Single Mothers’ Post-Separation Provisioning: Child Support and the Governance of Gender

Abstract

This article uses single mothers’ pursuit of child support (child maintenance) to examine how the state governs gender through post-separation financial responsibilities. We draw on interview data to detail how the Australian welfare state compels single mothers’ child support provisioning through claims work and the associated strategies of managing information, emotions and government workers. Despite their sustained efforts, provisioning afforded single mothers’ limited financial benefits. We argue that this outcome reflected a gendered policy and implementation regime that normalised masculine financial discretion and simultaneously compelled single mothers’ provisioning and failed to accord it legitimacy. Provisioning did, however, benefit the welfare state, which appropriated single mothers’ time and knowledge to claim and perform key functions. We conclude that the necessity and challenges of child support provisioning were not indicative of a failing child support programme but rather reflected its role in the reproduction of gendered power, responsibilities and rewards in post-separation parenting.

Keywords

child maintenance child support governance of gender lone motherhood post-separation parenting provisioning single mothers unpaid work welfare state

Introduction

In this article, we focus on women’s pursuit of child support (also termed child maintenance) to analyse how the governance of gender (Brush, 2003) simultaneously compels women’s provisioning activities while failing to accord their provisioning legitimacy or recognise it as work. We present the experiences of 37 Australian women to argue that the organisation and distribution of child support provisioning articulates gendered power relations that underpin the child support programme (CSP). This occurs through policy and institutional practices that necessitate women’s child support provisioning in ways that reflect and reproduce gendered institutional practices and logics and financial outcomes. Child support provisioning may make a modest and typically temporary contribution to women and children’s financial well-being but in the process a central institution of Australian post-separation parenting legislation appropriates women’s unpaid work to claim and perform key state functions. We conclude that women’s child support provisioning work does not reflect the failings of policy and practice but rather, their logic.

We conceptualise women’s often necessitated pursuit of child support as a type of provisioning: that is, work directed towards acquiring financial, material and other intangible necessities and conveniences for themselves and for those with whom they are linked by relationships of responsibility (Neysmith and Reitsma-Street, 2005). These relationships of responsibility configure the type of work, its extent, how and when it is undertaken, whether it is voluntary or mandatory and the resources and barriers that shape women’s engagement with such work (Neysmith and Reitsma-Street, 2005: 383). With its emphasis on the connection between activities and relationships rather than the sites or spheres in which activities occur, the concept of provisioning encourages the recognition and valuing of women’s work across contexts (Neysmith et al., 2010).

The conceptualisation driving this article contrasts with existing approaches to child support, wherein the dominant language of payment, receipt and transfer disguises mothers’ work in addressing a former partner’s refusal or reluctance to pay. Laws and policies differ across countries, but there are high rates of payer non-compliance in many jurisdictions (Hakovirta, 2011). In Australia, slightly over 40% of recipient mothers report payments being made in full and on time, with mothers describing decreasing compliance as time since separation increases (Qu et al., 2014). These patterns indicate that the transfer of child support is often not the result of regular and uncontested payment processes. Rather, women negotiate payment and non-payment with their former partners and engage with state institutions as they attempt to pursue compliance (Edin and Lien, 1996; Harris, 2015; Natalier and Hewitt, 2014).

Conceptualising child support activities as provisioning extends feminist and sociological challenges to dominant gendered definitions of what ‘counts’ as work. This is an important claim in policy and political contexts that emphasise the importance of fathers in children’s lives in ways that render the contributions of mothers largely invisible (Featherstone, 2010). It also aligns with the turn to more expansive understandings that have increasingly challenged the dualisms of public and private, economic and non-economic, formal and informal activities underpinning definitions of work (O’Connor et al., 1999; Power, 2015; Taylor, 2004; Williams and Nadin, 2012) and the marginalisation of substantial parts of women’s work and lives (Taylor, 2004). Our approach adds an important interrogation of how an unregarded form of women’s work in post-separation contexts is necessitated by the state’s governance of gender (Brush, 2003).

Our discussion also contributes to the growing body of gender-informed analyses of child support policy. Researchers have identified the gendered meaning and use of child support in parental identities and interactions (Bradshaw et al., 1999; Cozzolino and Williams, 2017; Natalier and Hewitt, 2010, 2014; Skinner, 2013), however a gendered analysis is less often applied to the workings and outcomes of child support policy and institutions. Late, irregular or non-payment and strategies for minimising assessments are most commonly understood as rooted in technical and administrative failings or inconsistencies between policy and its implementation (Plotnick et al., 2015; Smyth et al., 2014). Thus, child support ‘problems’ are an expression of imperfectly achieved policy aims such as fairness, equality or efficiency. Recognising that state institutions and policies organise, reward and position gendered citizens (Brush, 2003) suggests the value of exploring the existence and effects of non-compliance not as policy failings but as expressions of the state’s role in distributing financial discretion and provisioning work associated with child support in gendered ways.

