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| Painting by Lucy Pierce |
£4
billion.
This
is the outstanding arrears of child maintenance owed in England and
Wales. According to a report by the charity Gingerbread called
Missing Maintenance, the Department of Works and Pensions
(DWP) estimates that only £467 million will ever be recovered.1
This leaves nearly one half of single parent families, the vast
majority headed by women, living in poverty.
The
current Conservative government is in the process of closing the
Child Support Agency (CSA) to replace it with the Child Maintenance
Service, which charges women £20 for the privilege of opening a file
and then a sum each month if some semblance of the maintenance is
actually paid.2
The new vaunted system has seen only 53% of the families registered
receiving maintenance with 90 000 people having not paid during one
three month period. There is already nearly £53 million in unpaid
maintenance. Many of the families will receive only negligible
amounts of money, as the DWP does not require the full maintenance to
be paid in order for the account to be registered as compliant.
Realistically, a father of 4 earning £70 000 a year can pay only £5
a month and still be included within the 53% statistic.3
Equally
problematic is the fact that the Child Maintenances Service is
actively writing to the primary caregivers to request they ‘forgive’
the debt owed by non-paying fathers4
- as though the primary caregivers of children, who are
overwhelmingly women, can neglect to pay rent, council tax and the
credit card debts they rack up buying groceries knowing these debts
will be 'forgiven'. As Polly Toynbee makes clear,
Some 90% of CSA cases have now been
transferred over to the CMS, but only 13% of mothers affected have
decided to pay the new fees and apply to the CMS: the DWP must be
pleased, as it had publicly estimated that 63% would pursue their
claims. All the pressure in official letters is to deter mothers. The
£20
fee may be a mild block, along with charging fathers 4%, but the
evidence suggests mothers just give up when prodded by these
letters.5
Charging
mothers to use the Child Maintenance Service is simply a way for the
government to abdicate responsibility. They are very clear that the
sole purpose is to force more parents into dealing with child
maintenance themselves. In doing so, they have refused to recognise
the reason why men, and it is overwhelmingly men, refuse to pay
maintenance: it is both a punishment and a form of control over their
former partners. This is male entitlement writ large by men who do
not care about the welfare of their children.
We
need to start calling the refusal to pay maintenance what it really
is: financial child abuse. Forcing your children to live in poverty
because you cannot be bothered to support them or refusing to punish
the mother are not the signs of 'good fathers'. It is the
hallmark of an abusive father.
It
is not difficult to implement child maintenance policies that are
effective and ensure that men cannot hide their assets. Placing the
Child Maintenance Service under the heading of HM Revenue &
Customs so that child maintenance is garnished directly from the
salary of the non-resident parent. This coupled with actual punitive
policies for those who refuse to pay, such as a fee for every missed
payment, interest accrued on outstanding payments, and the use of
enforcement agents (bailiffs) to confiscate personal property, and,
potentially, criminal proceedings would see an immediate increase in
the number of men who start to pay their maintenance.6
There
is a quote bandied about in discussions of child contact and child
maintenance that says 'children aren't pay per view', as though
children were nothing more than a possession to be passed about. As
with Women's Aid campaign, Safe Contact Saves Lives, we need
to stop talking about children as possessions and start talking about
children's rights.7
Children have the right to live free from violence. Children also
have the right to live outwith poverty.
The erasure of men's financial
responsibility for their children, supported by government policy, is
an absolute disgrace. It is, simply, state sanctioned child abuse.
This is an excerpt from the upcoming Girl God Anthology, Single Mothers Speak on Patriarchy.
Louise
Pennington is a feminist writer and activist who works for the
campaign organisation Everyday Victim Blaming, which challenges media
misrepresentations of domestic and sexual violence and abuse.
References:
1
Report: Missing Maintenance.
Gingerbread: Single Parents,
Equal Families. (June 2016). PDF:
http://www.gingerbread.org.uk/uploads/media/17/9809.pdf
2
‘Use the Child Maintenance
Service or Child Support Agency’.
https://www.gov.uk/child-maintenance/overview.
Accessed 29.8.16.
3
‘How we work out child
maintenance: a step by step guide”. Child Maintenance Service.
(https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/325219/how-we-work-out-child-maintenance.pdf)
Accessed 29.8.16.
4
Polly Toynbee. ‘Why the silence on the scandal of unpaid child
maintenance?’. Guardian. (16.5.2016).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/16/silence-scandal-unpaid-child-maintenance?CMP=share_btn_tw.
Accessed 19.5.2016.
5
Polly Toynbee. ‘Why the silence on the scandal of unpaid child
maintenance?’. Guardian. (16.5.2016).
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/16/silence-scandal-unpaid-child-maintenance?CMP=share_btn_tw.
Accessed 19.5.2016.
6
Canada also includes the
suspension of drivers licenses and passports as part of their
maintenance enforcement programs.
http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/fl-df/enforce-execution/pwo-pqp.html.
Accessed 29.8.2016.
7
‘Child First: Safe Contact
Saves Lives’. Women’s Aid England/ Wales.
https://www.womensaid.org.uk/childfirst/
Accessed 29.8.16
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