The previous chapter set out some of the points in the child support process where women may fall out of the leaky pipeline, across a range of international settings. The purpose was to construct a general understanding of how the child support process works across countries, and more importantly does not work, to distribute finances from non-resident parents to their children's household. In this chapter, the attention turns to examine how states can make claims regarding the success of child support policy and how they are enabled to remain silent on its failures. I draw on the work of critical policy scholars (Stone, 1989; Jamrozik and Nocella, 1998; Bacchi, 1999) to examine problem framing and the construction of problem absence. These theorists provide a framework through which noticing or not noticing social problems can be understood, which provides insight into the different views that child support clients, front-line service staff, policy administrators and politicians will have. The process outlined in Chapter 4 provided key insight into women's experiences as child support seekers, but from the perspective of service staff, policy administrators and researchers who work with or implement programmes for such women. However, the informants drawn on in Chapter 4 must work within the laws and policies that governments have provided. While technical amendments to procedure and practice can be quite easily achieved, questions of the overall purpose, nature and process of child support require political engagement and public support. As such, child support is inherently political, and sits within intersectional relations of gender, class and race. The contention of this chapter is that within these political considerations, the concerns of women as child support recipients are not likely to be noticed or regarded as warranting significant political concern.

The analysis presented in this chapter again sets out the governance of child support as a process, but as a political rather than technical process, beginning with how child support policy problems are ‘noticed’. As Bacchi's (2009) work reveals, how problems are brought into the public imaginary shapes the array of solutions that are available to address them. When the state can manage and contain social problems through technical and political means (Stone, 1989; Li, 2007), there is less reason for states to intervene to address their underpinning social causes.