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Welfare Surveillance Wave 1

This file is a work in progressThis is a very rough first draft released before its really runable so people
can get a general sense of the argument. This is intended to be a policy aff that defends reducing
surveillance of a parent or parents on welfare.

There will be a different critical welfare aff released in the coming days that will definitely not be run in
the mini tournament. That affirmative will criticize discursive surveillance enacted through labeling
people welfare queens and dead beat dads

1AC ev
Plan:
The United States Federal Government in recognition of the legitimacy of
alternative parenting models should substantially curtail its surveillance of
paternity, marital status or child support levels as a condition for receipt of federal
benefits

In recent times a recurrent mythology that has been applied to poor people in
America, particularly as applied to poor people of color, is the myth of what is
termed the dead beat dad a myth that has uniquely been applied to Black and
Latino individuals. This myth has been widely embraced despite the fact that
consensus of studies have consistently demonstrated it to be false.
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
Needless to say, the voices of pursued parents themselves were seldom heard amid the chorus of condemnation. Yet cracks have begun to appear
in the monolith in recent years. Economist William Comanor writes, "Child support obligations," the only form of "obligation" or "debt" that
most of the debtors have done nothing to incur, "are now treated far more harshly than any other form of debt" (2004, 3). Attorney Ronald

Henry more harshly characterizes government claims of widespread nonpayment as "an obvious sham," a
"disaster," and "the most onerous form of debt collection practiced in the United States" (2004, 135). " The overwhelming majority of
so-called 'deadbeat dads' are just judicially created ," says another attorney. "Why all this talk about so-called 'deadbeat dads'?
Because there is a lot of money to be made through that myth" (Green 2002). Data and the research assembled by independent scholars indicate
that the problem is not entirely what officials and the media claim it to be. In the

largest federally funded study ever


undertaken on the subject, Sanford Braver demonstrated that little scientific basis exists for claims that large
numbers of fathers fail to pay child support. Braver found that government claims of nonpayment were derived not from may
compiled database or other hard figures, but entirely from surveys of custodial parents (1998, 21-22 and chap. 2). The Census Bureau simply
asked mothers what they were receiving. No corroborative data were produced because none exists. Moreover, officials rely only on these
surveys of mothers, on nothing else, in setting enforcement policy against fathers, and no effort is made to balance them with surveys of
noncustodial parents. According to the House Ways and Means Committee, "By interviewing a random sample of single-parent families, the
Census Bureau is able to generate a host of numbers that can be used to assess the performance of non-custodial parents in paying child support"
(U.S. House 1998, 604.) Yet Braver (1998) found that fathers

overwhelmingly do pay court-ordered child support when


they are employed, often at enormous personal sacrifice. Scholars largely agree that unemployment is "the
single most important factor relating to nonpayment" (Braver 1998, 33; see all of chap. 4). One study team (Bartfeld and
Mayer 1994) found that 95 percent of fathers with no employment problems for the previous five years paid their ordered support regularly and
that 81 percent paid in full and on time. A federal pilot study commissioned by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE)
itself also found no serious problem of nonpayment . A full-scale government-sponsored study was planned to follow up the pilot,
but OCSE cancelled it when the pilot study's findings threatened the justification for the agency's existence by demonstrating that nonpayment
was not a serious problem. The Congressional Research Service also concluded at about the same time that no serious nonpayment problem
existed among the middle class (Braver, Fitzpatrick, and Bay 1988; Solomon 1989, 1-3; Sonenstein and Calhoun 1990). Government agencies
and private collection companies devise astronomical figures on alleged (or "estimated") arrearages cited by officials, now up to $100 billion and
constantly rising, (1) based not on compiled data, but on hypothetical formulas of what would be owed in circumstances that do not exist. These

data in themselves are simply numbers on paper; in other words, they are based on the assignment of debt to private citizens by government
officials. These citizens have certainly not been proven to owe this money by convictions in jury trials. Besides lacking any basis in compiled
data, these figures are issued without reference to a host of unanswered questions, as noted previously, and bear no necessary relation to whether
the parent committed any infraction or other action to incur the imputed obligation, whether the amount "owed" is reasonable or even possible for
him to pay, whether it bears any relation to the children's needs or costs, why the children were separated from the parent in the first place or
whether the separation was ever justified, or simply whether the parent did in fact make the demanded payment. (2) Indeed, whether the payer is
even the parent of the children in question is often not clear. Unlike taxation, child-support "obligations" are determined not by elected
representatives who formulate statutory provisions that apply equally to all, but by judicial and administrative personnel who legislate a payment
obligation for each individual that he alone is required to obey. Despite

the stereotype of the deadbeat dad as the wealthy playboy


officials have acknowledged that most of the claimed
debt is largely uncollectable because almost all is attributed to fathers who are as poor as or poorer than
the mothers and children (Edin, Lein, and Nelson 1998). "About two-thirds of the debt and about two-thirds of the people who owe it
squiring around his new trophy wife in a bright red Porsche, federal

earned less than $10,000 last year," OCSE director Sherri Heller concluded. "In other words, it appears that most of the debt is owed by extremely
poor debtors" (U.S. HHS 2003). Contrary

to highly sensationalized but now discredited statistics on the alleged


financial hardships of divorce to women, economic researchers have concluded recently that "it is the
non-custodial parent, usually the father, who suffers the most [following divorce ]. In every case and for every
income, according to our analyses, the payer of child support is never able to cover household expenditures if paying child support at guideline
levels" (Folse and Varela-Alvarez 2002, 273). The study's authors add, "These simulations may actually under-represent the circumstances of
non-custodial parents because they do not include expenditures for their children beyond child support" (285). (3) The

research by Braver
undermined virtually every justification for the multi-billion-dollar criminal-enforcement machinery and for
programs to "promote responsible fatherhood." If these scholars are to be believed--and no official or researcher has
challenged their conclusions, let alone refuted them--the government has created a problem where none
existed previously and both a huge army of enforcement agents and a panoply of criminal punishments for which there is
no justification. Yet almost a decade after Braver's study, no enforcement agency, public or private, has even acknowledged his accusation
that they are fomenting public hysteria against a nonexistent problem, nor have existing policies been adjusted. As Braver
and others has

himself observes, "The far-flung federal bureaucracy involved with the child support enforcement machinery would naturally feel threatened if
the conviction became widespread that there might not really be a sizable problem with divorced fathers' child support compliance, after all"
(1998, 34).

More recent studies have continued to confirm that the myth is a product of racist
stereotypes that allows us to pathologize the problems in poor communities as being
the product of irresponsible individuals rather than structural inequality
Public Health Watch 14 The Myth of The Absent Black Father & The Persistence Of Racial
Stereotypes, April 20, 2014, https://publichealthwatch.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/the-myth-of-theabsent-black-father-the-persistence-of-racial-stereotypes/
If you believe everything you read on the Internet (which, actually, I would highly recommend not doing), Black men are seriously missing-inaction when it comes to raising children. One article, entitled Whos Your Daddy: The Epidemic Of Absent Black Fathers, describes the
epidemic of absent Black fathers in todays society as vastly increasing and getting worse and worse. In another article, Whats The Problem

a recent
report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that African-American fathers are just as
involved in their childrens lives as White and Latino men. The findings clearly refute the notion that
Black fathers are disinterested in raising or caring for their children , and contradicts the myth of the absent Black father.
With Black Fathers?, the author states definitively, It is true that many Black fathers are absent from their childrens lives. But

The L.A. Times Emily Alpert Reyes reports: Defying enduring stereotypes about black fatherhood, a federal survey of American parents shows
that by most measures, black fathers who live with their children are just as involved as other dads who live with their kids or more so. For
instance, among fathers who lived with young children, 70% of black dads said they bathed, diapered or dressed those kids every day, compared
with 60% of white fathers and 45% of Latino fathers, according to a report released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics. Nearly
35% of black fathers who lived with their young children said they read to them daily, compared with 30% of white dads and 22% of Latino dads.
The report was based on a federal survey that included more than 3,900 fathers between 2006 and 2010 a trove of data seen as the gold
standard for studying fatherhood in the United States. In many cases, the differences between black fathers and those of other races were not
statistically significant, researchers said. While the

CDC found that Black fathers who live with their children are just
as involved as their peers, the same held true for fathers who do not live with their children . The statistic that
70-percent of African-American children are being raised in a single-parent-led household has been held up as proof that Black dads are not
involved in their childrens lives, but the CDC report shows that this notion is just not true. On Think Progress, Tara Culp-Ressler of Think
Progress writes: The

Pew Research Center, which has tracked this data for years, consistently finds no big differences

between white and black fathers. Gretchen Livingston, one of the senior researchers studying family life at Pew, wasnt at all
surprised by the new CDC data. Blacks look a lot like everyone else, she pointed out. Although black fathers are more likely to live separately
from their children the statistic thats usually trotted out to prove the parenting crisis many of them remain just as involved in their kids
lives. Pew

estimates that 67 percent of black dads who dont live with their kids see them at least once a
month, compared to 59 percent of white dads and just 32 percent of Hispanic dads. And theres
compelling evidence that number of black dads living apart from their kids stems from structural systems
of inequality and poverty, not the unfounded assumption that African-American men somehow place less
value on parenting. Equal numbers of black dads and white dads tend to agree that its important to be a father who provides emotional
support, discipline, and moral guidance. Theres one area of divergence in the way the two groups approach their parental responsibilities: Black
dads are even more likely to think its important to financially provide for their children. But

in spite of empirical evidence


showing that African-American fathers are just as involved with their children as other dads, the myth that
Black men are failing in their duties as fathers persists . But why? Culp-Ressler argues that race-based stereotypes
like the welfare queenare hard to get rid of because they are so deeply-ingrained and often passed off as truth (see
the beginning of the article, where it was stated as fact that many Black fathers are absent from their childrens lives). I touched on this issue in
a previous article, but I would add that colorblind ideology and racialized politics also play an important role in perpetuating negative stereotypes
such as the absent Black father. Pathologizing

Black fatherhood relies on the same logic used to naturalize racial


inequities as the product of a cultural problem in the Black community, rather than pervasive and systemic racial discrimination. I n this
way, racial disparities in health, education, income, and other areas can be pinned on the epidemic of
absent Black fathers, instead of the racially unjust policies and other mechanisms of institutional racism
that underly such disparities. For those who dont want to confront these issues, blaming Black fathers for racial
inequities allows them to avoid accountability for the problem while at the same time perpetuating the
injustices that caused the problem in the first place .

While the idea is a mythThe Federal Government has constructed an


elaboratestructure to monitor citizens in search of what it calls dead beat dads.
Baskerville 2 Stephen Baskerville, PhD teaches political science at Howard University, The Myth of
Deadbeat Dads, http://www.ejfi.org/family/family-61.htm
OCSE now maintains an army of almost 60,000 plainclothes agents, with sweeping powers to seize
property and persons involved in divorce proceedings, including the power to issue arrest warrants. 35
Hunting alleged deadbeats also rationalizes highly intrusive monitoring of all private citizens. In addition
to automatic wage garnishing from all obligors, even before they become "delinquent," the New Hires
Directory now compels employers to furnish the name of every new employee to the federal government.
"Never before have federal officials had the legal authority and technological ability...to keep tabs on
Americans accused of nothing," wrote the Washington Post on June 27, 1999. "Just like in totalitarian
societies, government bureaucrats will soon have the power to deny you a job, and the ability to monitor
your income, assets, and debts," says Libertarian Party Chairman Steve Dasbach. "This law turns the
presumption of innocence on its head and forces every American to prove their innocence to politicians,
bureaucrats, and computers." Several state governments have even voiced dissent, including skepticism
over the reality of "deadbeats." "Under the guise of cracking down on so-called deadbeat dads, the
Congress has required the states to carry out a massive and intrusive federal regulatory scheme by
which personal data on all state citizens" is collected, the Kansas Attorney General's office charged in a
federal suit challenging the constitutionality of the mandate. 36 The distinction between the guilty and the
innocent becomes almost meaningless, since officials are monitoring citizens who owe, those whose
obligations are paid up, and those who are not under any order at all. The presumption of guilt against
those who are obeying the law was revealed by one official who boasted to the Post that "we don't give

them an opportunity to become deadbeats." 37 The presumption that not only are all parents under child
support orders already quasi-criminals but that all citizens are potential criminals against whom
preemptive enforcement measures must be initiated is revealed by Teresa Myers of the National
Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). "Some people have argued that the state should only collect the
names of child support obligors, not the general population," she suggests. But "this argument ignores the
primary reason" for collecting the names: "At one point or another, many people will either be obligated
to pay or eligible to receive child sup-port."

