Opening the black box of child support: Shining a light on how financial abuse is perpetrated
Authors: Kay Cook, Adrienne Byrt, Terese Edwards and Ashlea Coen
Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology
This report draws on the experiences of 675 single mothers who have engaged with the Australian child support system. Their survey responses reveal how violence is the backdrop to women’s engagement within each stage of the child support process, from application to collection. Our findings also highlight the compounding impact of violence and poverty (Summers, 2022).
Women face impossible choices, where seeking financial support for their children can expose them to post-separation violence (Cook et al., 2023). The results of our survey show how these impossible choices really provide women with no choice at all. Rather, women are placed into impossible situations. Our findings show how the child support system is failing single Australian mothers, particularly those experiencing family violence.
While our previous Financial Abuse: The Weaponisation of Child Support (see Cook et al., 2023) report revealed the staggering rates of violence experienced by women within the child support system and the impact on mothers and their children, what remained unknown was exactly how the child support system was able to be weaponised. At the same time, evidence on financial abuse and the weaponisation of the child support system is continuing to grow (Cook et al., 2023; Stewart et al., 2023; Women’s Legal Services Australia (WLSA), 2024), as a range of researchers, advocacy and social welfare organisations take note of the financial and systemic injustices that single mothers face.
Calls for systems-wide intervention into violence against women and children have featured in a range of Government reports (see the recent work of Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission [DFSVC], 2024; Gallagher & Chalmers, 2023), inquiries (see the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Family Law, and the recent financial abuse inquiry, O’Neill & Mascarenhas, 2024) and committees (see Campbell et al., 2024; Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee [EIAC], 2024; ; Interim EIAC, 2023), and build on the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022-2032 (Department of Social Services [DSS], 2022). Evidence that shines a light on the weaponisation of the Australian Child Support System underlines the need for urgent reform to ensure that the objectives of the National Plan, and ultimately women’s safety, can be achieved.
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