The Governance of Gender

In Gender and Governance, Lisa Brush (2003) argues the state is a gendered and gendering entity. Here, we apply Brush’s discussion of the governance of gender, a process by which state policies, laws and institutions reproduce, regulate, sanction and mitigate hierarchical relationships of gender difference across multiple domains of social life. The governance of gender is evident in two interrelated processes. First, the state accords men and women unequal rights, resources and power. The different rights, resources and power afforded to child support recipients (most commonly women) and payers (most commonly men) (Qu et al., 2014) are one such example. Second, the state produces gendered subject positions through the ‘creation and regulation, construction and instruction’ of ‘proper’ masculinities and femininities (Brush, 2003: 52). This is implicit in the gendered construction of financially autonomous men and financially dependent women who typically occupy the positions of child support payers and recipients respectively (Diduck, 1995). We focus on how these processes were evident in how the key institution of the CSP – the Department of Human Services Child Support (DHSCS) – facilitated men’s discretion and demanded and constrained women’s child support provisioning.

The governance of gender centres state processes in the constitution and normalisation of gendered difference and inequality structuring relationships between families, welfare and markets (Iversen et al., 2005; Orloff, 1993; Pateman, 1989). While the gendered characteristics of welfare states vary across contexts (Orloff, 1993), these processes strengthen a dichotomy of the public sphere as an economically productive, male and masculine domain where ‘work’ occurs (Orloff, 1993; Pateman, 1989), and the private domestic sphere as a feminised site of reproductive activity of no economic value (O’Connor et al., 1999). The misrecognition and de-valuing of women’s work in families and communities is reflected in constructions of single mothers receiving welfare payments as unproductive and economically and morally failed in their dependency on the state (Christopher, 2004). It is also evident in activation policies demanding an individualised, de-gendered adult worker engaged in the formal labour market (Lewis, 2001). Thus, single mothers not undertaking paid labour are defined as unemployed workers, not mothers or women engaged in diverse productive activities (Kingfisher and Goldsmith, 2001).

The governance of gender embedded in policy is reproduced and potentially transformed when that policy is implemented through interactions between single mothers and state workers (Brush, 2003). Workers translate the formal expression of laws and policies in ways that have immediate and longer-term impacts on the resources and positioning of single mothers (Brush, 2003; Orloff, 1993). Research across countries highlights how frontline workers respond to and are challenged by the information, prompts, demands, queries and appeals presented by child support recipients (and payers, too) (Edin and Lien, 1996; Harris, 2015; Natalier, 2017). These dealings fit Neysmith et al.’s (2010) conceptualisation of claims work – the often unacknowledged activities centred on advocating for institutional assistance and resources. This suggests that the DHSCS is a key site necessitating women’s child support provisioning, and a site in which the governance of gender directly shapes women’s lives.

Australia’s Child Support Programme

Australia’s CSP dissolves the family–state dualism. The policy reflects an expectation that financially providing for children is the duty of mothers and fathers, not the state (Fehlberg and Maclean, 2009). This creates an administrative and financial relationship between parents and their children, and between parents themselves. For most mothers, this connection is embedded in the state: it is necessitated by child support policy, intersects with the welfare system and family law and is referenced to government bureaucracies. And while the financial implications are greater for low income single mothers, those with higher incomes are also enmeshed in the demands of the CSP and welfare systems if they are to receive their full entitlements from the state.

It is not compulsory to seek child support but to receive their full welfare payments, recipient parents must have a child support agreement or assessment lodged with the DHSCS unless they are exempt due to a risk of family violence (Department of Social Services [DSS], 2018a). State benefits are linked to the expected amount of child support (DSS, 2018b); if the full amount of child support is not paid, the shortfall can be compensated – but not fully covered – through changes to welfare payments. However, the DHSCS and welfare system are neither designed nor advertised to be responsive to fluctuations, and many mothers are unaware of this option (Cook et al., 2015). In particular, single mothers with low incomes cannot easily opt out of the CSP, and are at risk of greater poverty when their former partners do not pay child support reliably and in full (Australian Law Reform Commission, 2011).