The federal government created a massive system of surveillance to target the


mythology of poor fathers who dont support their children
Baskerville 2 Stephen Baskerville, PhD teaches political science at Howard University, The Myth of
Deadbeat Dads, http://www.ejfi.org/family/family-61.htm
Special interest groups

demonized divorced fathers into "deadbeat dads," and then criminalized them . The
result: a system that traces all newly hired employees, shifts the burden of proof to the accused, and
throws fathers in jail for losing their jobs. TV host Bill O'Reilly recently declared that "There is an epidemic of child abandonment
in America, mainly by fathers." Senator Evan Bayh has attacked "irresponsible" fathers in several speeches. Campaigning for president, Al Gore
promised harsher measures against "deadbeat dads," including sending more to jail.

The Clinton administration implemented


numerous child-support "crackdowns," including the ominously named Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act; the Directory
of New Hires, which contains the name of every newly hired individual in the country so that any
deadbeat among them can be tracked down; and the Federal Case Registry, a massive system of
government surveillance that aims to monitor 16-19 million citizens. In an ironic role reversal, Republicans have
responded to the Democrats' law-and-order campaign with social programs. 1 President Bush recently announced a $320 million program to
"promote responsible fatherhood," and Congress is considering a bill to "reconnect fathers with their families." Yet the underlying message is
similar. The administration promises to increase collections with a "five-year plan." "We want to send the strongest possible message that parents
cannot walk away from their children." In

fact, no evidence exists that large numbers of fathers voluntarily abandon


their children. No government or academic study has ever demonstrated such an epidemic, and those
studies that have addressed the question directly have concluded otherwise. 2 In the largest federally
funded study ever conducted on the subject, psychologist Sanford Braver demonstrated that very few married
fathers abandon their children. Overwhelmingly it is mothers, not fathers, who are walking away from marriages and thus separating
children from their fathers. Other studies have reached similar or more dramatic conclusions. Braver also found that when they
are employed, virtually all divorced fathers pay the child support they owe and that the number of arrearages "estimated" by the government is
derived not from any actual statistics but from surveys. 3 The Census Bureau simply asked mothers whether they were receiving payments. No
data exists to corroborate the mothers' claims. As Braver found, "there is no actively maintained national database of child support payments."

20 million people at any moment are impacted by paternafare surveillance


Smith 10 Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell University, Should Liberal
Feminists Support Paternafare and Welfare Reform? A Capabilities-Oriented Analysis, Politics &
Gender / Volume 6 / Issue 02 / June 2010, pp 247-269
I narrow the scope of my analysis by focusing largely upon one

specific dimension of welfare reform, namely, paternafare.3


single mother must name the biological or marital father of her children
and assist the state in pursuing him for child support. Since the passage of PRWORA in 1996, the welfare
recipient in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) now faces severe penalties for failing to make
what her caseworker considers to be a good faith effort in this respect. In many cases, she is
Under the latter rule, the low-income

sanctioned and suffers a reduction in her already inadequate benefit as a result. In a significant number of cases,
she is expelled from the program altogether. At any given moment, about 20 million adults are being targeted by
the paternafare system (Turetsky 2003).

The monitoring populations of color through efforts to push heteronormative family


structures is not new. It is the strategy used in the immediate post slavery era to
maintain systems of domination and racism
Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
MARRIAGE AS COLONIZATION IN POST-BELLUM AMERICA The vast majority of scholarship concerning colonization by the United
States focuses on the colonization of Native Americans-also referred to as expansionism-and broadly discusses American colonialism as any
"policy which attempted to obtain both formal political and economic control of a given area and which especially aimed to use this area as a
source of direct economic benefits."39 In recent history, scholars

and activists have explored the civilizing mission of the


United States as it relates to other racialized groups, including Blacks and Latino/as, with an expansive
view of colonialism as an instrument through which white colonizers have used law to bring the
colonized within an American national identity by subjecting them to oppressive state monitoring ." For
example, Professors Katherine Franke and Laura Edwards have analyzed how governments utilized law to "civilize" newly
freed Blacks as they transitioned from slavery to freedom.4 The ultimate goal of these governmental efforts was not only to
provide cheap labor for southern industries by creating a supply of convicts and child apprentices who could be forced to work with little or no
pay, but also to

force freed black people to comport with the heteronormative ideal of the nation's perceived
national familial identity42 -the self sufficient American family with a working husband and a dependent wife and children 43 -and to
therefore absolve the government of responsibility for financially supporting needy black women and children.' One method for accomplishing
the integration of former slaves into free society without burdening Whites with related economic costs was to insist that newly freed Blacks
adopt and comply with the standard legal institution of marriage." Prior to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation,46 slaves had no ability
to contract47 and thus were not allowed to legally marry.4 8 Instead, during the antebellum period, white slavemasters were deemed the head of
each household and bore the financial responsibility of caring for each of their dependents, including their slaves.49 Slave marriages were viewed
as a threat to slave owners' power and control because, if recognized, such marriages would grant black men claims to black women and children
as property based on the marital contract." Additionally, plantation owners worried that slave husbands would become violent in defending their
wives and children,5 especially against those slave owners who sexually assaulted and abused slave women." Nevertheless, many slaves married
by engaging in marriage rituals, such as jumping over broomsticks. 3 When slave owners stood to benefit from slave marriages because they
made abandoning loved ones for escape to the North emotionally difficult, slaves' marriages were even recognized by their owners. 4 In those
situations, however, slaveholders maintained complete control over the marriages55 and could and did end marriages and separate families by
sale.5 6 In fact, because slave families were so frequently ripped apart by the slave market, slave couples often recited vows such as "until death
or distance do us part."57 With

the emancipation of slaves and their release from slavemasters' households came
the need to maintain power and control over Blacks such that they would not disrupt order in white civil
society. By allowing and encouraging former slaves to marry, states maintained their power over the lives
of freed people by requiring all married couples to register with the State and then forcefully prosecuting
those Blacks who did not do so as a means of ensuring compliance with marriage laws. 8 Indeed, without any
regard for the ways in which slavery and the slave market made it difficult for the husband-wife structure to remain intact in slave families,59

newly freed Blacks and their families were punished for stepping out of this mold, even when the
violations directly resulted from previous forced compliance with the slave system. 60 For example, because of
the manner in which slavery often tore families apart, when a loved one who was sold or presumed dead returned, some newly freed Blacks found
themselves with more than one spouse upon their emancipation.6' These freed Blacks were prosecuted for bigamy in such situations, forcing them
to comply with the free white model for normal familial relationships after decades during which Blacks had no choice but to develop alternative
family and dependency structures.62 Despite the hardships brought by the newly gained right to marry at will, newly freed Blacks welcomed it63
precisely because slave families had frequently been torn apart during slavery.64 Additionally, newly emancipated Blacks wished to make their
marriages right in the eyes of God and desired recognition of the validity of their marriages by the laws of free society, because they believed
compliance with religious and legal requirements would prove their eligibility for the rights associated with citizenship and freedom. 65

Although Blacks were allowed to marry legally for the first time, this right was less part of recognizing

Blacks as truly free citizens of the nation66 than it was a means of regulating their behaviors because
policymakers believed that they would drain states' economic resources without such regulation . 67 The
prohibition against interracial marriages reveals this lack of true freedom through the right to marry.68 Powerful Whites permitted Blacks to
marry only if the marriages did not disrupt social hierarchies; interracial marriage would challenge white supremacy by allowing Blacks and
Whites to integrate in the most intimate of societal units, the family.69 Monoracial marriage was a key "civilizing" tool because, by establishing
economic roles within black families, it shifted enormous financial responsibility from the government to individual, newly freed black men, who
were charged with providing for their households' economic needs. When Blacks were finally freed, many former slaves, especially women and
children, found themselves in the worst of conditions.7 " Henry Rowntree, a federal agency representative whose duties included dealing with the
needs of indigent former slaves, described several freed women and children as follows: Five women all Mothers, and the residue of 29 children,
all small and under 12 years of age. One of the Women had the small pox, her face a perfect mass of Scabs, her children were left uncared for
except for what they incidentally [received]. Another woman was nursing a little boy about 7 whose earthly life was fast ebbing away, she could
pay but little attention to the rest of her family. Another was scarcely able to crawl about.... They owned One Pan, and one Iron kettle amongst
them, they had no tin cup, no crockery of any kind, no knives or forks, and certainly were the poorest off, of any I have met with being litterally
[sic] and truthfully destitute in every sense of the word.71 In essence, the question looming over the heads of many white policymakers upon the
emancipation of Blacks was exactly what to do with all these black women and children in need.72 Concerned

that the inability of


newly freed Blacks to support themselves would make large numbers of them become public charges,
white policymakers and leaders stressed the notion that "[n]o really respectable person wishes to be
supported by others."73 It was now time for former slaves, upon whose labor the economic foundation of the South had been built,74 to
support themselves. As one southern general stated to black soldiers, "You must now work.... You have families to support; your wives will need
clothes.... Freedom confers new obligations. '75 Furthermore, as General Clinton B. Fisk, head of the Freedmen's Bureau in Tennessee,
specifically declared to freed black men, Husbands must provide for their families. Your wives will not love you if you do not provide bread and
clothes for them. They cannot be happy and greet you with a kiss, when you come home, if they are hungry, ragged, and cold. By industry and
economy you can soon provide a real good home, and plenty of food and clothing for your family; and you should not rest until this is done.7 6
Marriage among newly freed Blacks was necessary to minimize states' economic responsibility for them, especially for black children born
during slavery. Because of the inability of Blacks to marry during the antebellum period, the children of black slave couples were technically
illegitimate and thus the government's responsibility.77 To ensure

that the government would not become economically


responsible for illegitimate children born during slavery or for these children's mothers, legislators sought
to ensure that the fate of such women and children would rest exclusively with freed black men,
regardless of economic realities. 7 ' To do so, many southern states declared in their Black Codes 79 that former slaves who lived
together as couples during slavery were considered to be legally married from the beginning of their cohabitation." For example, the Mississippi
Black Code declared that "all freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes, who do now and have heretofore lived and cohabited together as husband
and wife shall be taken and held in law as legally married, and the issue shall be taken and held as legitimate for all purposes."'" If a former slave
man and woman were deemed legally married while they were slaves, then their children were not illegitimate. Thus, rather than becoming
liabilities of the state, these children became the responsibility of their now legally married parents, who were required by law to support them
financially.82 The financial motives behind granting freed Blacks the right to marry were most apparent in the government's policies for newly
freed men who were reunited with multiple spouses with multiple children. In these instances, government agents often selected one family for
these men, basing their decisions on the number of dependents in each potential nuclear family unit. As one Freedmen's Bureau agent remarked
about his own selection process, "Whenever a negro appears before me with two or three wives who have equal claim upon him... I marry him to
the woman who has the greatest number of helpless children who otherwise would become a charge on the Bureau."83 The government's motive
of minimizing states' responsibility for freed slaves was also reflected in decisions to allow newly freed black women with children fathered by
their former slavemaster to name a black man as the father in charge of supporting their children.84 In sum, the government used marriage to
financially and socially domesticate newly freed Blacks to ensure that the white public faced minimal responsibility for former slaves' economic
security.8 5 Marriage

was viewed as a vehicle through which the government could promote industriousness
among Blacks, gradually eliminating Blacks' dependence on any form of public assistance. As one
northern correspondent wrote, "Marital relations are invaluable as a means of promoting industry.
Morality encourages industry and prosperity. Immorality in the sexual relations produces idleness,
intemperance, and apathy." 6 In essence, enforcing marriage laws privatized the dependency of newly
freed Blacks.87 Marriage allowed states to deflect their responsibility for supporting newly-emancipated
Blacks to impoverished black men, who were forced to assume the financial caretaking role of their
former slave owners in their private homes even though they had no resources or access to political and
economic power. By forcing newly freed black families to fit within the economic structure of the
husband-wife dyad-with males as the primary breadwinners for their wives and children 5 - 8 white
policymakers gave freed black men the financial burdens traditionally held by heads of white
slaveowning households, and thus eliminated public responsibility for newly freed black women and
children.89 In the end, marriage for Blacks signified domestic obligations with very few corresponding social and political rights and no
acknowledgment by the government of how treatment of Blacks and black families during slavery made it difficult for newly freed Blacks to
model their households in this manner.9

