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Financial abuse is a form of violence that can extend well beyond intimate partner relationship breakdown. A survey of 540 Australian separated parents examined how financial abuse was perpetrated, with a focus on child support and other government systems. Women reported that their ex-partners minimized and withheld child support payments to inflict direct financial harm, while interactions between the family court, taxation, and benefit payment systems were taken advantage of to threaten or control them. Findings revealed how the mandatory and complex Australian child support system provided perpetrators with a useful means of perpetrating financial abuse across households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on interviews with 41 Australian separated mothers, and the government forms, information and instructions used to administer their child support and benefit entitlements, to reveal four tactics through which women's decision-making was coordinated to produce financial benefits to the state. The state pursued its preferred outcome by foregrounding women's obligation to seek and collect child support, while at the same time, information on alternative choices was made deliberately opaque – making the state's foregrounded option more likely. If women were entitled to, or sought, options that lay outside the default choice, the onus was on them to investigate, instigate and persevere with what was made to be a deliberately onerous and opaque process. As a result, the administration of Australian child support policy perpetuated low-income women's experiences of economic and social inequity, entrenching the feminisation of poverty in single parent families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA instituted child support agencies in the late 1900s and had some policies that resulted in having lowered governmental expenditures when child support was paid. Building on previous research comparing these four countries, this article examines the extent to which these countries currently use explicit cost recovery policies, implicit policies revealed in programme interactions, and fees. Using data from country informants on hypothetical families, we show the percentage of child support payments that are retained through these different tools. In addition to characterizing country approaches, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of different cost-recovery strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare family policy in Australia and Finland, focusing on child support as interrogating how gender equality ideals and realities play out when families diverge from the dual-parent model. Despite Finland's de-gendered leave and employment policy, a gender wage gap continues to position mothers as primary carers. In Australia, pre-separation policies are gendered in that leave benefits position mothers as primary carers. In both countries, child support policy took the opposite approach. Finland's child support policy provides less incentive for the father to take care of children post-separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses fathers' evidence presented to an Australian inquiry into the child support scheme. We examine these data in order to address how fathers' proposed child support policy solutions compared against Eekelaar's critique of parents' moral responsibilities to children and his identification of three substitute social bases for parents' continued support. We find that despite the inquiry's technical remit, fathers' solutions challenged the very basis of child support as maintaining, reinforcing, or redressing their responsibilities to children. Here, we illustrate that such procedures may be unable to contain fundamental challenges to state legitimacy when dealing with contested social issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare agencies are increasingly turning to technology to facilitate information-sharing and communication with users. However, while the administrative, governmental and material effects of technological advances have been examined, research has yet to explore how welfare users could make use of technology for their benefit. In this article, we examine the extent to which available technologies allow Australian separated mothers to assemble and provide data to government agencies in order to pursue procedural, and therefore substantive, justice in child support and welfare contexts. We find that no currently available apps provide separated mothers with technological affordances suited to this purpose. As a result, we find that existing child support and welfare data practices reinforce the social hierarchies that exist post-separation, whereby low-income single mothers are financially and socially disadvantaged, while welfare administrators and non-compliant ex-partners accrue savings and discretionary benefits as a result of existing bureaucratic data gaps and omissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child support payments extend separated fathers' male breadwinning role across households, likely fuelling fathers' perceptions of "unfairness". By examining fathers' written submissions to an Australian inquiry, we examine fathers' claims of unfairness, which were expressed in terms of gender inequality. Here, we show how fathers adopted a gender equality discourse that left intact the existing gender order. Through expectations for equal treatment, men claimed the child support system would produce equality of outcomes, namely, eliminating the redistributive need for child support payments. In doing so, fathers' qualified support for gender equality advantaged men as payers while further entrenching gender inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Child Support Scheme was established as a means of ensuring adequate financial support for children of separated parents. However, within the financial transfer of child support exist notions of 'trust' and 'fairness' based on parents navigating their changed relationship post-separation. Previous research has explored the assessment and outcomes of child support for both payee and payer parents, however little attention has been given to how women evaluate the assessment and outcomes of child support. As such, this research aimed to explore payee mothers' evaluation of their child support experiences based on the value of their child support assessment and the extent to which these payments were received. Following the methods of constructivist grounded theory, in-depth interviews were conducted with 20 low-income single mothers. Analysis revealed that payee mothers evaluated child support based on the moral assumptions and the rationalities they perceived were underlying payer fathers' child support compliance. While payee mothers desired arrangements that reflected joint parental financial responsibility, in reality many experienced problematic child support payments, which may ultimately undermine payee parents' confidence in the Child Support Scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the 2011-12 federal budget measure to strengthen child support compliance in light of gendered assessments of child support reform, particularly those that identify an emphasis on men's financial autonomy and the buttressing of men's financial authority beyond the couple relationship. By changing the way non-resident (payer) parent income is calculated for those who fail to lodge tax returns, the government aims to save $78.7 million over four years, with savings to be recouped directly from increased child support assessments and decreased Family Tax Benefits to resident (payee) parents. Given that 87 per cent of child support payers are men, this reform unintentionally legitimises men's noncompliance with the Australian Tax Office by circumventing the tax system in determining payer income. At the same time, women and children stand to bear indirect financial costs as they face increased reliance on their ex-partner for financial support--a move that increases men's financial authority over women and children beyond the couple relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Child Support Scheme impacts on the lives of many Australian families. Yet the Australian evidence base informing child support policy development is relatively sparse and lacks coherence. In this article, we employ an equity framework to consolidate the published Australian empirical child support research in order to identify gaps in current knowledge and assess the various layers of competing interest inherent therein. While researchers have begun to examine the financial outcomes of the new Australian Child Support Scheme, work is urgently needed to understand the effects that the new scheme has on children, payees and payers, and how these effects operate. We conclude by proposing an agenda for future Australian child support research that focuses on the aims of the scheme and the four equity principles we employ, namely, horizontal, vertical, gender, and intergenerational equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the experience of low-income women on welfare in Australia and the process of seeking child support from a violent ex-partner, contrasting this with research from the United States and the United Kingdom. Women in Australia who fear ongoing or renewed abuse as a result of seeking child support are eligible for an exemption. However, the exemption policy does not necessarily provide the intended protection of women and children from ongoing abuse and poverty. The exemption policy route also produces an unintended outcome whereby the perpetrators of violence are financially rewarded as they do not have to pay child support. These outcomes are shaped by a complex interaction of personal, cultural and structural forces that make the process of seeking child support for women who have experienced violence extremely problematic. The article demonstrates how in Australia, as in the US and UK policy contexts, the needs of women and their children are compromised by the details of policy specification and the way policies are implemented within the different systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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