Since 2010, the Government has insisted that the Child Support Agency “created conflict” and “drove a wedge between parents”, and that “family based arrangements” for child support were always better. This belief was driven by Karen and Nick Woodall and Christine Skinner, their longtime colleague, and transmitted to minister Maria Miller and Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith by their Special Adviser, Samantha Callan, who has a long history of consorting with fathers’ rights activists.
Christine Skinner, an academic at York University, wrote her PhD on her theory of “reciprocity” in child support, and has held to her belief ever since, that compelling fathers to pay is doomed to failure because all fathers in reality do want to pay, but on terms they believe are fair and which are linked to how much involvement and control they have in their children’s lives.
Karen and Nick Woodall are driven by resentment towards Nick Woodall’s first wife, who had the gall to “demand child support from him” in the 1990s, even though he had the children for half the week and she remarried, infuriatingly becoming better off than him. This resentment spawned an obsessive conspiracy theory that feminists have carefully “stitched together” an entire net of legislation, policies and mindsets deliberately designed to “eradicate fathers”.
The three first met Samantha Callan in 2006, when she was still officially working for Care for the Family and CARE alongside her work for the Centre for Social Justice. Samantha Callan had been working with the international Religious Right through the Mormon-led World Family Policy Center in Provo, Utah, and the World Congress of Families in Illinois, to halt and reverse women’s and LGBT rights deemed antithetical to “the natural family”. They recognised a convergence of interests, both seeing feminism and women’s rights as systematically undermining and breaking up families. Both realised that state support for single mothers must end in order to break women’s independence and put men back in their rightful position of control and family headship.
25 January 2012: Reforming child maintenance: resisting the pressure to punish fathers
“Today sees the continuing debate on the Welfare Reform Bill in the House of Lords reach the issue of charging parents for the use of the Statutory Maintenance System, what used to be called the Child Support Agency. The issue of charging parents is one that has got Peers hot and bothered as they rush to defend the rights of single parents fuelled, no doubt, by the relentless campaigning of single parent charity Gingerbread.
Reading some of the rhetoric, I often wonder whether I live in the same world as these campaigners for whom most separated parents appear to be women, single handedly striving to put bread on the table and shoes on their children’s feet. This world is effectively described by the Chief Executive of Gingerbread, quoted in the Independent today on the issue of charging parents to use the Statutory Maintenance Scheme, when she said ”children will end up paying the price for the non-resident’s failure to meet his parental responsibilities.”
Now this price that she is talking about is, by our calculation at the Centre for Separated Families, as follows:
no more than 35p per week (which is less than the cost of three standard text messages) for 16% of those affected, whilst 40% would pay no more than 70p per week and if maintenance Maintenance Direct is used, there would be no charge payable at all!
which, on examination, would lead one to conclude that it is a reasonable investment for the potential thousands of pounds that could be received in Child Maintenance over a child’s lifetime.
And yet this topic has got the single parents charities in a lather, the Peers that they lobby up on their high-horses, and the media in a frenzy about how women and children are going to be punished by the introduction of charges. The big question is, why?
Running underneath this issue is a principle. It is a key principle and it is one that single parent campaign groups are very very familiar with. We see this principle being played out over and over again, in the liberal media and the in political terms. The principle is the rights of women (which of course are always linked with the rights of children) and how they will be affected by cuts and in this case charges for the use of the Statutory Maintenance Scheme. This extraordinarily popular cause is one that even the Prime Minister presiding over the government that is proposing the cuts and the charges must defer to, the rights of women being likely to affect the female vote and in turn play a deciding factor in whether he continues in his post.
Let us be clear, women (and their children) are top of the pile and hold a huge amount of political capital, whilst men, particularly as fathers, are way down the list and can therefore be seen in more prosaic terms. In the world that I work in, Fathers – as one observer said to me last year – ’have a moral obligation to pay’ – simply, it would seem, by virtue of being a man. The outrage at the heart of charging mothers for the use of the Statutory Maintenance Scheme, a scheme that was once, (in the guise of the Child Support Agency) seen as the big stick to beat father’s into submission, is not, the small amounts of money that it would actually cost, the issue is the principle that women are losing the absolute right to have the state intervene punitively against fathers on their behalf.