Status quo efforts to use paternafare surveillance relies on the same racialized logic
Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
THE MODERN "MARRIAGE CURE" FOR POVERTY As noted in Part I, post-bellum policymakers
readily concluded that marriage would prevent slaves from being "undomesticated" and economically
dependent on the government.1 "' In the same way that marriage was used during the post-bellum period
to "civilize" and control newly freed Blacks, it is often proposed today as a solution to the welfare crisis
specifically, the public problem of poor households headed by single mothers who are consistently
blamed for widespread social problems such as drug use, illiteracy, and crime.0 2 Although race is rarely
ever explicitly mentioned in debates on welfare reform, its influence on people's perceptions of the
welfare system is overpowering.0 3 For much of the public, discussions of welfare reform invoke the
image of a single black or Latina woman with several children," and proposed solutions to social
problems share a common underlying message-that laws must be adopted to "civilize" these welfare
mothers with uncontrollably large families." 5 This Part analyzes the ways in which PRWORA and H.R,
240, which includes the Bush marriage initiative, like marriage laws during the postbellum period, blindly
promote marriage as a means of eliminating state financial responsibility for poor women and children-in
particular black welfare mothers and their children-and of controlling problems such as drugs and crime
that policymakers assume are caused by poor, single black mothers.

PRWORA is the extension of marital surveillance as a strategy reenacted the post


bellum strategies of controlling the bodies of people of color
Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
State and federal

politicians have readily adopted many scholars' "culture of poverty"'79 arguments, which favor
welfare reforms that encourage women to marry and rely on men for financial stability . Citing the collapse of
marriage as the primary cause of child poverty, intergenerational poverty, and emotional and behavioral problems among poor children, ' 8
politicians pushed for and passed welfare legislation designed to strengthen marriage1-as if it were obvious that marriage would cure these
societal ills.'82 For instance, some states instituted "Bridefare" programs, which give monetary rewards to welfare mothers who marry.'83
Additionally, PRWORA explicitly

listed "the formation and maintenance of two-parent families" as one of its


primary goals, which Congress assumed would remedy women and children's dependence on public
benefits.'84 Congress made a number of findings in PRWORA regarding the importance of marriage and
the problems stemming from the perceived societal rejection of marriage .'85 For instance, the congressional findings
for the PRWORA note that "[m]arriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children."' 8 6 Congress
also declared that "[t]he increase in the number of children receiving public assistance [was] closely related to the increase in births to unmarried
women."' 8 7 Indeed, congressional findings hinted that marriage might cure a number of problems, including low birth weights, low verbal
cognitive attainment, child abuse and neglect, low educational aspirations, poor student performance, and the rising numbers of convicts in the
juvenile justice system.'88 In fact, according to these findings, marriage would even reduce the incidence of divorce and out-of-wedlock births
among members of future generations, as simply "[be]ing born out-of wedlock significantly reduces the chances of the child growing up to have
an intact marriage. ' "89 Moreover, much

like in the post-bellum period, when former slaves were encouraged to


marry and government agents selected families for former slave men according to the number of
dependents in each potential family, the reasons behind the marriage promoting goals of PRWORA were

primarily economic. 9 ' In the same way that post-bellum state governments used marriage as a vehicle for
minimizing the dependency of newly-emancipated Blacks--especially black children-on the government
by passing responsibility for former slaves' economic welfare after decades of brutal slavery to individual
black men,' 9 ' Congress intended PRWORA, at least in part, to "end the dependence of needy parents on
government benefits by promoting. .. marriage."'92 In fact, Congress pointed to low marriage rates as a central cause of
poverty, noting that while "[o]nly 9 percent of married-couple families with children under 18 years of age have income below the national
poverty level[,] .... 46 percent of femaleheaded households with children under 18 years of age are below the national poverty level."' 93
Additionally, Congress

explicitly focused on placing economic responsibility with men in its attempt to create
a remedy for poverty in female-headed households,'94 citing a need for responsible fatherhood along with its
finding that "only 54 percent of single-parent families with children had a child support order established."' 95 In fact, under PRWORA, a
woman can have her public benefits for her children withdrawn if she is perceived as failing to cooperate
in identifying the father of her children. 9 6 The thrust of PRWORA and related state legislation is to alleviate
governmental responsibility where it can be privatized through the family. Where that has failed, the thrust has been
to eliminate state financial obligations by preventing certain families from growing through measures such as family size caps.' 97 Indeed, in
the same vein as post-bellum Black Code declarations that made slave marriages valid and the children of legally married
black couples their own responsibility, PRWORA specifically provides economic bonuses for states that successfully relieve themselves of
burdens from illegitimate children by implementing measures that decrease the numbers of out-of-wedlock births. 198

We must reject every instance of racism


Joseph Barndt, Co-Director, Crossroads, DISMANTLING RACISM, 1991, p. 155-156
The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty, subservience, and
powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust: the effects of uncontrolled
power privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our white prison, will
inevitably destroy us. But we have also seen that the walls of racism can be
dismantled. We are not condemned to an inexorable fate, but are offered the
vision and the possibility of freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison
of individual, institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are
urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to tear down,
once and for all, the walls of racism. The danger point of self-destruction
seems to be drawing even more near. The results of centuries of national and
worldwide conquest and colonialism, of military buildups and violent
aggression, of overconsumption and environmental destruction, may be
reaching a point of no return. A small and predominately white minority of the
global population derives its power and privilege from the suffering of the vast
majority of peoples of color. For the sake of the world and ourselves, we dare
not allow it to continue.

The federal paternafare surveillance system is sexist, racist, classist and increases
structural everyday violence
Heidt-Forsythe & McGowan 13
Erin Heidt-Forsythe is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at Penn State Univ &
Michelle L. McGowan is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics and a member of the Women's and Gender

Studies Program Faculty at Case Western Reserve Whose Right to Know? The Subjectivity of Mothers in
Mandatory Paternity Testing, The American Journal of Bioethics Volume 13, Issue 5, 2013 Taylor &
Francis Online pages 42-44
In the reform of welfare in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), Republicans and
Democrats called for a return to father-headed households for moral, social, and economic reasons (Mink 2002 ). To
enforce the social role of fathers, the federal government with the participation of statesrequires recipients of
TANF to identify their child's father, and to assist in collecting child support from him (Mink 2002 ). Critics
argue that such requirements are highly racialized and classed, as attention on fatherlessness has focused on
African-American families and unwed women's sexual preferences and procreative practices, epitomized
by the cultural myth of the welfare queen (Mink 2002 ). Such a system is one of paternafare, where
burdensome rules over paternity identification (among other tools of social control) reinforce a one size
fits all heteropatriarchal model of kinship relations (Smith 2007 , 3). In this system, paternity identification
disciplines sexual behavior and kinship structures, rather than materially improving children's lives (Mink 2002 ). Instead,
empirical evidence suggests that the presence of fathers in socially and economically fragile families does
not correlate with positive outcomes in children (Marsiglio et al. 2000 ). Furthermore, paternity identification in
welfare in the United States gives the government power to demand the identity of a woman's sexual
partner, even though her decision to not marry might have been a decision not to let government into
her most intimate life (Mink 2002 , 74). Gwendolyn Mink and others argue that mandatory paternity identification
threatens the safety of woman and children, compels mothers to create association between fathers and
children, and exposes women to private violence that can result from paternity identification (Mink 2002 ).
Hence, welfare policy in the United States exposes the potential for sexist, racist, and classist power
dynamics in the promotion of normative family formation through the enforcement of paternity
identification. Although paternity identification in welfare policy is conceptually distinct from Ravelingien and Pennings's proposal of
routine paternity testing in heterosexual couples children, both concepts expose the loss of mothers subjectivities, anxieties over fatherlessness,
and the imperfections of a one-size-fits-all solution to perceived medical and social ills.

The Federal surveillance program is racist, heteronormative and patriarchal


Mink 2 Gwendolyn Mink is a professor of women's studies at Smith College, From Welfare to
Wedlock: Marriage Promotion and Poor Mothers' Inequality, The Good Society 11.3 (2002) 68-73,
https://muse-jhu-edu.www2.lib.ku.edu/journals/good_society/v011/11.3mink.html#authbio
Let me turn now to the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (TANF), which the Personal Responsibility Act created
when it "reformed" welfare 1996. In its famous "findings," the TANF provision of the PRWORA blames countless social ills on Black single
mothers; in its statement of purpose, TANF policy pledges to promote marriage, reduce out-of-wedlock births, and to "encourage the formation
and maintenance of two-parent families." 5 Toward these ends, TANF subjects single mothers to work rules that deprive them of the right and the
flexibility to make parenting decisions about the care needs of their children. It subjects them to paternity disclosure rules that vitiate their sexual
and reproductive privacy. It subjects them to family formation rules, which confer social and financial fatherhood on biological fathers (and
instantiate their legal rights) regardless of a mother's say. In these ways and more, TANF punishes

single motherhood,
endangering the physical, emotional, and material security of poor mothers and their children,
jeopardizing poor mothers' custody of their own children, and negating their right to form intimate
associations on their own terms. As Public Vows convincingly demonstrates, governmental interference in intimate
lifeespecially in the formation of families through marriagehas almost always forwarded dominant
societal and governmental goals for racial and gender order . That's what anti-miscegenation laws were all about. That's
what coverture was all about. That's what countless immigration and naturalization laws were all about, laws that restricted the entry of wives and
women, or that stripped U.S. women of citizenship if they married non-citizen men. TANF

recapitulates the racialized,

patriarchal tradition in its pronouncements and punishments regarding childbearing and childrearing by single mothers.
Marriage serves several functions in TANF: it privatizes poverty; it reaffirms patriarchy ; and it spotlights women of color
as moral failures. Noting the color of welfare and the color of nonmarital mothers who are poor, 6 TANF proponents attribute
the need for welfare to the moral or cultural deficits of racialized individuals rather than to racialized
opportunities and economic conditions. For example, the 2000 Green Book, published by the House Ways and Means Committee,
undemocratic,

proclaimed in retrospect: TANF stakes itself to "the perspicacity of Moynihan's vision" that "[B]lack Americans [are] held back economically and
socially in large part because their family structure [is] deteriorating." 7 According to this argument, single-mother poverty arises from single

TANF's most
extensive efforts to push mothers into heterosexual families headed by fathers arise from its child
support and paternity establishment requirements affecting mothers. These provisions do not go so far as to
compel marriage or residential co-parenting, but they do require mothers to maintain association with biological fathers
(so that they can inform on them!) even if mothers do not want biological fathers involved with their
children. Under the paternity establishment provision, a mother must disclose the identity of her child's
biological father or must permit the government to examine her sex life so that it can discover the DNA
paternal match for her child. Under the child support enforcement provision, a mother must help government locate her child's
mothers' failure to choose marriage; in turn, the failure to marry is a measure of single mothers' impoverished citizenship.

biological father so that the government can collect reimbursement from him for the mother's TANF benefit. A mandatory minimum sanction
against families in which mothers do not cooperate in establishing paternity or collecting child support enforces government's determination that
a biological reproductive nexus constitutes a social family.