The CSP is administered through the DHSCS (called the Child Support Agency immediately prior to this study). Approximately 85% of separated parents interact with the DHSCS (Fehlberg et al., 2014: 418), with the remaining 15% ‘self-managing’ child support with no government oversight. A little over half (54%) of parents engaging with the DHSCS lodge an agreement with the Department but manage payments without DHSCS involvement (Private Collect). The remaining 46% are categorised as Child Support Collect, whereby the DHSCS calculates, collects and transfers payments. Under Child Support Collect, child support is assessed with reference to a formula standardising calculations through an income shares approach incorporating each parents’ income and percentage of overnight care of children (DSS, 2018b). Parents using Private Collect or self-managing can negotiate amounts paid but Private Collect parents receiving a set of government payments called Family Tax Benefits cannot agree to an amount lower than that calculated by the formula.

Payers can legally minimise their income for the purpose of child support assessments through family trusts and business tax arrangements (Fehlberg et al., 2014). They may avoid lodging income tax returns or fail to declare income from the informal labour market (Ministerial Taskforce on Child Support, 2005); both are illegal but neither attracts sufficient state surveillance or penalties to serve as a compelling deterrent. Enforcement options are not systematically applied to address non-payment, late payment or child support debt (Fehlberg et al., 2014: 457). Thus, the state does not effectively constrain men’s practical discretion to determine the amount and timing of child support payments.

Due to ineffective compliance practices, women describe repeatedly raising with the DHSCS their former partner’s non-compliance, collecting and sharing information and advocating for enforcement. This entails complex accounting and administrative tasks as women manage discrepancies between child support ‘on the books’ and the amounts actually paid (Cook et al., 2015). Women may challenge DHSCS decisions through Change of Assessment or Administrative Appeals processes which involve submitting conflicting accounts of personal incomes and the costs of a child and the DHSCS sharing these between parents for transparency purposes (DSS, 2018b). Single mothers actively manage relationships and interactions with the state and their former partners while receiving limited support from the state to do so.

Widespread payer non-compliance and the absence of meaningful state enforcement reflect Diduck’s (1995) discussion of masculine financial discretion. Diduck argues that when men cohabit with their partners and children, they have a social and legal obligation to financially support their families. When the relationship ends, men are practically afforded the discretion of continuing or withdrawing that support in the form of child support, a discretion aligning with masculine financial autonomy and authority privileged in domestic and state welfare spheres. Following our discussion of methods, we explore how the governance of gender through the CSP buttresses masculine financial discretion and necessitates feminised provisioning.

Methods

Research Design and Data Collection

Our analysis draws on data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 37 separated Australian mothers entitled to be paid child support. Interviews were guided by a schedule that centred on women’s experiences of the DHSCS. Women also discussed their interactions with other family law and welfare institutions, the financial, relationship and emotional outcomes of these interactions, relationships with former partners and the impact of child support on their children. The interviews were digitally recorded and professionally transcribed.

After ethics approval, 31 participants were recruited through advocacy and support groups, and a further six participants through snowball sampling. Thirty-five women had borne their children in long-term heterosexual relationships. Fourteen women had one child, 16 had two children and seven had three or more children. Thirty identified as Anglo-Australian; others described European (n = 4), South American (n = 1), South-East Asian (n = 1) and sub-continental (n = 1) backgrounds. The median annual income of the sample was A$30,000 (approximately US$27,800 at 2014 exchange rates). This is a low income in Australia, where the median income for all female employees was A$43,628 (US$40,500) in 2014 when the data were collected (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2015). The sample income ranged between A$11,000 (US$10,200) and A$110,000 (US$102,000). Seven women were employed full-time, 13 were employed part-time and 17 were not employed. Twenty-five cared for their children more than two-thirds of the time, four had shared care arrangements (each parent cared for a child between 35% and 65% of nights), three described fluctuating arrangements, one participant’s child lived with a relative and six did not describe care arrangements.

Twenty-five women used Child Support Collect, one woman used Private Collect, three self-managed, three had alternative arrangements and five participants could not provide this information. The amount of assessed child support ranged from A$0 per week to A$560 (US$520) per week, with a median assessment of A$31 (US$29) per week; one-third of women were assessed to receive A$25 (US$23) or less per week. Eight women received the expected amount of child support on time and in full, and 29 described situations where their former partner paid no, irregular or partial child support.

Our findings should be read in light of the implications of our study design. The sample included women from a range of socio-economic positions, relationship histories and cultural backgrounds but it is not statistically representative of Australian separated mothers and cannot facilitate the systematic analysis of the impact and intersection of other key structures (e.g. class and ethnicity) on child support provisioning. Our sample includes a greater proportion of women using Child Support Collect than the total separated parent population and a greater proportion of women who have experienced payment irregularities than the total DHSCS caseload (Qu et al., 2014). Our recruitment strategy likely contributed to this. However, women with challenging child support circumstances serve a valuable analytic purpose, throwing into relief work that may be taken for granted in less difficult scenarios. Finally, we note this study provides a snapshot of participants’ provisioning but patterns may change because relationships, care arrangements and child support payments often alter over time (Fehlberg et al., 2013).

