the passage of Social Security in the New Deal 61 years earlier. The hype around welfare reform overshadowed a significant section of the act entitled, “Title III—Child Support.” This section of the act made major changes in the child support program that is charged with the task of establishing, enforcing and modifying child support orders for children with non-residential parents. This book tells the story of the development and passage of the 1996 child support reforms.

Taking a novel approach to child support policy analysis, Single Parents and Child Support Systems locates the transfer of payments between separated parents within a wider social policy ecosystem and compares the political, institutional and administrative dimensions of child support policy enactment across the globe.

Incorporating previously unpublished HCP 928-i, -ii, -iii, session 2003-04