Absent addressing patriarchy all forms of violence become


inevitable.
INCITE, Women of Color Against Violence. July 2005. www.incite-national.org/
media/docs/2406_cmty-acc-poc.pdf
The system of patriarchy is the root of gender oppression. We all exist
within a system of oppression
which assumes rigid gender binaries of women and men, female and
male; which values males and the
male-identified and devalues female and the female-identified; which
assumes heterosexual normativity;
which delegates men/boys/male-identified to roles and positions which
have higher status and levels of
decision-making than women/girls/female-identified; which assume male
values as universal and given.
This system of patriarchy intersects with racism, classism,
homophobia/heterosexism, transphobia,
ableism, ageism, nativism (anti-immigrants) to oppress women of
color/queer people of color. Ultimately,
it oppresses us all. Despite our commitment to social justice and liberation,
we as activists, organizations
and movement are not immune.

Gender oppression is not just an act, its a state of mind and a way of
doing. The patterns of power and
control, acts of abuse and violence, and cultures and conditions tolerating,
condoning, encouraging and
perpetrating abuse and violence appear to follow certain patterns.

Only challenging the normative constructions of paternafare can attack racism,


sexism and heteronormativity at the core
Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
As I have demonstrated in this Article, Congress's proposed "return of the ring"-its revival

of the encouragement of marriage


as a cure for the social ills that are assumed to be the fault of racial minorities, specifically of Blacks-is
ineffective to address the systemic forces that keep disadvantaged families of colonized racial groups in
poverty. Indeed, the marriage cure proposal is nothing more than an extension of American colonialism that
labels families that do not fit the traditional white family model as deviant and attempts to make all
people into self-sufficient citizens who do not disturb the hierarchical race-based organization of
American society." 5 In the end, the promotion of marriage for the poor, specifically for poor Blacks, has
never been about helping Blacks to permanently avoid the cycle of poverty. Rather, it is a result of
decades of blaming outsiders of white American culture for their own poverty, which actually results from
pervasive racism, nationalism, and classism. 3 6 Marriage promotion is therefore a method for deflecting governmental
responsibility for providing help to the colonized poor. During the post-bellum period, the government, including the Freedmen's Bureau, knew
that the public possessed some duty to assist Blacks in transitioning from slavery to freedom through economic assistance and public aid. Yet, in
order to appease Whites, especially former slaveowners, policymakers manipulated former slaves' desire to prove their worthiness as free
members of society and enjoy the benefits of the marital contract by promoting marriage in a way that minimized public financial responsibility
for newly freed Blacks. In sum, the new right to marry was not granted to promote inclusion, but rather to shift the financial responsibility for
poor former slave women and children from the state and former slaveowners to black male workers. Today, similar motivations drive the
marriage promotion proposals in H.R. 240. Instead of devoting resources to effective tools for combating poverty, such as college education and
high-level vocational training, the government chooses to divert these resources to encouraging marriage. Poor

black women who fail


to marry or remain married are considered deviant and criticized for failing to conform to the
conservative white family model, and marriage is emphatically heralded as a cure for society's problems.
As the supporters of the marriage cure imply, the answer to poverty is not found in education, training,
and counseling, but in "normal" marriages. Plain and simple, welfare mothers, who are racialized as black,
must simply get married so that their inherent dependency may be privatized. It is a return to the ring-the
wedding ring-that will civilize them and stop the growing number of problems that stem from their
deviance. As this Article indicates, however, such colonizing behavior is damaging for everyone involved-the
colonizers and the colonized. For this reason, governments should recognize the unique needs of different groups and encourage
remedies for poverty that formally incorporate other forms of parenting in statutes to provide financial and social support to all families. As
feminist scholar bell hooks asserted, "[Othermothering] is revolutionary in this society because it takes place in opposition to the idea that
parents, especially mothers, should be the only childrearers .... It cannot happen.., if parents regard children as their 'property,' their
'possession.""'3 7 To expand

state recognition to include parenting partnerships other than the husband-wife


dyad would debunk the notion that mothers and children are men's property. Such broadened recognition
would also attack poverty, as well as racism, sexism, and heterosexism at their core .

Extensions

Topicality -- Surveillance
Routine attention to details of ones life for purposes of influencing behavior is
defined as surveillance
Office of the Privacy Commissioner 12 Surveillance Technologies and Children Report prepared
by the Research Group of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada October 2012
https://www.priv.gc.ca/information/research-recherche/2012/opc_201210_e.asp
In the words of David Lyon, surveillance is a key feature of contemporary life which is both so routine and taken-for-granted that it seems

Surveillance is
defined as focussed, systematic and routine attention to personal details for the purpose of influence,
management, protection or direction.2
unremarkable and yet simultaneously has such far reaching consequences that it demands social scientific scrutiny.1

Surveillance is defined as monitoring for the purpose of influencing behavior


Mack 14 Timothy C. Mack is president of the World Future Society and executive editor of World
Future Review, Privacy and the Surveillance Explosion Subject(s): Information Society Governance WFS
Home The Futurist 2014 Issues of The Futurist January-February 2014 (Vol. 48, No. 1) ,
http://www.wfs.org/futurist/january-february-2014-vol-48-no-1/privacy-and-surveillance-explosion
Surveillance encompasses the monitoring of behavior, movement, or other dynamic states (mostly involving
people) for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting . While most often used in crime and terrorism
prevention, surveillance is also used for such work as epidemiological oversight by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example.
Construction sites, warehouses, commercial office buildings, and parking lots also commonly have surveillance technology installed for the
protection of property.

The Federal Case Registry is a federal program of massive government surveillance


Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
The campaign escalated dramatically during the Clinton years, especially following PRWORA. In 1998, Clinton signed the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, which
enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support. In that same year, U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Donna


Shalala announced the Federal Case Registry , a massive system of government surveillance that aimed to include
16-19 million citizens, even those current in their payments. "Combined with the National Directory of New Hires ," Shalala said, "HHS now has the strongest child
support enforcement resource in the history of the program" (U.S. HHS 1998b). Clinton announced soon afterward yet another "new child support crackdown." "This
effort will include new investigative teams in five regions of the country to identify, analyze, and investigate cases [that is, parents[ for criminal prosecution, and an
eightfold increase in legal support personnel to help prosecute these cases" (U.S. HHS 1998a).

The federal system for forcing child support payments is an Orwellian surveillance
system
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html

Child support has come under increasing criticism in recent years for its heavy-handed enforcement methods that violate constitutional
protections. "The advocates of evermore-aggressive measures for collecting

child support," writes Bryce Christensen, "have moved


us a dangerous step closer to a police state and have violated the rights of innocent and often impoverished fathers" (2001, 63-64).
Attorney Jed Abraham describes the apparatus as "a veritable gulag, complete with sophisticated surveillance and
compliance capabilities such as computer-based tracing, license revocation, asset confiscation, and
incarceration. The face of this regime is decidedly Orwellian " (1999, 154-55).

The Federal government created a massive federal paternity surveillance system


Canadian DOJ 15
Phase 1 Report of Feasibility Study on New Hire Programs for Canada: New Hire Programs in the United
States, http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/fl-lf/child-enfant/newhi-nemp/p5.html
The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) required each state to develop a new hire
program for all employers. The act also established the National Directory of New Hires (also called the National Directory) to
receive data from each state's program. The PRWORA requires computerized state-wide procedures and requires child support agencies to
maintain a state registry of child support orders and a support payment clearinghouse to receive and disburse payments. The PRWORA

expanded the role of the Federal Parent Locator Service (FPLS) to include the National Directory and the
Federal Case Registry of all child support orders in the country. The Federal Case Registry contains an
abstract of information on all public assistance cases, as well as voluntary child support cases, from every
state. This registry makes it easier to find people who cross state lines and helps governments decide who has continuing jurisdiction. The data
in the registry are matched with the data in the National Directory and any matches are sent automatically to the appropriate states for processing
and enforcement. The

federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), in the Department of Health and
Human Services, is responsible for the programs . The National Directory includes federal and state new hires information,
federal and state quarterly wage reports, and state information about unemployment insurance claimants. State employment security agencies
(SESAs) supply the state wage and unemployment insurance reports; it is estimated that they will submit 140 million wage and 25 million
unemployment insurance records to the National Directory each quarter. Approximately

60 million new hire records will be


submitted to the National Directory every year. Other support enforcement components of the PRWORA legislation include
provisions to streamline paternity establishment; more uniform interstate collection laws; and uniform procedures for suspending professional,
occupational, recreational and drivers' licences when their holders fail to pay child support.

PRWORA is surveillance of sexuality


Puri 8 Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology a Simmons College, Encountering Nationalism p. 150-51
Depending on their social class and cultural context, women

can also be subject to surveillance by the state , especially


when they are outside the purview of respectable womanhood, for being sex workers, lesbians, unmarried, or
widows, for example. The state is often the vehicle for subjecting the perceived threat of female sexuality to existing social order through
legislative or social control. One of the most prominent concerns in the US in the 1990s was welfare or the Aid to Families with Dependent
Children. The AFDC was initially formulated to aid single, indigent women with children, and was thoroughly reformed in 1996. It was primarily
motivated by the specter of' sexual degeneracy of poor women of color, who were thought to be getting a "free ride" by having children and
becoming permanently dependent on the state. In the

preamble of the Act aimed at welfare reform, known as the


Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, it is stated: "1: marriage is the foundation
of a successful society: 2: marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children."'" While
middle-class and professional women can be encouraged to regulate their sexuality and childbearing within marriage, poor women are more
vulnerable to enforcement by state laws. Notwithstanding indications to the contrary. i.e. that women do not have "irresponsible sex" and bear

the specter of
sexual irresponsibility among poor women of color garnered widespread support for this Act. The point here is
not simply the regulation and surveillance of women's sexuality that has long existed in most cultural contexts and pre-modern
children as economic incentives, and that women are dependent on state aid not from choice but from lack of alternatives,

states. Rather, it is that this regulation and surveillance carries


national interests. and with the force of national culture and values.

the weight of the modern state acting on behalf of

Imposing standards of proper parenting in welfare is moral surveillance


Anderson 14 Emily Theiline Anderson MA in Anthropology Whitman College, MAKING GOOD
MOTHERS: STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE, POVERTY AND PRISON PROGRAMS FOR MOTHERS IN
THE UNITED STATES,
https://dspace.lasrworks.org/bitstream/handle/10349/1255/Anderson_ET_thesis.pdf?sequence=1
The mothering narrative acts as a tool of ordering American society into two categories: those who adhere to it, and
those who do not. In other words, everyday life is, among other things, a never-ending flow of moral surveillance . We all survey each
other to see if actions live up to the norms and expectations we carry in our heads (Gans 1995: 11). If it is determined that a person or population
does not act in accordance to the dominant narrative, then they are given the label of deviant. As Herber Gans explains in The War Against the
Poor, labels go beyond just stereotyping behavior; they project personal attributions and failures: As a result, welfare

recipients become

defective personalities or deficient moral types ; that they are also family members, churchgoers, or neighbors is immaterial.
Indeed, one of the purposes of labels is to strip labeled persons of their qualities. That a welfare recipient may be a fine mother becomes
irrelevant; the label assumes that she, like all others in her category, is a bad mother, and she is given no chance to prove otherwise (Gans 1995:
12).

