Child Support Agency Research Articles

Descriptions of loss and resilience among fathers paying child support

In thispaper, I present qualitative data on the ways in which 28 fathers contextualise their payment of child support in their relationships with their ex-partners, children and the Child Support Agency (CSA). Fathers described their experience in terms of either loss or resilience. Those in the loss category positioned themselves as victims of their ex-partner’s use of the CSA. They understood their child support obligations as illustrative of broader processes of silencing and disempowerment, whereby their identities and practices as fathers were ignored. Those men who talked about their experiences in terms of resilience shared accounts of post-separation parenting that took place beyond the surveillance of the CSA, with parents focused on the best interests of their children. They did not experience a threat to their fathering choices or identities. The findings highlight the importance of gendered and expressive dimensions of child support.

“Some of My Children Are Worth More Than Others”: Perceptions of Nonresidential Fathers with Second Families as to the Fairness of the Australian Child Support Agency's Handling of First Family Child Support Financial Arrangements

One in three Australian marriages end in divorce, and over half of such divorces involve children. Research indicates that men tend to repartner within 1 to 2 years of a divorce and women within 3 to 5 years. A significant issue for repartnered men is the provision of financial support for children from both their first and second families. Although only 6% of all Australian first family children spend near/equal time (shared care) after divorce with both parents, fathers in Australia are mandated under child support legislation to provide financial support for their first family children, whether they reside with them or not. However, it is argued by this study's nonresidential fathers that the Child Support Agency, when considering the level of financial support for first family children, tends to overlook the needs of second family children, thus creating an advantaged and disadvantaged set of siblings. This finding is reviewed through a distributive justice theory lens. Finally, some future directions for research aimed at exploring the impact of Child Support Legislation on second families are suggested.

Post-separation patterns of children’s overnight stays with each parent: A detailed snapshot

Despite widespread interest in patterns of parenting after separation over the past decade – especially in shared-time arrangements – few studies have explored the detail of post-separation parenting time schedules. This article: (a) provides a detailed snapshot of children’s overnight stays with each parent among a national random sample of 408 separated parents registered with the Australian Child Support Agency (CSA); and (b) develops a typology of parenting time that emphasises the contiguity of overnights and the frequency of children’s transitions between parents’ homes. Parenting time schedules are examined across a range of residence levels from 1–8 overnight stays per fortnight with fathers. While many separated fathers see their children mainly on weekends, the immense diversity of modern parenting time schedules points to a greater sharing of parental responsibilities and richer range of parenting contexts post-separation than previously evident in Australia. The article encourages researchers, parents, practitioners and policymakers to adopt a multi-dimensional view of parenting time rather than focus on time simply as a number or percentage.

Child Support System of Australia

Child Support System of Australia

Families' Experiences of Services

Families' Experiences of Services

Third time lucky? The third child support reforms replace the Child Support Agency with the new C-MEC

Changes to the Child Support Agency (CSA) have once again been made following the failures of two earlier reforms. The agency, notorious for its mishandling of cases and poor achievement record, wa...

Mothers’ child support arrangements: a comparison of routes through which mothers obtain awards for maintenance in Britain

This article examines the means through which parents make arrangements for the payment of child support. The chances of mothers obtaining private maintenance agreements, Child Support Agency (CSA) awards or no award are compared by examining a number of factors, including the characteristics of separated mothers and fathers. The analysis is based on data collected through the Families and Children Study. The results show that private agreements, in contrast to CSA awards, are less likely to be in place where a mother has never lived with the child’s father or separated from him some time ago. Private agreements are also relatively rare where contact between a non-resident father and his child is infrequent or non-existent. Findings suggest that some facility for the registration of private agreements might be considered as part of the current child support redesign process.

After all the policy reform, is child support actually helping low-income mothers?

The economic vulnerability of children in lone-parent families has drawn attention to child support policy. After 13 years of constant policy changes the child support system remains highly problematic and is currently undergoing an independent review. Given this, it is timely to question whether child support payments (from all types of agreements, not just Child Support Agency assessments) are actually helping lone-mother families. Or are most low-income mothers connected to men who have little capacity to pay, so that child support actually helps only moderate-income families? This article uses data from the UK Families and Children Study to examine the receipt of child support by lone mothers across the income distribution. It examines the amounts of child support received and the contribution it makes to total income packages across two major groupings: lone-mother quintile groups and poverty groups. We find that lone mothers who are already relatively better off (compared with other lone mothers in the survey) are more likely to receive child support. However, lone mothers who receive child support tend to receive similar median amounts, regardless of their income levels. Moreover, child support is a more important part of the income package for lone mothers with low incomes than for those with higher incomes.