Data Analysis

Our analysis was informed by a critical realist approach (Houston, 2001). Participants’ accounts are interpretations of their experiences, and these interpretations and experiences occur in a social context with material impacts upon participants’ lives. To conduct the analysis, transcripts were divided between the first and second named authors and coded separately, with one-third of the transcripts double coded to check for consistency. This highlighted the effort women expended when interacting with the DHSCS. We applied an abductive analytical approach (Shank, 2008), where we used the literature on provisioning to interpret women’s effort as claims work supported by three strategies: managing information; managing emotions; and managing government agency workers. We now discuss these processes in detail.

The Gendered Responsibilities of Claims Work

Claims work is rights and needs focused, directed towards receiving assistance and resources from institutions. It entails research, marshalling evidence, advocacy, argument and negotiation, in an attempt to convince people that claims are legitimate (Neysmith et al., 2010). In formal expressions of child support policy and processes these are largely invisible activities and unrecognised as work. But for participants, claims work was time-consuming and compelled by the intersection of child support and welfare policies.

Claims work arose out of governance processes that differentially assign responsibility for lodging and pursuing child support agreements or assessments. This responsibility is not explicitly gendered but care arrangements, low incomes and welfare payments mean women are likely to engage with the DHSCS. Claims work was simplest when it entailed the initial approach and information supplied to the DHSCS to determine or lodge child support assessment or agreements. Most women described more demanding and complex claims work arising when their former partners did not conform to agreements or assessments or avoided being assessed at a fair amount. Reflecting the absence of meaningful DHSCS compliance activities, women described their ongoing responsibility for identifying, reporting and following up their former partner’s non-compliance. Wendy, whose former partner paid the assessed amount of a little over A$500 (US$464) a week irregularly in ‘dribs and drabs’ through Child Support Collect, put it this way: ‘you’re standing up and saying, “Well, no. [He hasn’t paid].” And so that’s a problem, in that I had to be the one to say it [to report non-payment to the DHSCS].’

Alice’s experiences exemplify the necessity of claims work. Her former partner was assessed to pay A$22.50 (US$21) per week through Child Support Collect but did not reliably pay and under-reported his income. The DHSCS responded to the irregular payments and under-reporting only when Alice raised them and did not consistently pursue compliance:

The only time anything happens with child support is, I ring up and I give them the details again and then like, a couple of weeks later some money might appear that’s just some random number […] So when I ring in they do something and then I’m expecting that, you know, and this payment happens. I think, ‘Oh great, something’s working.’ I don’t know what it is that’s working because they won’t tell me. So I think, ‘Great, things are working’, so there’ll be money coming in and then nothing comes in. So when I ring again a couple of months later then magically some more money comes in again.

As Alice’s experience exemplified, women’s claims work typically had little lasting impact: improvements in the amount or regularity of child support payments were temporary. Irrespective of the immediate results of claims work, its legitimacy was eroded by workers’ comments that women’s efforts were unlikely to result in consistent payments. Penelope’s former partner failed to pay weekly child support of A$100 (US$93) through Child Support Collect. She recounted,

They made it clear that they’re most likely not able to collect the money – that was pretty much what I was told. […] They said, ‘Well, we’ll put it on our system, but we can’t guarantee you’ll get anything.’

Oriel, whose former partner, ‘never paid any child support and the Agency [DHSCS] never followed him up’, was explicitly told that she should not expect to receive the assessed amount: ‘They just said, “Well if he doesn’t want to pay, he doesn’t want to pay. There’s no other options open to you.”’

The necessity of provisioning, the typically limited and temporary impact of claims work, and workers’ expectation of its failure were structured by and reinforced the governance of gender, specifically the reproduction of masculine financial discretion that prioritised men’s ability to determine the conditions of their child support payments. Thus, women pursued strategies to increase the likelihood of DHSCS responsiveness and their former partner’s compliance.

The Governance of Gender and Provisioning Strategies

Women pursued claims work through a range of strategies: ‘the cognitive and emotional attention, conscious or not, that participants used to knit together, to defend, to balance, and to change burdens of responsibilities’ (Neysmith et al., 2010: 160). Strategies are an attempt to ‘use agency in tight spaces’ (Neysmith et al., 2010: 160), and so they are shaped by structural and institutional contexts. They may be responsive or proactive, and entail co-operation or challenge to individual or institutional practices. Strategies may be focused on day to day survival or may be used in the service of transformative resistance (Neysmith et al., 2010). Our analysis identified three strategies, all focused on challenging institutional practices without seeking to transform them: managing information; managing emotions; and managing government agency workers. For analytic clarity each strategy is discussed separately, but in actuality these strategies were interconnected.