AT Marriage good turns


Welfare reform has no quantitative effect on marriage or birth ratesit was a
dramatic failure
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
In the fall of 2006, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported that out-of-wedlock births had reached a record high (Hamilton,
Martin, and Ventura 2006). At about the same time, new Census Bureau figures, as interpreted by the New York Times, indicated that married
couples for the first time represent less than half the nation's households (Roberts 2006). Following

ten years of welfare reform


that was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing and encourage marriage and two-parent families, these
reports are perplexing news, indeed. Whatever the budgetary savings, welfare reform has failed from the standpoint of the
family. The figures "clearly show that the impact of welfare reform is now virtually zero," says Robert Rector of
the Heritage Foundation, "and we are going back to the way things were before welfare reform" (qtd. in Wetzstein 2006). It has been well known
since at least the Moynihan report in 1965 that welfare serves as a disincentive to marriage and an incentive to divorce and unwed childbearing.
Yet no explanation has been forthcoming for why cutting back on welfare has failed to reverse the trend. In fact, this failure raises far-reaching
questions about our entire approach to what has become known as "family policy." As implemented thus far, welfare reform is unlikely to make a
large difference and remains a step behind the problem. The continued rise in out-of-wedlock births no longer proceeds only from low-income
teenagers. Indeed, in terms of" this target population, welfare reform does appear to have had some impact. The NCHS reports that the birth rate
among girls ages ten to seventeen dropped in 2005 to the lowest level on record. Births to unwed women in their late twenties, thirties, and
forties, however, have risen and account for the now-record numbers. Inspired perhaps by books such as Rosanna Hertz's Single by Chance,
Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family (2006) and Peggy
Drexler's Raising Boys Without Men (2005), or at least the subject of these books, these women are joining their low-income counterparts in
moving beyond divorce to dispense with marriage altogether. Yet the children of divorce still almost double the 1.5 million out-of-wedlock births
annually in the continued growth of single-parent homes. Given 4.1 million total births annually, this problem now touches virtually every family
in America.

Turn, Child support enforcement actually destroys families


Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
The federal funding created or exacerbated a number of perverse incentives and perhaps unintended
consequences: to turn as many parents as possible into payers; to separate as many children as possible from their parents and otherwise
encourage the creation of single-parent homes; to make payment levels as onerous as possible; to extract every dollar from
every payer available; and even to impose payment obligations on citizens who are not parents. Jo Michelle Beld, a consultant to the Minnesota
child-support enforcement agency, has described how the

livelihoods of enforcement officials depend on broken homes,


support orders,
in combination with other child support enforcement policies, have a negative effect on contact between non-custodial
parents and their children" (2003, 715).
how these same officials set the child-support levels they collect and tend to ratchet them ever higher, and how "high child

Turn, Child support pursuit is counterproductive and reduces marriage


Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
The increased guidelines in turn have led to "windfalls to the custodial parents" (Christensen 2001, 66), most of whom are middle-class and
upper-middle-class divorcing women. This

situation generates an incentive to create more fatherless children,


through either divorce or unwed childbearing. Robert Willis (2004) calculates that only between one-fifth and one-third of childsupport payments are actually spent on the children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent. Moreover, support levels that greatly exceed the
cost of rearing children create "an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother" (42). "This recent entitlement," write economist Robert
McNeely and legal scholar Cynthia McNeely, "has

led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to

divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving of a child" (2004, 170). Another
economic study also concludes that child support serves as "an unintended economic incentive for middle-class
women to seek divorce." "As long as the middle-income father works at a level comparable to that before [during?] the marriage," write
Kimberly Folse and Hugo Varela-Alvarez, who base their study on child support at an atypically low percentage of fathers' income (17 percent),
"divorce can be attractive, or at least economically rewarding for her" (2002, 283). This conclusion simply extends well-established findings that
increased welfare payments result in increased divorce (Gallaway and Vedder 1986; Hoffman and Duncan 1995). In this case, however, a lawenforcement component is added, which becomes effectively a system of federal divorce enforcement. "Enforcement... is the critical variable in
the choice dilemma because it represents a greater surety in the assessment of the probability of attaining rewards," write Folse and VarelaAlvarez. "Strong

enforcement, while it is an agreed upon societal goal to protect children, may, in fact, lead to class-based micro-level

decisions that lead to the unintended consequence of increasing the likelihood of divorce" (2002, 274, 284). In other
words, a mother can simply escape the uncertainties, vicissitudes, and compromises inherent to life shared with a working husband by divorcing,
whereupon the police function as a private collection agency who will force him, at gunpoint if necessary, to pay her the family income that she
alone then controls.

The marital cure is an ineffective method for addressing poverty


Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
Much like marriage could not resolve the dire economic situation of newly emancipated Blacks during the
post-bellum period, it will not cure the dependency of the women and children who find themselves on
welfare today. Without focusing attention on the true underlying problems of poverty in the United States,
in particular the way in which heterosexism, sexism, racism, and classism work to both feminize and
racialize poverty, marriage or any other solutions proposed to address poverty cannot effectively work to
remedy the problem. If federal and state governments truly want to assist poor women and children on
welfare, then they will not only increase aid to fund educational, training, and childcare programs that
will enable poor women and children to move off the welfare rolls permanently, but will also enact
legislation to encompass and support a broad range of family forms that can give the poor agency in
determining how to structure private support to help in escaping from poverty. This Part details and
explains the limitations of the marriage cure as a means of reducing poverty and improving the lives of
poor families. Part III.A critiques the marriage cure to poverty, analyzing the many ways in which
PRWORA, H.R. 240, and other marriage promotion laws fail to address the real reasons people are
unable to permanently escape poverty. Part III.B details practical alternatives to the marriage cure that
will allow poor individuals to join together in a variety of cooperative relationships in order to
successfully provide for themselves and their children and gradually become self-sufficient. A. The
Limits of the Marriage Cure The limits of the marriage cure cannot be overstated. The proposed marital

solution fails not only poor women and children but also poor men. To begin, it falls short of providing
any remedy that will lift welfare mothers and their children out of poverty forever by diverting resources
that could be spent on education and training-factors which have proven to assist people in escaping
poverty2 34 -to programs on marriage education and counseling. Second, it not only disregards the role
that previous welfare legislation played in destroying and tearing apart families due to regulations such as
"man-in-the-house" rules, but also neglects the fact that one-half of the two-parent solution-poor men, in
particular poor black men-often find themselves in equally disadvantaged economic positions as their
counterparts, with alarming unemployment and incarceration rates. Finally, it fails the entire family by
limiting poor people, especially poor black and Latino families, to one model of the American family that
does not incorporate the generational links, strengths, and practices, such as othermothering,235 that are
often utilized within black and Latino communities. At a basic level, the marriage cure to welfare fails
because it ignores many significant realities that any comprehensive remedy for poverty must address.

The marriage cure ignores the economic realities facing men


Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
Second, the proposed marriage cure fails to account for the desperate economic condition of the men who
are critical to its success. 24 6 The pool of available and marriageable men for black women--especially
black welfare mothers-has been severely diminished by the mass incarceration of black men.247 Nearly
half of all male prison inmates are black men, even though Blacks constitute less than fifteen percent of
the overall population.2 49 As Professor Dorothy Roberts recently stated, "On any given day, nearly onethird of black men in their twenties are under the supervision of the criminal justice system-either behind
bars, on probation, or on parole."25 Moreover, as Professor William Julius Wilson's book, When Work
Disappears, makes clear, it is unreasonable to think that placing economic responsibility for poor women
and children on men will cure poverty given current realities; black men face substantial barriers to
finding jobs because of the loss of jobs in poor inner city neighborhoods due to technological changes and
the disappearance of many urban manufacturing jobs."' For example, Professor Wilson's study of innercity job availability in fifteen black communities in Chicago found that "only 37 percent of all the adults
were gainfully employed in a typical week in 1990." 252 The marriage cure largely ignores important
obstacles to the economic success of the husband-wife dyad, such as the devastating effects of the
disappearance of well-paying industrial jobs once held by men of color-especially black men-in the inner
city. 53

Normative marriage model is racist


Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
The marriage cure considers any family structure outside of the husband-wife model to be deviant and
dangerous2 69 and punishes such families accordingly. 70 Such a limited conception of proper familial relationships fails to

acknowledge expanding definitions of healthy families.2 '

Strict limits on acceptable notions of family have a particularly


devastating effect on black and Latino communities for a variety of reasons . Besides the fact that incarceration and
pervasive joblessness have narrowed the pool of marriageable black and Latino men,272 for many Blacks and Latinos "family"
extends beyond the traditional nuclear-family model of mother, father, and children .27 3 Indeed, it is estimated
that over 15% of black children have been informally adopted by relatives in their extended families 2 74 -by people who are "othermothers." As
Professor Patricia Hill Collins explained in Black Feminist Thought, "[O]thermothers-women who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering
responsibilities traditionally have been central to the institution of Black motherhood."27' 5 Collins explained that relationships between women
in the black community who divide caretaking responsibilities among extended family members and even entire neighborhoods are essential to
ensuring that black children receive proper care.276 Professors Margaret Brinig and Steven Nock confirmed the highly positive effects of kinship
care 77 or other mothering in the black community in a comparative study of children in foster homes, kinship care arrangements, and
transracially adoptive homes.278 Professors Brinig and Nock measured and compared depression, morbidity, alcohol and substance abuse, and
juvenile dependency in their adopted subjects, and discovered that unlike white children, for whom adoption was far superior to kinship care,
kinship placements for black children functioned as well as parental homes.279

AT Child Support good for kids


Turn, the child support enforcement provisions are counterproductive
Cammett 11 Ann Cammett, Associate Professor of Law, Co-Director, Family Justice Clinic, William S.
Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Deadbeats, Deadbrokes, and Prisoners, Spring,
2011 Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy 18 Geo. J. Poverty Law & Pol'y 127
Historically, child

support policy has targeted absent parents with aggressive enforcement measures. Such an approach
is based on an economic resource model that is increasingly irrelevant, even counterproductive , for many lowincome families. Specifically, modem day mass incarceration has radically skewed the paradigm on which the child support system is based,
removing millions of parents from the formal economy entirely, diminishing their income opportunities after release, and rendering them
ineffective economic actors. Such

a flawed policy approach creates unintended consequences for the children of


these parents by compromising a core non-monetary goal of child support system--parent-child
engagement--as enforcement measures serve to alienate parents from the formal economy after reentry
and drive them underground and away from their families.

AT States do the surveilling


The State programs are caused by Federal policy
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
This massive growth of law-enforcement machinery and reach was federally driven . In 1984, the Child
Support Enforcement amendment to the Social Security Act required states to adopt advisory child-support
guidelines. The legislation was promoted by OCSE itself and by private collection companies--again, less to help children than to save the
government money under the theory that the system would help to get single-mother families off welfare by making fathers pay more. No
statistical data were presented then (or have been since) to indicate that the legislation would have the desired effect (Seidenberg 1997, 107-8).
Given that most low-income, single-mother families did not and still do not have valid child-support orders, that most unpaid child support is
owing to unemployment, and that "most non-custodial parents of AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] children do not earn enough
to pay as much child support as their children are already receiving in AFDC benefits," higher support guidelines could not and cannot help these
children (Garfinkel and McLanahan 1986, 24-25). With no explanation or clear constitutional authority, guidelines

and criminalenforcement machinery conceived and created to help the minority of children in poverty were then extended, under
pressure from OCSE and other interests, to all child-support orders, even the majority not receiving welfare, by the Family Support Act
of 1988. The law also made guidelines mandatory.

