Social Justice™(DWP) and the Trouble with Families

Abstract

This chapter examines two policy strands that accompanied the move to the radical retrenchment of the social security system: the Social Justice Strategy and the Troubled Families Programme. It tracks how the language of social justice is turned on its head to become a story of bad individual choices and the crisis of troubled families becomes, among other things, a crisis of normative gender. It argues that, in redefining ‘Social Justice’ to target what it positions as the dysfunctional family and its individual bad behaviour, and in evoking the ‘Troubled Family’ as the legitimate object of intensive surveillance and discipline, this narrative reinstates some very old assumptions about the gendered private sphere of family and reproduction, with deeply troubling effects. Reading these policies in conjunction with the narrative on welfare reform reveals how normative gender—and, in particular, the scrutinizing of poor women’s reproductive practices—is even more firmly stitched into the narrative of welfare dependency and how poor women’s inappropriate reproductive activities become a rationale for positioning them as remedial or deficient citizens.