Mitigating risks associated with major IT projects

Public and private sector companies are now well versed in the risks associated with complex IT projects. Some highprofile government projects, such as the computer system for the Child Support Agency, have become notorious for delay and spiralling costs.

Innovation at the Australian Child Support Agency

This paper outlines the thinking behind a number of innovative services developed by the Child Support Agency (CSA) in Australia in recent years. Helping to meet parents’ needs beyond their legal child support responsibilities is a vital component of Agency service delivery. While there is still some way to go before there is a fully integrated family law system, CSA continues to develop greater shared understandings about the experience of separation and the demands placed on parents.

The Impact of Sure Start

The first report from the national Sure Start evaluation team concludes that to date not only has the Sure Start programme not been a success, but for certain groups of disadvantaged families it has led to a worse outcome. The cost to date has been £3 billion.This is simply the latest in a series of spectacular policy failures: for example, the Child Support Agency, family tax credits, truancy reduction, lack of literacy amongst many children, reductions in access to top universities from state schools.Each has its own reasons for failure, but there are now so many examples in so many diverse areas that something more fundamental is going on. The problem is the increasingly complicated nature of the interventions of the social democratic state. These increase rather than reduce the probability of failure. Government still has an important role. But it should be as simple as possible.

THE AUSTRALIAN CHILD SUPPORT AGENCY:

The Australian Child Support Agency is recognized as a world leader in the delivery of child support services. But the rapid growth in debt between 1998 and 2003 signaled a need to develop strategies to counter the growth in owed child support. A Debt Study was undertaken in late 2002 to establish the collectibility of debt by category of cases with debt, search for the most cost‐effective methods of debt collection, and determine if other client and debt segmentation methods were warranted. The success of the Debt Study led to the implementation of the Intensive Debt Collection strategy in 2003–04.

Linking Passive and Active Representation by Gender: The Case of Child Support Agencies

Linking Passive and Active Representation by Gender: The Case of Child Support Agencies

‘Hardware, Software or Network Connection?’ Theorizing Crisis in the UK Next Steps Agencies?

This paper explores the literature theorizing institutional crises by examining the policy problems faced by the UK's Child Support Agency and Prison Service Agency in the mid 1990s. In both these cases the ‘hardware’ (delivery through agencies), and the ‘software’ (policy saliency) were linked to their difficulties. However, these policy areas can be contrasted with the Benefits Agency, another highly salient policy area where no crisis occurred. This paper argues that it was neither the ‘hardware’ nor the ‘software’ but the way in which the bureaucratic networks surrounding these agencies operated that explains why the policy process was difficult. In concluding, the relevance of the network concept to the crisis literature is examined, illuminating the role that networks play in promoting or preventing institutional crisis as well as the research questions that arise if network relations are considered alongside a broader understanding of the dynamics of institutional crisis.

Knowledge management in public service provision: the Child Support Agency

The paper addresses the issue of knowledge management in public service organisations where the concept of provider competitiveness is of limited significance but other priorities prevail. The broad aim is to understand how the concept of “competitive advantage through knowledge management”, as practised in the broader business community, might translate to the modern Civil Service? This issue is explored through the medium of a study within the UK's Child Support Agency (CSA) based on the results of interviews with, and questionnaire responses from, the senior management group. The central question thereby investigated was: “To what extent can the conditions required for successful knowledge management be observed and evaluated?” A “conditions framework” and associated analysis is then used to assess broader implications and the possibility of wider application within other such public service organisations.