State programs exist because of federal requirements and the federal government
surveils the states to assure compliance
Smith 7
Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell University, Welfare Reform and Sexual
Regulation,
p. 119-20
The paternafare system was enhanced by the PR [Personal Responsibility Act}. Under this law, the states
must continue to make cooperation with paternity identification and child support enforcement a
compulsory condition of eligibility for poverty assistance for needy single mothers . The state TANF programs
must also continue to require these women to assign their child support rights over to the state. Even further, the PRA orders the states
to sanction clients who do not make a good-faith effort to meet their paternafare obligations and expands the
administrative powers of the IV-D agency. Under the PRA, the state's exposure to judicial review is reduced. For the first time, the PRA combines
state incentives -bonuses are offered to the states that have good records of welfare-case-related child support payment collection -with state
sanctions. Any state that fails to enforce the paternity identification and child support enforcement cooperation requirement will lose up to 5
percent of its total block grant.2 The paternafare compliance rates are quite impressive. Based on my own reading of the TANF laws and
regulations for the fifty states, it appears that all of the paternafare measures that are specified in the federal law have in fact been incorporated in
every single state's TANF program.3 The PRA also marks a somewhat ambiguous development. Whereas previous federal law and regulations
had required the states to provide a good-cause exemption, the PRA gives the states the freedom to choose whether they will have such an
exemption in their TANF programs. At the same time, the optional exemption in the PRA represents an advance since the law makes specific
reference to domestic violence. Under the PRA, the state must shuttle the poor single mother, by virtue of her marital status alone, through the
most demanding aspects of the paternafare process. A poor married woman admitted into the TANF program does not have to undergo the same

The PRA imposes close federal


oversight where the state's paternity identification and child support enforcement efforts are
concerned. Each state must achieve a 90 percent success rate in establishing the paternity of the

treatment because the state usually considers her legal husband as the father of her children.4

children on its TANF case load. 5 The single mother must sign a statement establishing the paternity of each child in her household.
To be sure, some clients may have evaded this requirement in the past by naming a deceased male or by making up an entirely fictitious person.
The PRA imposes a demanding standard where cooperation is concerned; it is much more difficult now for the single mother to
dodge the system. In order to remain in compliance with the federal rules, the state must press the single
mother to name the father of the child. Her efforts are deemed acceptable only if and when child support
arrangements are successfully put into place . Wherever these arrangements are not imposed within a reasonable period of time,
the state must punish her: the state must either decrease her benefits or expel her from the program. Congress acted again in I998 to enhance the
child support requirements; it passed the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act.6 This law made it a felony for any payer to cross state lines with the
intent of evading a child support obligation and made it a crime for any payer to willfully fail to support a child residing in a different state.7

The surveillance is a federal program which forces the states to act as federal agents
The states are forced to collect data on behalf of the federal government
Morgan 99 Laura W. Morgan is a senior attorney for family law at the National Legal Research Group
THE FEDERALIZATION OF FAMILY LAW: ARTICLE The Federalization of Child Support A Shift in
the Ruling Paradigm: Child Support as Outside the Contours of "Family Law", Journal of the American
Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers 1999 16 J. Am. Acad. Matrimonial Law. 195 Lexis Nexis
Title III of the PRWORA details a mandatory child support collection structure that must be established
and operated if a state is to remain eligible for the full Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)
grant. PRWORA requires states to enact legislation or regulations to: (1) expand the scope of existing
in-hospital paternity establishment programs and to make them uniform; (2) streamline the process for the
establishment of paternity; (3) provide authority to the child support enforcement agency to order genetic
testing without the necessity of obtaining an order from any judicial or administrative tribunal; (4) create
a state registry of all cases in which services for collection are provided by the state IV-D agency, which
must include the amount of the obligation, a record of payments collected, the amount of arrears, if any,
the distribution of collections, and identifying information on the parties and children; (5) coordinate the
state registry with the Federal Case Registry, Federal Parent Locator Service, Medicaid agencies, and
Interstate Information; (6) create a Directory of New Hires that will report to the Federal Parent Locator
Service for matching; (7) match new hires against Federal Case Registry of Child Support Orders; (8)
require employers to send withholdings to the state disbursement unit within seven days after payday; (9)
require the Social Security number of any applicant for a commercial driver's license, occupational
license, professional license, or marriage license, and in any paternity or child support action; (10) adopt
the Uniform Interstate Family Support Act (UIFSA) by January 1, 1998; (11) use standard forms for
interstate enforcement of child support by October 1, 1996; (12) create expedited procedures without
court [*211] order for obtaining financial records by subpoena, imposing penalties for failure to respond
to subpoena requests, requiring responses to other state requests for information, providing access to
public records, ordering income withholding, and securing assets by intercept from workers'
compensation benefits, judgments, settlements, and lotteries; (13) adopt the Uniform Fraudulent
Conveyance Act of 1981, or other similar act that creates a prima facie case of fraud for transfers of
property to avoid support payment where a support obligation is owed; (14) establish liens against real
estate and personal property as a matter of law for overdue support owed by a parent who resides or owns
property in the state, and give full faith and credit to liens arising in sister states where such liens are
properly recorded or served in accordance with state law; (14) withhold, suspend, or restrict drivers'
licenses, professional and occupational licenses, and recreational licenses of individuals who owe child
support.

PRWORA did not devolve authority to statesIt imposed federal requirements on


the states
Sparke 5 Matthew Sparke, Professor of Geography and International Studies Univ of Washington, In
the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-state p. 225
The devolution of welfare policy making to the states had been widely heralded by policy makers as part of the
hegemonic articulation of the reform effort with national American traditions of democratic freedom, diversity, and choice. "Revocable consent,"

in fact PRWORA was a remarkably stringent act in


terms of the way it allowed states to experiment only with variations in degrees of welfare restriction ." That
it should nevertheless be noted, was not on offer for even states, and

said, Gingrich and the other house Republicans, along with Senate majority leader Robert Dole, repeatedly trumpeted the devolution in policy
making as part of their civic commitment to states' rights, and the president, an ex-governor who maintained strong federalist commitments from
his Arkansas background, argued that the states were closest to the problems of welfare and so were best suited to tailoring appropriate local
responses (itself an argument that did conservative hegemonic work rearticulating welfare with local needs as opposed to federal rights)?' The
states, in this discourse, were portrayed as laboratories of democracy and diversity; they were to become sites of civic experimentation that would
serve the larger national good. The problems with this hegemonic discourse concern both the dynamics it has set in motion between states and the
ways in which states themselves have actually responded to their newfound ability to experiment with types of welfare restriction. In terms of
interstate relations, like the push for provincial rights in Canada, states' rights rhetoric is clearly allied with a neoliberal vision of making states
compete in a market-mediated race toward governmental cutbacks. As Sanford Schram explains in an excellent analysis of welfare politics, this
neoliberal common sense informed the hegemonic idea that allowing states to experiment would successfully punish more generous states by
turning them into so-called welfare magnets." In practice, Schram shows, there is little evidence that welfare recipients do actually migrate to less
punishing regimes, but among state legislators the discourse that says they do has remained hegemonic and this in turn has set the scene for a real
race to the bottom: a bottom in this case of increasingly harsh welfare rollbacks as policy makers have sought to avoid allowing their own states
to become seen as potential "welfare magnets."73 Increasing numbers of restrictions have developed in states across the country, and now that the
U.S. Supreme Court has outlawed discriminatory lower benefits to interstate migrants, Schram suggests that the future promises only more cycles
of competitive cutbacks."

PROWARA did not devolve welfare to the StatesIt required states to participate
in a program of federal surveillance of the poor
Soss et al 11 JOE S0 SS is the Cowles Professor for the Study of Public Service in the Hubert H.
Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. RICHARD C. FORDING is professor
and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Alabama. SANFORD F. SC H RAM
teaches in the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research at Bryn Mawr College., Disciplining
the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race p. 121-2
PRWORA restructured two political relationships at the heart of poverty governance: the relationship between federal and state authorities
and the relationship between these authorities and low-income citizens. In both cases, it shifted governance toward a disciplinary
model that uses incentives, penalties, and structural arrangements to shape the "free choices" of relevant
actors. The disciplinary turn was clearly visible in the case of state-citizen relations. The TANF program was explicitly designed to reform the
choices of the "dependent poor," who would now be addressed as deficient citizens and market actors. Welfare recipients would be
disciplined through "contractual" obligations, incentives, tutelary efforts, and penalties for
noncompliance. What fewer observers noted was that PRWORA restructured federal-state relations in
ways that drew on this same logic. Champions of welfare reform de- scribed it as a "devolution revolution" that would liberate
creative state officials from oppressive federal rules. But PRWORA did more than transfer authority from one level of government to another;
it restructured the relationship be- tween levels of government. Under the new law, the states were forced to make policy
choices in new areas, and their decisions were structured, incentivized, and constrained by new federal
rules and performance benchmarks. The flurry of state action after 1996 reflected the intersection of these dimensions of change. On
one side, PRWORA directed state authorities to shift the terms of their relationships with low-income
citizens. The limited ethos of rights and opportunities that guided AFDC provision after the 1960s was supplanted by a new focus on enforcing
obligations and rectifying behavior. The citizen's semi-entitlement to aid, backed by procedural protections, was abolished. Opportunities for job
training, created eight years earlier under the JOBS program, met the same fate--as did the option of using public aid to support one's pursuit of
higher education (Shaw et al. 2006). PRWORA included no significant provisions to create jobs or to promote the kinds of wages and work g

conditions needed by low-income mothers (Collins and Mayer 2010). Instead, the

new law identified work and marriage as the


"foundation of a successful society" and directed states to focus on the twin themes of personal
transformation and civic obligation. In designing TANF programs, state officials would have to decide how best to enforce work
requirements and turn recipients into "job-ready" applicants for employers. They would have to create sanctions for noncompliance and devise
schedules for their imposition and se- verity. Federal lawmakers encouraged the states to experiment with new behavior modification classes and
behavioral conditions for eligibility. Federal

performance reviews forced the states to institute new approaches to


monitoring and documenting client behavior, leading some states to institute newly permitted procedures such as finger printing
and drug testing. As this description suggests, federal welfare reform did not seek to free the states; it sought to move
them toward a more disciplinary approach to governance . PRWORA established a new "devolution settlement" that
constrained, structured, and incentivized state choices along specific dimensions (Peck 2002). The earlier settlement established in the 1960s gave
states limited freedom within a rule system designed to block the most exclusionary and invasive administrative strategies. In this sense, welfare
rights victories placed federal rules in tension with the long-standing tendency for state and local authorities to pursue behavioral control (Lowi
1998). PRWORA reversed

this polarity. It placed the weight of national government behind a disciplinary


agenda and created a rule system designed to constrain liberal-minded state officials who might deviate from
the new-paternalist script. Thus, PRWORA barred the states from using their federal TANF funds to provide
aid to recent noncitizen immigrants, people convicted of narcotics offenses under federal law, and teen
mothers who did not live with their parents. It discouraged states from extending aid to new categories of recipients, while
allowing them to deny aid to unwed mothers under the age of eighteen and to children born during a spell of welfare receipt. States could
shorten but not lengthen the sixty-month federal limit on lifetime welfare participation; they could shorten but not lengthen the
twenty-four-month federal timeline for re- quiring work participation .