The reforms to the Child Maintenance System are long overdue and today, Maria Miller, the Minister in charge of the changes, has announced a twenty million pound investment in support services to enable parents to work together after separation. The Centre for Separated Families has long campaigned for such a change and welcomes the news with relief. At last, the UK can begin to develop some of the services that have been available in other countries for many years, the kind of services that help both parents to remain actively involved in their children’s lives instead of pushing them apart and dividing them into carer or provider. This news is a huge step forward for those working with separated families in the UK and particularly those working with fathers.
At the heart of the changes that start with the investment announced today, is the understanding that fathers have struggled for many years to remain part of their children’s lives and have, for too long, been pushed out by the stereotyping of family separation that has been perpetuated by single parent campaign groups. Whilst this news has been announced, however, the media and political focus remains upon the issue of charging mothers for the use of the Statutory Maintenance Scheme. Let us be clear, the rights of women as mothers is not something that the campaign groups are going to give up lightly.
I have written about the UK social assistance model of support to separated families many times. Brought in to sever the dependence of women upon their husbands after separation, the model is intended to safeguard unmarried and divorced women’s right to choose how they, and their children, organise their lives after family separation. Its original aim, to reduce stigma and ensure that all families are treated with respect however they are constituted, has largely been met. However, this has, in my view, come at a cost. And the price paid has been fatherhood.
Contrast the social assistance model with the social policy governing separated families in, say, Norway or Denmark, where both parents are supported to care for their children and both parents are seen as responsible for providing. Women in the Scandinavian countries are not fighting for their rights not to pay for a service to collect Child Maintenance from the father of their children, they are out working and providing it themselves, in partnership with the father of their children who is also sharing the care as well as providing in his own right. This system seems to me to be eminently more suitable to twenty first century Britain; supporting women to be more than carers, tied to the kitchen sink and men to be more than workers, tied to long working hours devoid of any interaction with the family.
The changes being heralded by today’s announcement will not bring us in line with those Scandinavian Countries. There is much further to go until we reach that sensible place, but they are a step in the right direction. The announcement of a package of financial support to develop holistic support for families, signals that this government understands that change is needed to ensure that both parents are supported to remain involved with their children after separation. This government has seen through the bluster and the fogging of the single parent campaign groups, to the other side, a place where dad is not the bogey man, always running off and leaving the family or terrorising mothers with domestic violence. This investment, in services that can offer a new way forward, is a mark of respect for families and a commitment to supporting them through difficult times so that they can continue to manage their own lives, together as well as apart.
But it is not going to be easy. The campaigning by the single parent groups goes on and the stereotypes of the impoverished single mother and her destitute children will continue to be perpetuated in order to keep the moral high ground. And Peers from Lord Mackay onwards will continue to fall for it. The government may well be defeated on the issue of charging in the Lords today. If they are, then it will be heralded by the single parent campaigners as another victory for the rights of children not to have to pay the price for the fecklessness of their fathers. But don’t be fooled. This is not about children’s rights, this is about women and their rights to enforce fathers to pay up or else. It is one of the fundamental foundations upon which single parent rights movement is founded – the right to control family life after separation – and it has contributed to the demise of the family, respect for fatherhood and the rights of children to know and love both of their parents after separation.
I have said many times, that where a mother is coping with life alone because the father of her children has run off, acted badly or avoided his responsibilities, we must support that mother and her children and bring that father to book. The charges that are being proposed are designed to ensure that those who really need a Statutory Maintenance Scheme can have access to a strong and powerful service. We will always need single parent support because there will always be single parents as described above. What I object to, however, is the way in which the single parent lobby has had a stranglehold on social policy in design and delivery for too long, forcing all families to fit that model of the poor impoverished mother and the dead beat dad. Today, this is finally being challenged and change is on its way. Whilst the media and the Lords are bemoaning the fate of the stereotype, those of us working in the real world are getting on with real life and real families. This government has done a brave thing. Those of us who understand how brave, step forward now.”
Discussion with her fans, and one detractor, continued the following day:
“The government was defeated last night on the issue of charging because the Lords are being lobbied by the powerful single parent campaigners who peddle the kind of rhetoric that makes people feel either guilty or anxious. The truth is, and having done this work for twenty five years, experienced family separation myself and having been the adult child of a separated family, that family separation is caused by mothers and fathers and mothers and fathers are equally impoverished, financially and emotionally by it.
The arguments by single parent campaigners try to make us believe that every separation leaves one parent impoverished and the other skipping off to hide assets, the Lords fell for it, thankfully the government will fight on. These are important times for equality, dignity and respect for fatherhood as well as the next generation of children for whom, I hope, a new future awaits.”
