Challenges to Privacy in the Context of Public Assistance: Poor Mothers and Child Support Enforcement

• In Event: 411 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Families, Poverty, and Inequality.

Abstract

Drawing on in-depth interviews with sixty poor mothers in a high-poverty neighborhood in Houston, TX, I ask how poor mothers experience privacy in the context of seeking public assistance. To do so, I focus on the aspect of the welfare application process that poor mothers in this study found to be the most invasive of their privacy: the requirement that mothers provide information about the identity and whereabouts of their children’s father for the purpose of state enforcement of child support. I find that this requirement produced a multi-dimensional privacy problem for mothers. On one hand is an informational privacy issue, in that mothers are unable to keep private pieces of information they perceive to be deeply intimate. Consequently, they are unable to shield themselves from the stigma they anticipate experiencing if they discuss what amounts to their sexual history. Yet also problematic for mothers was the loss of decisional privacy—by divulging information about the child’s father, they give the state the necessary information to open a child support case. Many mothers preferred not to file child support, ether because the father was already providing in-kind support, because mothers empathized with fathers’ difficulties finding employment, or because they feared the father might cease being a part of their children’s lives if he was forced to pay child support. For some mothers, these privacy issues deterred them from seeking public assistance at all. Theoretical and policy relevant implications are discussed.

Author

• Cayce C. Hughes, University of Chicago