Managing Information

Managing information most commonly occurred in response to DHSCS workers requesting women to provide information to support their claims that a former partner under-reported or hid income. For example, Isobel’s former partner did not regularly pay child support through Child Support Collect, and she suspected he under-reported his income:

I gave all my initial information and sometimes for instance, I could give them [DHSCS] addresses, photos and names and numbers of people of where he had done cash work. But that doesn’t show that he does it all the time. So they wouldn’t accept it.

Demonstrating the unequal distribution of rights and responsibilities that underpins masculine financial discretion, the DHSCS did not impose work on Isobel’s ex-partner to provide evidence that he had complied with child support and tax law. The DHSCS did not conduct investigations to substantiate the veracity of Isobel’s claims but rather required Isobel to undertake further work if she wished to receive the full amount of child support to which she argued she was entitled.

Managing information was also necessary in Change of Assessment processes that could be initiated by either a payer or recipient when financial circumstances altered. For example, Ebony’s partner reliably paid child support (A$135/US$125 per week, through Child Support Collect) but the amount had reduced over time because he requested multiple changes of assessment. Ebony reported that child support did not meaningfully contribute to the costs of raising a child, and she sought additional money for specific expenses:

I’ve given them [medical care invoices] to the Child Support Agency [DHSCS]. […] What more do you want? I’ve faxed it, I’ve mailed it. […] I said, ‘Have you had a look at all the paperwork?’ All I seem to be doing is lashing out money for faxes, because I don’t have a fax machine, paying out 10 dollars here, eight dollars. Do you know how much it costs to do all that and mail it? And, ‘Oh, we didn’t get that particular fax. Can you send me another copy? Which number did you send it to?’

The financial and time burdens of the DHSCS’s administrative practices were borne by Ebony with no impact on her ex-partner’s discretion to determine appropriate amounts to be paid.

Managing information included pushing workers to interpret and act upon the information they had access to. Una described her former partner’s consistently late lodgement of his tax return, which likely reduced the amount of child support he was assessed to pay (A$30 [US$28] a week through Child Support Collect, not consistently paid).

And for the last two years – I’m due, it will come any time now – I will get a letter from them [DHSCS] saying that because he hasn’t contacted them they’re going to assume that he earns the standard amount, an average male wage, and they will base my child support, how much I should be paid, how much I’m paid, on that calculation. So that is a long way off what the reality is. So then I have to ring them all and I have to say, ‘If you go back through your records you will see that for 10 years, for the last 11 years, this is the pattern.’ […] He’s been doing that forever. So they know he doesn’t pay, they know that he always owes me money and yet every single year they do that and I get – I lose a couple of payments until they sort it out through their computers and their paperwork.

Women were aware of the tension between attempting to increase the impact of their claims work, and the suspicion – often certain knowledge – that these strategies were largely ineffective in the longer term. When asked by an interviewer how the DHSCS used the information she provided, Ebony bluntly concluded: ‘I think they wipe their backside with it.’

Managing information also required participants to manage their own records across government departments. The intensity and detail demanded of them contrasted with the discretion and privacy enjoyed by their former partners. For example, Beatrice’s former partner had failed to lodge income tax returns in the previous seven years (he had been assessed to pay A$150 (US$140) per week through Child Support Collect on the basis of prior tax returns but did not consistently pay) but as a recipient of welfare payments, Beatrice had to conform strictly to reporting requirements:

How is it possible that my children’s father has not done his income tax since 2008? How come he’s been able to get away with that but I have never been able to get away with not filling out forms, not doing my tax? I’ve been diligent to the point of being in tears.

Similarly, for three years Quinta had unsuccessfully requested that the DHSCS investigate her former partner hiding income and assets and pursue his A$70,000 (US$65,000) child support debt. In contrast to the lack of surveillance enjoyed by her former partner, Quinta found managing her own information both necessary and stressful: ‘I go into a mad panic when I’m trying to find things, find documents, find emails, find things, it just puts me in a bad, bad place. […] Actually, just constantly trying to prove, prove, prove.’

Men’s and women’s different positions within the CSP led to different consequences of a failure to share information. Women’s information management strategies were necessitated by the demands of welfare and child support regulations. The life administration described by women like Beatrice and Quinta reflected how women were held strictly to rules but rarely had effective recourse when the DHSCS ignored its own processes. In contrast, men had practical discretion to withhold information and payments with little likelihood of state sanctions. Women’s information management strategies were a response to masculine financial discretion which undermined their provisioning, and the absence of DHSCS compliance action reinforced that discretion.

