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THE BOGUS CHILD SUPPORT AGENCY http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001497.html Someone should put the Child Support Agency out of its misery, and quickly. It has been a calamity ever since it was brought into being by a Tory government twelve years ago. It has failed to collect £1.7 billion in back maintenance. It has a backlog of 350,000 cases, and over the past four years has made no fewer than 35,000 compensation payments for poor service. Yesterday, it emerged that the amount of money it has collected from absent parents has plummeted following the installation of a new £456 million computer system. The never-ending shambles at the CSA is matched by the shambles of the government's response. The Prime Minister implied last week that it was so badly flawed it might have to close altogether. Yet ministers at the Department of Work and Pensions insist that it will merely be reformed - again - next January. This is surely to flog a ruinously expensive horse that is not only dead but should never have been born in the first place. For the CSA's problems lie far deeper than the Agency's structure or its payments formula or its wretched computer. The very premise on which it was founded is fundamentally flawed. From the start, its aims were confused. Its main purpose was to cut public spending through reducing state support for lone mothers by loading such payments onto fathers instead. Ministers claimed that this would restore parental responsibility. But the one did not follow from the other. The argument was that men were financially responsible for their children whether or not such fathers were part of the family household. This was surely a profound mistake. Men's responsibility is to be committed parents who look after their children by actually living with them. But the CSA formula reduced fathers to being merely walking wallets, and helped redefine the family unit as the autonomous mother and child alone, serviced through payments from a distance by absent men. As a result, Tory expenditure-cutters lined up in an unholy alliance alongside the ultra-feminist left. The feminist case was that lone motherhood was a right, and that although men might be too awful to be husbands they nevertheless had an obligation to pay for the upkeep of their children. The result was that the CSA helped fuel gross injustice, galloping irresponsibility and the accelerating breakdown of the family. When their wives or partners walked out taking the children with them, men were not only faced with the destruction of their family but were also - intolerably - forced to pay for it, even if the mother had begun a new relationship which was bringing money into their children's household. Making a man pay for the upkeep of his children in such circumstances simply because he was the biological father was unfair and inconsistent. After all, he would not be expected to do so if his children were adopted or fostered, because bread-winning is part of the wider role of every-day fathering. But men were deemed to be equally responsible for their children whether they had fathered them through a series of one-night stands, deserted their wives for another woman or had themselves been deserted. Far from restoring the concept of responsibility to family life, this emptied it of meaning. It also ignored the fact that the catastrophic phenomenon of mass lone motherhood has been largely driven by women. Of course, there are many cases where mothers have been deserted by faithless husbands, and where it is right to pursue fathers for maintenance just as one would force anyone who breaks a solemn agreement to meet his responsibilities. But in most cases, it is the woman who either breaks the marriage or is content to have a baby without the father being involved. This is because, consciously or subconsciously, she makes a calculation that she can go it alone financially, either because the state will provide or because, even if she is currently working, she knows that the state is showering benefits on lone mothers with children, including - in theory - child support payments. If an unmarried woman chooses to give up work when she has a baby, this is presented by feminists as an unarguable case for mandatory payments by the father. But why? There is already a perfectly good social arrangement to give mothers precisely such support. It is called marriage. The problem is that the woman may not want marriage to the man, but she does still want his money. What kind of equality is this? The assumption is that unmarried mothers are helpless victims, either of men or of circumstances (or both). We are told that the teenage mothers of popular stereotype are too clueless to know how babies are made. (Presumably, then, their boyfriends are equally clueless - which is not only equally unlikely, but makes forcing them to pay for their ignorance positively unkind.) In fact, most of these girls assume that having a baby is a passport to an independent life - an assumption underpinned by the expectation of an income supplied or enforced by the state. In the past, the boys were made to marry them. Now, however, the girls say these lads are a waste of space and so they reject them - and they are supported in this by their own mothers, who may themselves never have been married, and by their wider community where committed fatherhood is virtually unknown. In any event, most lone mothers are not feckless teenagers but mature women. Women and girls have thus either made a conscious choice to have a child without being married, or have knowingly taken the risk of getting pregnant, or once pregnant are content to go it alone. They have therefore chosen to forego the child support system known as marriage. To expect still to enjoy the benefits of that support, having explicitly rejected the duties it entails, is irresponsible and makes a nonsense of marriage. Yet that is precisely the set of assumptions that the CSA promotes. At the heart of this problem is that child support policy is explicitly not intended to repair the family. Politicians are terrified to go down this road, taking refuge instead in the apparent neutrality of financial support for children. But it is not neutral at all. On the contrary, it is fuelling further family breakdown by failing to acknowledge that the principal motor behind this phenomenon is the behaviour of women. Yes, some men are grossly irresponsible and are either unfaithful, desert their wives or father many children by different women. But many men feel licensed to behave in such a manner because of those women who declare them redundant. It is women above all who should be made to take responsibility for their behaviour. If they choose to tear up a marriage contract or to have children without committing themselves to the father, they should bear the financial burden. Instead of being propped up with benefits or money extorted from rejected men, they should be expected to support themselves through work. This may sound harsh. But if women were forced to recalibrate where their interests lie once they become mothers, the steam would go out of the lone motherhood industry almost overnight. Far more harsh, after all, is the plight of fatherless children. In treating women instead as victims, the government ignores the real casualties of the egregious failure of its family policy - the greatest of all of Tony Blair's betrayals. Posted by Melanie at 21st November 2005 |