“Our argument at CSF [Centre for Separated Families] is that all legislation, policy and practice around family separation should be gender analysed for its impact on mothers and fathers and the choices that they make about the relationships that they have with children. we would even argue that a gender impact assessment of legislation, accompanied by gender budgeting, would tell us where we need to invest in support services to enable greater engagement between mothers and fathers after separation which would lead to better outcomes for children over time, for example by improving the way in which mothers and fathers work together and share care and provision instead of interacting with the state through the benefits system or the Statutory Maintenance Scheme.
The reason why Bindel and Trinder et al do not want this to happen is, I imagine, because it would uncouple the relationship between women and the state and return women to the need to cooperate with men. it is controversial but the government have started this process through the reform of the child Maintenance System, promoting and supporting private agreements rather than the automatic pursuit of maintenance by the State. I really believe that they have got it right and that what will fall out of those changes will bring change. if this Ministerial Review can get it right too and we can drive through the kind of practical support that families need to make their own arrangements after separation, we stand a chance of real change and protecting families from the problems that are caused by the likes of Gingerbread.”
“ I have been working on the Steering Group with the DWP on the development of services to promote and support collaboration and have also been on the group advising on the inclusion of a statement within the Children Act 1989. Its a long haul and we need to see this as a generational change but the right things are being done despite the powerful opposition to change and so I am hopeful and getting myself and my team ready to do whatever is necessary to bring this country into line with other more enlightened places.
When the message is made clear and the legislation and the support services are all aligned with that message, we will stand a much better chance of tackling the ways that relationships with children are vulnerable to control and manipulation. I am very certain that the pathways are being cleared and that what is going on in government is right this time.”
“Maria Miller is the Minister with responsibility for reforming child maintenance, she is the single most focused politician on getting collaborative parenting supported (apart from Iain Duncan Smith) to my mind. She could do with support, all of the reforms to child maintenance are met with a barrage of opposition from Gingerbread et al, most recently when the Lords opposed the proposals to charge single parents for using the statutory maintenance scheme (what used to be the CSA). Fortunately the government just went ahead and implemented it anyway but it takes real vision and focus to keep on facing what has hitherto been an impenetrable wall of opposition and she has kept on going. I actually think that not many people realise the significance of the reforms that have been to child maintenance, they are to my mind, the biggest signal of all that there has been a shift, the repeal of Section 6 in 2008, which meant that there was not an automatic use of the CSA for people on benefits and the move towards supporting private agreements, changed the landscape completely. The most recent changes have been swift, big and brave and the future for making child maintenance agreements looks different with the big stick having been put away (taken out of the hands of Gingerbread et al) and a much more realistic and family based approach being taken which is respectful of fathers rather than treating them like walking wallets.”
“The announcements of tenders for developing new services to help parents to collaborate after separation is an example of this. Barely a year after the Minister with responsibility for reform of Child Maintenance set up a steering group to consider new services, proposals are being translated into reality. We may not like everything that the Child Maintenance Commission does, but the determination to ensure that private agreements are both supported and promoted is changing the language and the landscape of post separation arrangements for supporting children.
Having worked with the Child Maintenance Commission back in 2008 when the new Options service was brought into being, I know that they have faced an almost insurmountable resistance to change. Gingerbread, once the doyenne of family separation, have opposed the reforms at every end and turn, including a mass campaign to influence the House of Lords debate over charging for the use of the Statutory Maintenance Scheme. As Gingerbread lose their once mighty grip on the issue of maintenance and the punishment of fathers, the introduction of new services, to support families to collaborate around the issue of providing for children, forms the backdrop to the next stage. This time the consultation on the issue of caring for children after separation. This twin track approach, tackling provision and care for children is strategic in its thinking and, in my view, courageous. Whilst the announcement is not going to bring everything that the fathers lobby is seeking, it is going to demonstrate some determination to at least have a stab at tackling some of the ingrained issues.
The field of family separation looks incredibly different today to that which was presided over by the last government. During the latter days of their tenure, Labour Ministers threw bundles of cash at the problem of family separation without seeming to have any real understanding or care about the outcomes. Compare that to the speed at which the Coalition government have set about changing the face of family separation support, forcing all third sector organisations to consider how they can support collaboration between parents rather than dividing them further from each other. If you map this, you will get a sense of just how much this government has shifted the focus of support away from the lone parent model and towards a dual parent model. Those power bases of the last government, the Fatherhood Institute for example, for whom representing fatherhood appears to be about what fathers can do for mothers, seem out of step now with government intention and policy progress. As someone who has worked in the field for over two decades now, I cannot ever remember a time like this, when the tightly woven web of matriarchal domination seems to thin further on a daily basis. The coalition may not be delivering utopia in terms of equality today, but as a step on the highway to change, this consultation is absolutely key.”
