The Forms and Functions of Child Support Stigma

Abstract

The stigmatization of single mothers who receive child support proliferates in news media, policy, and popular culture. Drawing on critical stigma literature, we examined data from interviews conducted with child support recipients in Australia and the United Kingdom. Our analysis examined how women receiving child support experienced stigma, how stigma was applied to other women in similar situations, and the political implications of these framings. Our interview data suggested child support stigma can be grouped into three categories, where women were seen to contravene maternal norms, patriarchal norms, and/or familial norms. These norms sanctioned mothers’ use of, amount of, and reliance on child support, viewing it fundamentally as men’s money that women take, rather than the contribution of a nonresident parent to their children’s upbringing. The source of stigma may have been ex-partners, child support bureaucratic systems, or recipients themselves, but the social and political functions of child support stigma remained the same: it discouraged solidarity between recipients and encouraged policy reform that further disadvantaged them.

An exploratory study examining the changes to Australia’s social security system during COVID‐19 lockdown measures

“…Hostile conditions are further enhanced by the stigma experienced by recipients of social security (Goodall and Cook, 2021 ). Stigmatisation is used to craft a punitive anti‐welfare common sense (Tyler, 2013 ) that creates public consent for punitive welfare approaches (Soldatic & Pini, 2009 ).…”

News media representations of people receiving income support and the production of stigma power: An empirical analysis of reporting on two Australian welfare payments

“…One recent study that has adapted these ideas reveals the stigma power inherent in child support payment processes. Goodall and Cook (2021) analysed interview data from 81 child support recipients in Australia and the UK and found that the social and political functions of stigma discouraged solidarity between recipients and encouraged policy reform that further disadvantaged them. Guided by the work of Tyler (2018Tyler ( , 2020 and Link and Phelan (2014), we consider a similar macro-structural perspective of stigma and stigma-power.…”

“…Simultaneously, 'acts of resistance' can be found with people seeking to remove themselves from others in similar circumstances and/or to identify themselves as 'different from' other people in receipt of income support. For example, the aforementioned research by Goodall and Cook (2021) found that women in receipt of child support payments actively sought to remove themselves from stigmatising processes attached to the payment process and their construction as 'bad mothers', maintaining that the dominant narrative applied to others but not themselves.…”