In this chapter, I draw on the international child support literature, as well as key informant interviews, to define and illustrate the points at which child support ‘fails’. I do so in order to provide an account of the common sites of dysfunction across systems, be they in advanced liberal welfare states, developing child support systems or social democratic welfare regimes. My focus on failure is not meant to be taken as proof that child support never works. On the contrary, there are many instances across countries where child support works well and lifts single-mother-headed families out of poverty. However, there is less to be learnt from a focus on success than there is from a focus on failure. My aim here is to examine when child support does not work and why. My contention is that while child support laws, policies and programmes vary widely, they all share one feature: they often do not work as a mechanism to transfer payments from a non-resident parent to a resident parent for the purpose of supporting children post-separation. Rather, child support systems often operate as a ‘leaky pipeline’ (Pell, 1996; Clark Blickenstaff, 2005) where separated mothers fall out of the system at some point, resulting in payments either not being made or received. At times, mothers are prevented from accessing systems. At other times, systems fail to act or fail to ensure that payments are transferred. The points of child support failure are then taken up in the subsequent chapters that examine how these failures come to be seen or remain unseen (Chapter 5) and why (Chapter 6), and how child support has been managed in increasingly technical (Chapter 7) and personalised (Chapter 8) ways.

Again, by focusing on the leaky pipeline of child support, I am not claiming that systems never work. Indeed, some countries have highly functional systems that determine, order and transfer payments. However, even within high-functioning systems, problems occur. My concern is that by foregrounding what works, what does not work and who child support does not work for is lost. The reality that a number of women make their way successfully through the child support system to actually receive payments obscures the reality of all those never made it in, or who fell out along the way.