This chapter reflects on the sites of child support failure outlined in Chapter 4 and locates these within the issues discussed in Chapter 5 regarding the failure to notice child support problems, particularly those that are experienced by women who must enact the child support system and then encounter the consequences of its failures. In this chapter, I advance the discussion by examining who benefits from the ways that child support fails, and the interests served at institutional and interactional levels. The assumption, developed in the previous chapters, is that child support systems inhere the subordination of women to masculinist norms. The failure to take meaningful action to collect and transfer payments confers benefits to individual men, fathers as a group, and the state as a gendered institution. My contention is that, across cases, the logics of child support action and inaction are underpinned by the gendered social processes of maintaining, restoring or increasing men's financial autonomy and authority over mothers following separation. At a systemic level, child support – as a process of transferring payments – can fail irrespective of whether states are busy implementing ongoing rounds of review and reform or are seemingly indifferent to the problems of sole parent poverty and parental irresponsibility that lie before them. The ‘theatre’ of operating a child support system can distract from the failure to ensure child support payments. The existence of a child support system – irrespective of its technical advancement or relative underdevelopment – ultimately provides cover to the state's advancement of its own interests above those of the people it purportedly seeks to serve.

Preserving masculine interests

There are two types of policy ‘solutions’ available to states, given the way that child support ‘problems’ have been noticed or not. When child support is framed as problematic, solutions become more technically complex, and as a result more contested, as they must seek to remedy all of the problems that the system brings to the public's attention. Alternatively, the status quo can be maintained by rendering invisible the problems that child support fails to identify and resolve. This dichotomy – of systems that seek to reform or preserve the status quo – sits in the background of subsequent chapters that examine how child support reform has proceeded and how, despite different logics, systems and levels of activity, the interests that are served by action or inaction are remarkably similar.