19 June 2012
On 7 May 2013 Karen Woodall wrote a blog post with the title “Recasting the Child Maintenance Landscape: from Options to Obligations”, calling the Child Support Agency:
“That horrendous, state intervention into family life, that destroys any ability of the family to continue to work together and the spiteful, faceless bureaucracy that purports to be about children’s well being but in reality is simply state sponsored robbery.”
“I regret that I ever wasted a moment of my time on the Steering Groups for the DWP and DfE.”
4 December 2013: Gender Wars: Feminist Falsehoods and Fabrications
“We know that good fathers are removed from the lives of their children by a system which is designed to do so – and then they are blamed for it and chased for child maintenance. Any father and some mothers too risks this, during separation there are no exceptions because this is how the UK system works. And yes, this system has the opportunity to create alienation built into it hence my drive to create change and highlight what feminist designed legislation has done.”
In her blog post of 20 December 2013, Karen Woodall reflected on “A year in the world of family separation”:
“It’s January 2013… On my desk in my office is the draft of the telephony training that I have written for the Department of Work and Pensions initiative called Help and Support for Separated Families…
Back at the office I open the draft of the telephony training. It is destined to train staff on national helplines to offer help and support to separated families. The idea originated in discussions that I had had with the then Minister with responsibility for Child Maintenance, Maria Miller. The reform of family services was intended to move delivery of support to the whole family after separation. I spent many hours sitting in rooms with the heads of government funded charities discussing how to achieve this…
In March, back at my desk, I find myself in an increasingly agitated state. Still working on the telephony training I am becoming more and more disillusioned with the Help and Support for Separated Families Initiative that I spent such a long time working on. Back in 2008, I had, alongside Nick, written, developed and delivered, a core part of the training that enabled the reform of Child Maintenance through the development of the Options service. Having been part of the reform of Child Maintenance since before Sir David Henshaw produced his review in 2006, I was well versed in its purpose and the intentions of successive governments to move from a punitive to a supportive system of post separation financial arrangements between parents. Between January and the end of July 2008, Nick and I worked twelve hour days alongside the Child Support Redesign Team in bringing the Options service to life. Between 2009 and 2011, we trained all of the new employees of the Child Maintenance Enforcement Commission (as it was then called) Executive in whole family, gender aware, father inclusive support to separated parents. Our training was nominated and won awards, it was voted the best part of the Commissions induction programme. We grew more confident that whole family support to separated families was something the government would adopt on a wider scale. By 2011, when the Coalition government began its simultaneous reform of the Children Act and family services, we were hopeful that a breakthrough could be made. In March 2013, as I sit looking at the Web Application which is now widely touted by the DWP as a a tool to help parents to sort out separation, I feel my heart sinking. Though I had known, on the day that Maria Miller and Tim Loughton were reshuffled, that any real reform hopes were lost for good, the reality of the swing back to the same old women’s rights agenda begins to dawn on me…
Summer arrives and I have decided that I can no longer support the DWP in their Help and Support for Separated Families Initiative. Inspired by a visit to Jersey and the work of some wonderful volunteers at Milli’s which is part of the Jersey Centre for Separated Families and linked in to our growing network, I write a blog contrasting that with the experience of working with managers from the Options service. I have pretty much made up my mind by now that I can no longer work with the DWP because what they have produced is so far away from what parents need that it will cause harm rather than serve to support collaboration between parents. The DWP don’t want me delivering the training I have written for their telephony service after this is published and I am glad to walk away from it. What began as a vision of reform of family services, with a telephony circle of leading charities working to help parents to collaborate, ends up with a tiny handful of organisations – one of which has clearly over exaggerated the number of people delivering their telephone services, another of which is unhappy with the concept of collaboration. Two of the organisations do have an understanding of what faces fathers and their children after separation so I comfort myself with the idea that at least my efforts went to supporting those…
Autumn, and I’m heading into a massive life transition. A house move looms and we have both left the Centre for Separated Families behind. Now we can properly focus on the work that we really want to do, which is therapeutic support to the whole family through separation and beyond. Our plans for research are coming to fruition and we are meeting new people, our new project, the National Network of Separated Family Centres is starting to flourish…
And so this is Christmas 2013 and I am about to close down for a few days to rest and recuperate so that I can return to my work with renewed vim and vigour in 2014… Back at the office I read about the millions just granted by the DWP for more mediation and, bizarrely, for gardening and painting activities, as part of the Help and Support for Separated Families Initiative. Thankfully, Nick gives me a copy of the Centre for Social Justice report Fractured Families and I am heartened to see that our visions and our values and our expertise are not completely lost. Nick’s work on Child Maintenance has contributed to the report and I can see that there is a way to keep hope for change alive.”
