This book aims to contribute to feminist policy research by examining child support as gendered governance practice. It provides an empirical example of the gender of governance by conceptualising child support not merely as law or policy implemented by states, but as a programme used to manage and discipline ‘unruly’ and ‘problematic’ populations. The population governed by child support, however, is not comprised of separated fathers who, across contexts, are consistently unreliable or unwilling payers. But, rather, the population governed by child support is comprised of separated mothers, who are hopeful child support recipients. The purpose of the book is to outline how child support systems are structured – often in increasingly technical and personalised ways – that render them ineffective and simultaneously position women as responsible for these systemic failures. As such, this book – rather than providing a descriptive account of how much money child support provides – serves as a provocation for how child support could be reimagined, resisted and contested.

The contention that motivates this analysis is that child support policy and law across countries – and their interactions with state support – hold with them fundamental and gendered assumptions about the ‘appropriate’ roles of mothers and fathers post-separation. As such, the analysis pursued here is a radically different approach to typical child support scholarship, which has set about conducting the necessary work of describing the nature, process and effects of law and policy in this relatively new scholarly domain. In such traditional accounts, the intention is to describe and refine policy and legal settings to improve practice and produce ‘better’ outcomes. In contrast, my intention is to critique the nature, process and effects of child support law and policy in order to theorise why, when, how and for whom child support policy works, or does not work. The assumption underpinning this book is that the answers to these questions sit within state-organised relations of power that serve and reflect social hierarchies, predominantly on the basis of gender. Reflecting on a range of child support systems internationally, I suggest that systems typically do not work as intended, as they are often inaccessible, fail to produce meaningful outcomes, or ignore or implicitly condone fathers’ non-compliance. Yet, these same systems often render women responsible for the failure of fathers to make payments, the failure of system administration and the failure of child support policy.