Managing Emotions

Participants managed emotions in ways that reflected Hochschild’s (1979: 561) definition of emotion work: a conscious and active effort to alter one’s emotional responses to a situation. This assisted women to protect their emotional well-being and avoid damaging important relationships as they pursued claims work. It reflected the emotional and psychic vulnerabilities generated through governance of gender processes that necessitated and undermined women’s provisioning and sense of agency.

Dealing with government agencies through recurrent claims work sparked women’s discouragement, anger and fear, eroding their emotional and mental health. Ida’s claims work was ongoing as she pushed the DHSCS to accurately assess and enforce her former partner’s child support obligations (A$31 [US$29] per week, inconsistently paid through Child Support Collect). She was clear about the impacts: ‘So in that way I felt very demoralised and unsupported. I’m really tired, I’m really tired. I’m so angry that these processes just keep being abused.’ Women with abusive former partners were explicit about the need to manage their fear. For example, Wendy’s former partner had been violent when they lived together, and she described the tension between her claims making and her fear:

It sucks you down so that, I wonder how many people are in this bracket where the CSA [DHSCS] says, ‘Well, raise a complaint against him and put forward what you know.’ If you’ve got that background of intimidation and threats and they’re going to take it [welfare payments] off you and all this kind of stuff, it does disable women and men too, obviously, if they’ve been on the receiving end. It’s kind of hard when the system isn’t actually sounding like a good system.

Women were clear that child support policy was implemented in ways that demanded claims work with no acknowledgement of the personal and emotional implications of its pursuit and failure.

Women’s primary technique of emotion management was limiting the time and energy they dedicated to claims work. Neither of Hannah’s two former partners consistently paid child support through Child Support Collect. She concluded,

It’s so tiring, yeah, and so it’s easier to throw up your hands and go, ‘Oh I don’t really care’, and a lot of people do that: ‘I don’t care about the money, I just cannot handle the negative aspect of it.’

Penelope dealt with the ongoing anxiety of her interactions with the DHSCS by changing her expectations of financial support from her former partner and administrative support from government bureaucracies:

I used to feel very anxious and stressed about it all, but once I resigned myself to the fact that I’m just it, the buck stops with me, I can’t expect any government assistance is going to make real help, and I can’t expect anything from my ex-husband – then that was the time that I think, it reduced a lot of stress to just say, ‘Well, I have to just do it on my own.’

Women also managed emotions to protect the relationship between their former partner and their children. Yolande (whose former partner paid none of the A$25/US$23 through Child Support Collect) stopped her claims work when her former partner distressed her children by discussing child support:

He was telling them that if he paid child support he’d be homeless. So it was causing a lot of grief that way because, you know, the kids took on [were upset]. I know Centrelink [government welfare agency] and that, you know, were like, ‘Oh that’s money you’re missing out’, and you know, ‘Blah, blah, blah’, but it’s just sometimes money’s not everything and yeah, sanity is.

The decision to temper or buttress claims work by strategically managing emotions was simultaneously a personal decision, reflecting women’s emotional resources and priorities and an outcome of the governance of gender. Women were clear that their emotional management – whether focused on themselves or the relationship between their children and former partner – arose out of the claims work necessitated and undermined by state practices that reinforced masculine financial discretion.

Managing Government Agency Workers

The centrality of staff interactions to child support provisioning required women to manage government agency workers. This strategy had mixed success. Some described instances when they successfully changed a worker’s decision, but women typically could not increase the money they were assessed to receive or actually received. However, the strategy had a symbolic value, allowing women to claim knowledge and authority in disempowering contexts. Most commonly, women challenged workers’ knowledge of regulations and processes. For example, Yolande presented herself as someone well versed in child support and welfare rules:

Yolande:

Probably because I’ve educated myself, I actually know more than them so when I ring them or speak to them at any point, I kind of say, ‘No, this is the legislation’, because I always back myself up.

Interviewer:

So they respond to you quite well then, given that you know what you’re talking about?

Yolande:

Yeah, sometimes. It can be, you know, it can be a bit hard.

Yolande’s final sentence hints at a lack of worker recognition of women’s knowledge. Similarly, Ida argued her claims to what she perceived to be poorly trained workers: ‘Most of the time I would be telling the CSA staff, “No, but you need to look at this section [of the legislation] because blah, blah, blah.” And they’d be going, “What are you talking about?”’ Ultimately, workers silenced her interpretations:

So I had one case that I was quoting in this Change of Assessment process to the [worker]. And halfway through quoting it to her, she asked me to stop. And I said, ‘Well I haven’t finished.’ And I kept going. And she said, ‘If you keep quoting that to me, I’m going to terminate the call.’