“It [Child Support Agency] supposedly has been cut out Y – though help and support for separated families, the somewhat lame duck which emerged from the so called reform of the ‘sector’ is hardly what I call a substitute strategy and it is most certainly not what Henshaw had in mind….you can supposedly make your own arrangements now, though I guess those on the old/new/new/old/future/scheme whatever it is called these days will still be caputed in the web of the pocket pickers. I completely agree with you, Child Maintenance is not the business of the state, the Child Support Agency came in on the back of the rise of births outside of marriage in the eighties/nineties however, to make sure the single never married mothers were not draining the state coffers for the care of their children. Since then it has had more changes of image than Lady Gaga in concert, with an attempt to move towards supporting collaboration. This however has been dragged back into the same old mire and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to see a reformed reformed reformed Child Support Agency version 103 being introduced at some point early on in 2016.”
“THE number one argument from women’s rights groups in opposition to the Child Maintenance System changing to allow parents to make their own arrangements ‘HE will bully HER to accept less than SHE is ENTITLED to. And there’s me thinking child maintenance is for children… and there’s you thinking that women bully men!”
“BANG ON THE MONEY. This is not about fathers rights it is about the well being of children and how the gender neutral legislation is enacted in a gendered way which produces gender biased outcomes.
We tried. We really really tried and we did get somewhere in the DWP in particular but we were beaten back by the women’s rights groups and our whole family practice got turned into something unrecognisable.”
“The problem with the way that we support separated families in this country is that for too long we have been driven to believe that this is only about dads who leave families and mothers and children who are abandoned. We have also been encouraged to believe that the only thing wrong with family separation is that said abandoned mothers are struggling to put food on the table and shoes on their children’s feet. This is untrue. It is a stereotype that serves to support the women’s rights groups who have dominated the social policy space around family separation for too long. It is dangerous and it is corrosive, especially to children who are least well served by its ongoing promotion.
Working close to the coal face of family separation, stereotypes are not useful in helping to understand what is really going on in a family. Use of punitive beliefs to drive practice does not serve children who are vulnerable to becoming caught up in parental battles. Looking beyond stereotypes, it is easy to see that the way that a family separates is very similar to the way that the family operated when it was together. Lines of power and control are utilised in just the same way. People do not change during separation, they simply sharpen and harden their inherent traits and they often fall back onto negative behaviours which are used to the full to power their way through to victory.
Because family separation is not about bad dads abandoning angelic mothers and their starving children. Much as we might like to think it is (because that makes it easy to deal with in policy and practice terms), it is not. And saying it is not is not anti mother and it is not pro father, it is simply raising the reality that family separation is about mothers and fathers, some of whom behave well and some of whom do not. When one reaches that place in practice with families, it is easier to see what is really going on and when you see what is really going on it is possible to assist the family. Properly assist I mean, not shove them into a state run service or the family courts where they are run through the mill of other people’s stereotyped beliefs again until they conform, walk away or die.”
Referring to her falling out with DWP officials in 2013 and the premature termination of their final contract training charities to handle phone calls from separated parents:
“What we have are policy makers who are politically motivated and who are absolutely blindsided by the women’s rights lobby. This lobby group is huge, it is financially powerful and it can manipulate reality at will. I have sat around tables with these people who are ferocious when they are challenged. I was once in a meeting with heads of women’s groups who more or less laughed at me, then threatened me and then spent the meeting trying to shout me down. I have been attacked, threatened and bullied by people involved in the women’s rights movement for speaking about the need to work outside of the feminist paradigm when working with separated families. I have seen possibilities for social policy changed absolutely wrecked by the fear of the women’s rights lobby and in the end I walked away because I could not stomach it anymore.”
“That’s it in a nutshell, I wonder how many know the truth of it…that’s called shafting your membership in my view, I have never forgotten it, it is what made me want to leave the charity sector, what made me leave came next, the watering down of all of our work by the DWP to keep the women’s rights groups happy.”