AT Devolution C-plan

Federal government action critical to reducing racism


Piven 10 Francis Piven, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City
University of New York, Why Welfare ls Racist, In Race and The Politics of Welfare Reform p. 325
The conclusion that emerges from these different approaches to an examination of American welfare is harsh but indisputable. Welfare

policy and practice in the United States is infused with racial biases. Still , that said, there are historical differences that
bear both on our understanding of the racism of the new welfare system, and on our ability to think about the contours of genuine reform. There
are good empirical grounds for thinking that American welfare is less racist when the role of the federal
government enlarges, and when the system is more tightly bound by law and regulation. There are several
reasons. One is simply that state and local governments find redistributional policies politically difficult. They are especially susceptible to threats
from business and affluent residents to move out of the jurisdiction if taxes are raised to pay for programs that benefit those less well off. As a
consequence, employer groups in particular have great influence on subnational governments, and they use that influence to shift the state and
local tax burden to the working and mid- dle class who cannot easily threaten to move. Not surprisingly, in a regressive tax system, expenditures
that are seen as benefiting the minority poor are more likely to provoke popular resentment. Another reason that federal

policies are at

least potentially more benign to minorities was suggested by Grant McConnell (I966) many years ago: "As the most important
and influential local interests gain power by being placed in a small sphere, the least inuential lose power" (105). Moreover, "The informal
structure of the small community will usually be able to suppress a challenge before it becomes overt (107). Finally, because devolution

of
responsibility for welfare to subna- tional governments produces a myriad of particularistic welfare
systems, it reduces the power of subordinate minorities to monitor and enforce such rights as they have,
thus smoothing the way for more discretionary and arbitrary patterns of welfare administration . Perhaps it is
needless to add that minorities have not fared well in American history under local and discretionary rule.

State devolution is itself endorsing racism


Sparke 5 Matthew Sparke, Professor of Geography and International Studies Univ of Washington, In
the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-state p. 226
Not surprisingly perhaps given the historic associations between white supremacy and states' rights
discourse in the United States, the freedom states have acquired to experiment with welfare policy under
PRWORA has also had systemically racist as well as neo- liberal effects." At the state level in the United
States, policy making is generally less transparent to the national media and less likely to receive the
sustained attention of national civil rights organizations . Amid such democratic deficits the so-called laboratories
of democracy have mediated between species and ethnos in such a way as to produce markedly nonpostethnic results.

State devolution increases racism


Neubeck & Casenave 12 Kenneth J. Neubeck is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, Noel
A. Cazenave is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor RaceBlind Pretensions

p. 212

The states' rights approach to welfare policy that was institutionalized by the Personal Responsibility and
Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 has done more than allow welfare racism to persist. It has

helped welfare racism to increase. The numerous and varied expressions of welfare racism we have presented in this chapter should
certainly make clear that ignoring race and racism in analyses of welfare reform proposals and legislation is one way of ignoring their racial
consequences.

AT: Spending
Federal child support surveillance does not save moneyIt costs far more money
than it collects
Baskerville 8 Stephen Baskerville is Ph.D. in Government, London School of Economics & Political
Science, Professor of Political Science at Patrick Henry College Pub Date: 01/01/2008 Independent
Review Wntr, 2008 Source Volume: 12 Source Issue: 3,
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Independent-Review/172775627.html
Child Support Enforcement amendment to the Social Security Act
was promoted by OCSE itself and by private collection companies--again, less to help children than to
save the government money under the theory that the system would help to get single-mother families off welfare by making fathers pay more. No
statistical data were presented then (or have been since) to indicate that the legislation would have the desired effect
This massive growth of law-enforcement machinery and reach was federally driven. In 1984, the
required states to adopt advisory child-support guidelines. The legislation

(Seidenberg 1997, 107-8). Given that most low-income, single-mother families did not and still do not have valid child-support orders, that most unpaid child support is owing to unemployment,
and that "most non-custodial parents of AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] children do not earn enough to pay as much child support as their children are already receiving in
AFDC benefits," higher support guidelines could not and cannot help these children (Garfinkel and McLanahan 1986, 24-25). With no explanation or clear constitutional authority, guidelines and
criminal-enforcement machinery conceived and created to help the minority of children in poverty were then extended, under pressure from OCSE and other interests, to all child-support orders,
even the majority not receiving welfare, by the Family Support Act of 1988. The law also made guidelines mandatory. By one estimate, the new guidelines more than doubled the size of awards
(Comanor 2004, 5). All this legal fanfare dramatically enlarged the program and continues to do so by bringing in millions of middle-class cases, most of which result from divorce, but for which
the system was never designed. As a result, "the number of dollars passing through the government collection system exploded" (Comanor 2004, 8). Nonwelfare cases now dwarf welfare cases.
Welfare cases, consisting for the most part of unmarried parents, account for only 17 percent of all cases, and the proportion is shrinking. The remaining 83 percent of nonwelfare cases consist
largely of previously married fathers who are usually divorced involuntarily. Nonwelfare cases currently account for 92 percent of the monies collected (U.S. HHS 2003, figs. 1 and 2).

Despite this growth in collections--and contrary to what was promised when the program was created--the cost to taxpayers increased
sharply. Promoted as a program that would reduce government spending, federal child-support
enforcement has in fact incurred a continuously increasing deficit . "The overall financial impact of the
child support program on taxpayers is negative," the House Ways and Means Committee reports: federal taxpayers lost $2.7 billion in 2002 (U.S. House
2004, 8-69 and table 8-5).

AT: Neoliberalism/cap k
The discursive construction of deadbeat dads is neoliberal and critical to capitalism
Cassiman 8 Shawn A. Cassiman* Assistant Professor Department of Sociology, University of Dayton,
Resisting the Neo-liberal Poverty Discourse:On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and WelfareQueens
http://www.academia.edu/213123/Resisting_the_Neoliberal_Poverty_Discourse_On_Constructing_Deadbeat_Dads_and_Welfare_Queens
Discourse and power or who dominates the discourse? While we might argue how long the discourse has been dominated by liberal or neo-liberal

The neo-liberal discourse


has profoundly shaped (or explained the shape of) social welfare policy and continues to do so. For instance, if poor
mothers are constructed as bad mothers, policy designed to prevent bad parents from having children
and protect children from potentially bad parents, might include forced sterilization or child remova l or
family caps, and has at different points in our history (Swift 1995). Furthermore, if poor mothers are discursively constructed as
unfit mothers, then policy also reflects this sort of conceptualization by urging mothers to work , as their care
ideologists, there is surely little room for arguing the neo-liberal domination of the contemporary discourse.

work is continually devalued. At the same time, poor single mothers are being forced into a labor market that also devalues their labor. In this
way, welfare recipients find themselves in a double bind (Schram2006) that may prove particularly damaging to poor women with children.
Deadbeat

Dads are jailed and ridiculed for their refusal or inability to support their children. The
devolution of responsibility from the federal government, to the states and finally to individuals, is
indicative of neo-liberal policy more concerned with providing an endless supply of cheap labor to
corporations than with the well-being of people. The division between the rich and everyone else in the
United States, at historic levels not seen since the days of unfettered Capitalism of the Robber Barons,
demonstrates that our social policy prioritizes a few select people over the majority. That we as a society
are not more concerned or more involved is testament to the power of the poverty discourse .

The SQ welfare reform is rooted in neoliberalism


McChesney 99 [Robert-is an American professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign as the Gutgsell Endowed
Professor in the Department of Communication, 4/1/99, Noam Chomsky and the Struggle Against Neoliberalism,
http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/19990401.htm, date accessed: 7/10/15]Kruger

Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time - it refers to the policies and
processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of
social life in order to maximize their personal profit. Associated initially with Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism has for the
past two decades been the dominant global political economic trend adopted by political parties of the
center, much of the traditional left, and the right. These parties and the policies they enact represent the immediate interests of extremely wealthy
investors and less than one thousand large corporations. Aside from some academics and members of the business community, the term neoliberalism is largely unknown and unused by the public

neoliberal initiatives are characterized as free market policies that


encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial
initiative, and undermine the dead hand of the incompetent, bureaucratic, and parasitic government,
which can never do good (even when well intentioned, which it rarely is ). A generation of corporate-financed public relations efforts
has given these terms and ideas a near-sacred aura. As a result, these phrases and the claims they imply rarely require empirical defense, and are invoked to rationalize
anything from lowering taxes on the wealthy and scrapping environmental regulations to dismantling
public education and social welfare programs. Indeed, any activity that might interfere with corporate domination of society is automatically suspect
because it would impede the workings of the free market, which is advanced as the only rational, fair, and democratic allocator of goods and services. At their most eloquent,
at large, especially in the United States. There, to the contrary,

proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else
a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few.

AT: State Spending

There disad instrumentalizes the poorThe surveillance treats the poor as a means
to the end of helping state budgetsIt treats people as a means
Smith 10 Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell University, Should Liberal
Feminists Support Paternafare and Welfare Reform? A Capabilities-Oriented Analysis, Politics &
Gender / Volume 6 / Issue 02 / June 2010, pp 247-269
Advocates for the paternafare system, such as Secretary of State Clinton (Clinton 2003, 367), have advanced several plausible justifications for
the policy. First, they point to the fact that support payments do improve the conditions of some TANF households every year. In 2002, the states
collected about $10 billion in support payments related to current or former TANF paternafare cases (Turetsky 2003, 5). The state establishes a
reimbursement figure for each case; this amount is equivalent to the value of the cash benefits that the TANF participant receives. The state
typically seizes the payer's entire support payment until the reimbursement level is met. At most, it passes through a token amount of $50 to the
TANF recipient herself. After the payer meets the reimbursement level, however, the state is supposed to direct his entire support payment
directly to the custodial mother.10 Given the fact that a small fraction of the payers do cooperate and do have an adequate income-earning
capacity that allows them to meet their support burden in full (Turetsky 2007), a limited and yet significant number of TANF households benefit
substantially from the system. About 36% of the households below the poverty line that are headed by single mothers and include dependent
children received child support from an absent parent in 2001. For these families, child support payments made up, on average, about 30% of the
total household income (Sorenson 2003). Paternafare supporters also argue that the policy has positive effects even where the payer cannot meet
his payment schedule. They contend that paternafare properly shifts the burden of supporting the low-income single mother and her children to
the absent marital/biological father. The policy teaches both the custodial mother and the absent father that society frowns upon irresponsible
reproduction: the conception, birth, and rearing of children within households that do not possess an adequate income-earning potential. They
believe that paternafare properly underlines the importance of sexual restraint or contraception among the heterosexual couples who are destined
to live out their entire lives at the bottom rungs of the income ladder. The supporters claim that paternafare rightly ensures that the
marital/biological fathers will pay for the upkeep of their children. Paternafare thereby corrects the gendered deficit with respect to caregiving.
More generally, paternafare promotes the idea that every household should turn to society as a whole for support only in the wake of an
unforeseen accident, a natural disaster, or an unavoidable condition that interferes with the individual's ability to work. For virtually everyone
else, the principles of self-sufficiency and the work ethic require us to withhold aid such that the poor will be spurred to rely upon their own
wage-earning efforts. From Nussbaum's perspective, however, these arguments are seriously flawed. She would only endorse restrictive eligibility
conditions for a poverty assistance program if they did not violate the entitlements specified under each of the 10 capabilities. In my view, an
undue burden test that is crafted with reference to Nussbaum's capabilities theory, and designed to determine the permissibility of an eligibility
rule for a subsistence income or housing program, would have four prongs. First, the

poverty assistance program must treat the


most vulnerable individual as an end ; she cannot be treated solely as an instrument for the pursuit of
someone else's interests. Second, the program cannot prioritize family well-being over individual rights. Policies that deliver increased
income for the family as a whole but encroach upon the rights of individual family members would not be acceptable (Nussbaum 2000, 24647).
Third, the principle of nonfungibility necessitates the achievement of the threshold level of entitlement and protection for the individual in each of
the 10 capabilities; the state is not allowed to press the recipient to accept trade-offs. Fourth, the program must uphold the threshold rights of each
and every individual, without discrimination against the members of any particular social group. Regarding the first prong, p aternafare

treats the single mother on welfare solely as an instrument, without also treating her as an end in herself.
She is, in effect, being coerced by her desperate economic circumstances into serving as the state's proxy
tax collector. Because the TANF recipient assigns the support payments over to the state until the reimbursement level is met, the state
regards paternafare exclusively from the perspective of its fiscal interests. The state's primary objective is to seize the support payments to pay
itself back for her TANF cash benefits, and to set up an enduring legal support obligation between the payer and the custodial mother that makes
her ineligible for means-tested poverty assistance. The state is drawing upon its own family law code with respect to the paternity of marital and
nonmarital children in targeting the absent father, but it lacks the adequate administrative mechanisms to identify the absent payer on its own
(Smith 2007, 2009). This is especially true where the absent father has no marital tie to the custodial mother and merely has a biological
relationship with her children. Thus, the low-income single mother's paternafare cooperation is indispensable to the advance of the state's fiscal
interests. Even if the state's claim against the absent father were morally defensible, the only acceptable way for the state to collect would be to
pursue him as a separate matter, without reference to the TANF recipient's eligibility. The

state should not be allowed to coerce


the low-income single mother to serve as its informant in order to collect what is essentially an absent
father tax.