Women’s attempts to challenge workers’ interpretations with their own met with limited success, despite their extensive knowledge and experience. At the conclusion of a detailed account of DHSCS procedural failings, Ida described the absence of any changes that would improve her child support situation:

And it just makes no sense whatsoever when I’ve got a letter from them saying, ‘We apologise that we haven’t done the process properly.’ And the letter says, ‘We’re going to use it as an education and training opportunity for our staff.’ And then I go back to them and say, ‘But yeah, what about my decision that you haven’t done properly?’ ‘Oh no, that will still stand.’

Irrespective of women’s attempts to manage them, workers were institutionally positioned to impose their interpretation of women’s claims. Women’s attempts to apply their knowledge to the management of DHSCS workers allowed them to symbolically claim legitimacy and expertise and position themselves as more than failed economic citizens. However, their knowledge rarely altered gendered child support responsibilities and discretion at individual or institutional levels.

Discussion and Conclusion

For many of the women in this study, child support did not entail the passive receipt of money but rather, exacting and ongoing provisioning activities and strategies. Australia’s child support and welfare policies and DHSCS practices compelled women’s claims work yet afforded women few ongoing financial benefits. The lack of long-term impact of claims work for individual women (e.g. lasting improvement in a former partner’s compliance) reflected the governance of gender embedded in state defined and required post-separation financial responsibilities, and reinforced the gendered inequities experienced by separated mothers vis-a-vis fathers and the state. Child support claims work and strategies were gendered through CSP policy and processes that placed the responsibility for pursuing child support disproportionately on those with the least power to effect meaningful change at either individual or structural levels.

The CSP was organised around a tension: the formal policy expectation that both parents contribute to the costs of raising their children was belied by institutional practices that failed to address men’s non-compliance and necessitated women’s management of DHSCS processes and their former partner’s activities. It is through this tension that the governance of gender occurred. Irrespective – and indeed as a result – of its language of gender neutrality, Australia’s CSP was designed and implemented in ways that reflected and reinforced gendered inequalities. It was part of the state’s apparatus of gender governance, reproducing a hierarchical gender regime that privileged and normalised masculine financial discretion and necessitated and appropriated women’s provisioning for the benefit of the state. The challenges that women faced in claiming and receiving child support were not examples of the failures of the CSP but reflections of its role in the regulation and social organisation of gender.

A structural analysis highlights how fathers’ child support activities had implications beyond the well-being of individual women and children who did not receive their full child support entitlements – they expressed and reinforced a gendered hierarchical social order. Given legislative blind-spots and resource constraints, it is likely that the DHSCS had limited forensic accounting and investigation capabilities to pursue men’s non-payment and income minimisation. However, these limitations reproduced existing gendered economic rewards, responsibilities and positions vis-a-vis the state and the other parent. Worker responses to men’s non-compliance did not prioritise the surveillance and policing of payers, which reflected the ‘minimal intrusion [and] little stigma’ (Brush, 2003: 84) that have characterised masculine claims against the welfare state and state approaches to money earned through paid labour. The intersection of child support and other welfare payments generated women’s responsibility for addressing their former partner’s non-compliance. This responsibility was unsupported by state practices to enforce compliance, so that the masculine financial discretion that necessitated women’s claims work was reinforced. The logic and workings of the CSP positioned women as subordinate to masculine financial discretion and authority, and their financial needs and claims as matters for the private sphere even when necessitated by state policy.

The governance of gender rewarded men and women differently, too. The reproduction of masculine financial discretion protected men’s ability to maximise their financial resources. This limited women’s access to child support that might contribute to the costs of raising children. Recent economic analyses have confirmed that child support can increase economic security for single mothers and their children (Hakovirta, 2011) but our findings suggest that the time, emotional and intellectual costs of provisioning strategies did not necessarily translate to longer-term financial benefits.

Women’s child support provisioning offered clearer potential benefits to the state. In requiring this provisioning, the state partially substituted its employees’ work with the unpaid work of mothers. The state’s demands for mothers’ unpaid claims work created an expectation that women would proactively identify and comply with the DHSCS’s rules. These were rules that state employees might otherwise be required to systematically understand and implement. To quote Neysmith and Reitsma-Street (2009: 243), ‘in a classic sleight of hand, a public issue is transformed into private troubles’.