The Rise and Fall of Court Prerogatives in Paternity Establishment

Much of the policy analysis literature takes the institutional structure in which a program operates?bureaucratic agencies or the courts?as given. Policy inputs proceed through the "black boxes" of institutions to produce a given set of outcomes. In this model, insti tutions are merely the channels by which policy goals are measured by either qualitative or quantitative impacts on a target population. What is missing from that paradigm, however, is the recognition that the mediating institutions themselves are the result of a particular constellation of determining forces and that these forces can have very real consequences on individuals' lives. One increasingly contentious area of debate surrounding institutional choice is paternity establishment in child support cases. Paternity establishment is a fundamental component of effective child support collection, especially as the number of out-of-wed lock births has risen from 400,000, or 10 percent of all births, in 1970 to 1.3 million, or 33 percent of all births, in 1999.1 The central question is, where should it be conducted, in the state courts or in the state administrative agencies that run the child support pro gram? Most recently, the states have answered that paternity establishment should take place under the direction of the variety of administrative agencies that run the country's child support programs. These agencies run the gamut from public welfare agencies in most states to attorney general offices and departments of revenue in others. These child support agencies, in turn, also supervise paternity establishment procedures in numerous local units, such as hospitals and town halls. This choice represents a dramatic break with past practices of deciding all such cases in the court system. How has such a mon umental change in public policy taken place? What factors mobilized such a change, and what does the current system look like? In describing this process of institutional evolution, the first section of this analysis will present the ways in which paternity cases were routinely determined under the state

The British Child Support Agency: Did American Origins Bring Failure?

In late 1990 the British government published a two-volume White Paper, Children Come First: The Government's Proposals on the Maintenance of Children, announcing its intention to establish a Child Support Agency (CSA). In contrast with most of the literature associated with the British CSA, my main concern in this paper is not with the direct identification of the problems, or the perceived problems, the agency has experienced since its inception in 1993; it is with how the agency was developed, and how this can help explain many of its subsequent problems or perceived problems. More directly, I will show that the origins of the agency are to be found in policy transfer from the USA, and that the difficulties inherent in this process led to important implementation problems. To do this, the paper is divided into four sections. In the first section I examine why the Thatcher government decided to develop the agency, rather than continuing with the Department of Social Security (DSS)/court-based child-support award system in operation at the time. Second, I demonstrate how parallel developments in Britain and the USA led the British government to be interested in, and then borrow, the key elements of the US Child Support Enforcement System (CSES). Third, I discuss the key elements of the CSA that were transferred from the USA. In the final section I illustrate how policy transfer offers an important, even if partial, explanation of the CSA's implementation problems, and why two successive governments have used considerable legislative time attempting to ‘fix’ the CSA.

Experiences with a Child Support Agency

Although there has been steady improvement in the amount of child support collected, it is estimated that about 70% of poor children eligible for child support do not receive it. There has been little formal study of mothers' interactions with child support offices and how these experiences may influence decisions about child support. This article presents a descriptive analysis of mothers' attitudes and experiences with a child support agency, giving voice to clients' perspectives about working with this system. The findings indicate that mothers find the public child support system to be inefficient and ineffective in helping them to obtain child support, even after they have a child support award. Their stories help us understand why many custodial parents become frustrated and angry at the system that has been put in place to help them, but often sets up barriers to their efforts to obtain child support. Only through more effective service delivery can parents become successful at receiving the child support needed to reduce their poverty level and improve the well being of their children.

Balancing Safety and Self-Sufficiency

This article reports on three demonstration projects involving efforts to address the needs of public assistance applicants/recipients who are domestic violence victims while also developing effective methods to improve cooperation with child support agencies. Through various approaches, such as direct questioning, screening and referrals, and domestic violence specialists, the projects explore ways to identify victims of domestic violence, levels of interest in child support and exemptions, barriers to cooperation, and clients' responses to specialists and referrals for community-based services.

Comparing child maintenance systems: Conceptual and methodological issues

Technological developments in collection and transfer of data have widened the scope of comparative research, but there has perhaps been less progress in methodology at conceptual and theoretical levels. In this article the author uses aspects of the research experience in a comparative study to illustrate the importance of considering transference and translation of concepts. The study compared child maintenance sytems in ten European countries to contribute to the UK policy debate on child support and reform of the Child Support Agency. Complex issues arose in making comparisons, illustrated here in discussion about different assumptions of obligation and ownership among the countries studied, in the context of child support, and conceptual differences in what is considered 'fair'. The author also reflects on the management and effect of language differences between the informants, and the adoption of English as the working language. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of developing the conceptual, theoretical and linguistic underpinning of comparative research.