The state also benefitted symbolically and financially from women’s claims work and its failure. Women’s claims work enabled the state to assert the importance of the generally supported principle that both parents should be responsible for meeting the costs of their children (Smyth and Weston, 2005) while minimising their direct involvement in limiting separated fathers’ financial discretion, individually and as a powerful political constituency (Gavanas, 2004). Because some welfare payments were linked to ‘expected’ child support, compelling women to document and report underpayment and non-payment while simultaneously making it difficult for them to effectively do so had the potential to limit the amount of welfare money paid by the state. Further outlays were minimised by not fully funding child support compliance measures (Fehlberg et al., 2014). Put another way, ‘if time is money, then any use of the free time of women taken from household, care and community work adds profit’ (Neysmith and Reitsma-Street, 2005: 386).

Women’s child support provisioning reflected the intersection of the governance of gender and the gender of unpaid work. O’Connor et al. (1999) note that the state defines and demands gendered labour according to people’s position in the private and public spheres – this is true of women’s child support provisioning which has not been recognised as work by government policy or the social sciences. When the state retreated from enforcing men’s child support liabilities, it positioned men’s child support decisions as something beyond its purview – a private choice. It positioned women’s financial claims upon their former partner as a domestic and individual matter rather than a responsibility demanded and structured by the state. Thus, child support provisioning became an activity of the private sphere. Like other feminised economic activities in the private sphere, this provisioning was largely unacknowledged and unsupported by the state.

Recognising women’s seeking of child support as a form of provisioning recuperates it from the private sphere and highlights the embeddedness of women’s work in gendered social structures. It centres the ways that claims work spans private and public spheres beyond the market. It is a further indication of the value of recognising heterogeneous work practices and positioning them on spectrums of ‘wholly formal to wholly informal cross-cut by a similar spectrum from wholly monetised to wholly non-monetised exchanges’ (Williams and Nadin, 2012: 7). This recognition has political and conceptual significance. Neysmith et al. (2010: 166) argue the importance of ‘exploring how privilege is maintained by dominant understandings of work’. Re-conceptualising child support from an amount of money women passively receive (and often do not receive) to a resource that women may acquire through complex and demanding work provides a basis for revisiting questions about where the actual and conceptual responsibility for managing child support should lie. It indicates the importance of countering expectations that women can and should pursue change at the levels of individual payment or policy logic and implementation, and the necessity of engaging with the more complex conceptual and political challenges of structural change.

Our article has focused on one country and like Brush (2003: 63) we note the ‘wide variety of political arrangements over time and geography [which] results in a range of gendered effects’. Our approach offers a new way of interrogating how the organisation of child support law, policy and practice in other jurisdictions may place women and men in precarious and gendered relationships with each other and the state. In punitive contexts like many US states, poor men – and particularly poor Black men – can be financially and criminally penalised with flow on effects for mothers and children (Cozzolino, 2018). In a very different policy context, the UK promotes private child support transfers and the entire caseload was moved to private arrangements unless fees are paid to re-enter the system (Bryson et al., 2014). Both jurisdictions raise questions about how women’s claims work may challenge or entrench the gendered power relationships between former partners, and between men, women and the state. Acknowledging women’s child support provisioning as a form of work demanded and shaped through the governance of gender, rather than arising out of policy glitches, provides a conceptual tool for taking seriously the realities of state sanctioned gendered responsibilities and rewards that shape many women’s post-separation lives. We suggest that this lens now be turned to child support in other national contexts, and other gendering state governance practices.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. We also wish to acknowledge the support of the National Council for Single Mothers and the Children and the Council for Single Mothers and their Children (Victoria) for their assistance with recruitment.

Funding

Kay Cook’s position is supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT160100115: Women’s access to child support). Kristin Natalier’s research is funded in part by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP180102799: The meaning of home for children following parental separation).

Kristin Natalier is a qualitative sociologist who explores the pleasures and challenges of intimate and family relationships in times of personal and social change. Her primary research programme addresses the intersection of personal relationships and policy, specifically the expressive dimensions and gendered power dynamics of child support and post-separation care arrangements. Through her research she seeks to improve understanding of, and empower, those who face multiple challenges following family transitions – especially separated mothers, and children.

Kay Cook is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow whose research addresses how social policies (e.g. welfare-to-work, child support and child care policies), transform relationships between the state, individuals and families. Through focusing on the personal impact of political processes, her research seeks to effect humanistic reform in policy development and service provision. She is the Co-Director of the International Network of Child Support Scholars. She is a contributor to the SAGE Encyclopaedia of Qualitative Research Methods and the second edition of the Handbook of Interview Research.

Hayley McKenzie’s research focuses on family and social policy, and explores the inequities experienced by particular social groups who are reliant on social and institutional policies, with a specific focus on women’s health and well-being.

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