Federal paternafare law treats the poor as means not ends


Smith 10 Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell University, Should Liberal
Feminists Support Paternafare and Welfare Reform? A Capabilities-Oriented Analysis, Politics &
Gender / Volume 6 / Issue 02 / June 2010, pp 247-269
The paternafare law, therefore, fails all four prongs of the capabilities-oriented undue burden test. While a few low-income families are enjoying
increased incomes under the system, paternafare

treats the mother on welfare as an instrument, rather than an end;


prioritizes the good of the family over the rights of the individual; forces family members to give up
fundamental rights in order to gain access to poverty benefits; and treats low-income single mothers in a
discriminatory fashion. These violations cannot be cured by superficial changes to implementation practices on the ground; they
are integral to the very structure of federal and state welfare law.15

Patriarchy links
Paternafare risks rolling back all autonomy for women
Mink 2 Gwendolyn Mink is a professor of women's studies at Smith College, From Welfare to Wedlock: Marriage Promotion and Poor
Mothers' Inequality, The Good Society 11.3 (2002) 68-73, https://muse-jhuedu.www2.lib.ku.edu/journals/good_society/v011/11.3mink.html#authbio Pure and simple, what the family formation agenda

is about is
engineering the structure of poor mothers' families. It's about Big Brother dictating what families should look like, and about punishing
families that don't look "right" by privatizing their poverty. This threatens personal, cultural, and associational
freedoms, not to mention the economic well-being of families that deviate from the prescriptive norm. The rights won
by women since the 1960s are at risk here. George Bush wants to "improve fathers' ability to manage family business affairs."
Will Marshall and Daniel Lichter want to prevent unmarried women from having babies. Evan Bayh wants to teach men "not to bring children
into the world" until they can pay for them. One way or another, perpetrators of marriage promotion designate marital fathers the kingpins of
legitimate family life. Think for a minute what this will do to women's reproductive rights . These rightsespecially the
right to make choices about abortionare grounded in the constitutional notion that [End Page 71] womennot husbands, not boyfriends, not
male sexual encounters, not sperm donors, but womenget to decide whether or not to bear a child. But according to Senator Bayh, men "bring
children into the world." Dressed

in the appealing language of "responsible fatherhood," Bayh's call for men to


refrain from childbearing "until [they] are prepared to support" children gives biological fathers standing
as childbearing decisionmakers and thereby imperils a right that is foundational to women's equal and
independent personhood. Among fundamentalist patriarchalists, the argument that welfare policy should be about family formation
is racially-charged and gender-ideological; it turns on what conservatives call their "family values." The conservative family
formation agenda is predictable: it was central to their attack on welfare in the 1980s and 1990s, and it was constitutive of their plans for TANF.
Among moderates and liberals, most of whom embrace gender and racial equality as their goals, the argument is more instrumental and
accordingly more insidious. Often, it is linked to the observation that families with residential, marital fathers tend to be better off than families
without them. As Daniel Lichter reported in the January issue of the DLC's Blueprint, "only 6 percent of married couples with children are poor,
compared with 36 percent of female-headed families." 22

The paternity surveillance rules construct a model of heteropatriarchy


Smith 7 Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell University, Welfare Reform and
Sexual Regulation, pp. 2-3
If we look closer at the actual structure of welfare reform law, however, a different image of power relations comes into view. To be sure, many
poor families have been driven from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program;4 the fact that the rolls have been drastically
trimmed and remained quite low even during the recession of the early 2000S is beyond dispute. However, the program's eligibility rules,
requirements, and sanctions are complex in nature. Some rules, such as workfare and the time limits, are fairly well understood.5 Other measures,
however, are rarely discussed. By their very design, these other measures

require poor single mothers to conform to a onesize-fits-all heteropatriarchal model of kinship relations.6 Under the mandatory paternity identification and
child support cooperation rules that are established in federal law, the poor single mother who receives
TANF benefits must name the biological father of her children and assist the state in collecting support
payments from him. In practice, these rules, which I will call "paternafare," impose difficult and enduring
demands upon the TANF client. Even when a recipient meets the program requirements in this respect, the precise structure of the paternafare
rules creates a situation in which the payer's obligation typically remains intact for many months after the TANF family exits the program. The
paternafare rules are so burdensome, however, that many TANF recipients are sanctioned for failing to make an adequate effort in this regard.
Some are even expelled from the program on these same grounds. Many

needy mothers may be avoiding the program


altogether because of the "paternafare" requirement, especially in cases where they are fleeing from a
biological father who has been abusive toward them and their children. A domestic violence survivor in
this situation has good reason to believe that if she entered the paternafare system, the biological father
would retaliate after being named as the payer in her case .

The paternafare surveillance system enacts heteropatriarchal views of women


Smith 7 Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell University, Welfare Reform and
Sexual Regulation, p. 119
The inclusion of paternafare in contemporary welfare law fulfills an ideological objective that is viewed by the leadership of both major
political parties as a crucial political goal. It symbolically

constructs poverty as the fruit of immoral and pathological


behavior on the part of deviant heterosexual women rather than the product of the structural conditions,
and it exemplifies and legitimates the neoliberal transfer of the obligation to support the poor from the
State to the private patriarchal household. On an ideological level, paternafare mimics feminist principles: men should pay their
fair share where childrearing costs are concerned. Poverty advocates who are seeking some immediate gains for welfare mothers under the
welfare reform regime rightly point out that child support payments can lift some of these women and their children out of poverty. However,
even the best designed child support regime cannot, in and of itself, transform the wage labor market that locks a substantial number of these men
and women in the lowest income brackets. Further,

paternafare encroaches upon poor custodial mothers' privacy rights and right to selfdetermination, and it uniquely imposes its heteropatriarchal model of dependence upon poor women . Finally,
paternafare enhances the risk that the male payers will harass and abuse the welfare mothers and their
children. In this sense, paternafare should be seen as the fruit of antifeminist ideology.

Having federal law legitimate paternafare requirements has a profound effect on


entrenching patriarchy
Smith 7 Anna Marie Smith is a professor of government at Cornell University, Welfare Reform and
Sexual Regulation, p. 116
The ideological effects of a program ostensibly tailored to pay the State back for TANF assistance and to
help keep poor single mothers off the rolls might be profound and widespread. Fundamental ideas
about gender identities, marriage, sexuality , and the relation between the "private" family and the
State could change if the program gained additional public attention and credibility. The idea that
biological fathers should pay support would have more adherents. By the same token, it seems entirely
logical that these same biological fathers would be regarded with more sympathy. From a patriarchal and
bourgeois perspective, masculinity and money rule: the male breadwinner who "pays the bills" ought to
have the most authority in the family unit. To the extent that it gains hegemonic status, paternafare
ideology will be able to enhance patriarchal authority and the idealization of the male breadwinner,
regardless of whether men actually do make a fair contribution -in financial or nurturing labor terms -to
caregiving. In addition, the argument for enhancing the rights of the father in the poor family -even where
that necessitates a reduction in the rights of the mother -will become even more unassailable.

PRWORA requires paternity surveillance that oppresses poor women


Huda 1 Parvin R. Huda is Senior Counsel Office of the Chief Counsel for Industry and Security, U.S.
Department of Commerce, Singled Out: A Critique of the Representation of Single Motherhood in

Welfare Discourse, 7 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 341 (2001),


http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol7/iss2/3
Although liberal feminism has helped secure profound legal victories for women, its tenets are of limited
application in the context of poor single motherhood. Certain liberal feminist ideals would, however,
serve as a necessary antidote to current welfare reform's provisions and rhetoric. Perhaps most
fundamentally, liberal feminists would condemn PRWORA's championing of marriage as the solution to
women's poverty. Privileging marriage is antithetical to liberal feminism's commitment to women's selfdetermination and self-actualization." Promoting traditional marriage as a solution to poor single mothers'
poverty ignores liberal feminist critiques of the gendered division of labor in marriage that historically has
harmed wives. More specifically, liberal feminists persuasively criticize those PRWORA provisions that
effectively punish single mothers for exercising their fundamental reproductive and procreative rights."8
Liberal feminism valorizes the individual's right to make choices and exercise his/her autonomy;
accordingly, the state should respect women's decisions to bear and raise children as single mothers.
Instead, PRWORA limits women's autonomy "and change[s] social norms through. altering individual
sexual behavior and influencing [women's] reproductive choices. vs Liberal feminists have critiqued three
PRWORA provisions-the illegitimacy bonus, the child exclusion and mandatory paternity establishmentas undue limits on women's autonomy.'0 According to Martha F. Davis, Legal Director of the National
Organization for Women Legal Defense and Education Fund (NOW LDEF), states must "successfully
manipulate individual choices about marriage, births and abortions" in order to win the illegitimacy bonus
awards."' Davis similarly describes the coercive potential of the child exclusion provision and exhorts all
women to recognize that the welfare bill, which permits states to adopt the child exclusion program at
their discretion, implicates not just work but "women's roles in society and particularly their ability to
make reproductive choices free of government interference."82 Finally, the PRWORA provision
regarding paternity establishment and child support enforcement is an infringement of a liberal feminist
understanding of autonomy.' Under PRWORA, individuals who apply for government assistance must
provide "specific identifying information about the [child's] noncustodial parent."84 Good cause and
other types of exceptions are permitted under a best interest of the child standard.' Families that refuse to
comply with the requirements may experience a reduction of at least twenty-five percent in their grant. 6
Mink believes that this mandatory cooperation requirement "coerces mothers who are single and poor into
relations with fathers."" The National Partnership for Women and Families has called the cooperation
requirements "impossibly strict," noting that "non-cooperation" might include failure to offer information
on social security numbers and current addresses for fathers who may have left the family years before.88
As a condition of the receipt of benefits, these mothers must cooperate and communicate information
about the fathers, thus relinquishing "decisional autonomy about family relationships."89

Patriarchy Impacts
Patriarchy makes war and extinction inevitable because of masculine aggression.
Dr. Jill Steans, Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory @ the University of
Birmingham, 1998, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction, p. 102-103
In this view, not only is war part of women's daily existence, but war, violence and women's
oppression all grow from the same root Military institutions and states are inseparable from
patriarchy. War is not then, as realists and neo-realists would hold, rooted in the nature of 'man' or
the anarchy of the international realm. However, the hegemony of a dominance-orientated
masculinity sets the dynamics of the social relations in which all are forced to participate. Some
feminists argue that patriarchal societies have an inherent proclivity towards war because of the
supreme value placed on control and the natural male tendency towards displays of physical
force.'01 Though primarily concerned with the discount of war, politics and citizenship. Hartsock argues
that the association of power with masculinity and virility has very real consequences. She argues
that 'it gives rise to a view of community both in theory and in fact obsessed with the revenge and
structured by conquest and domination') Furthermore, according to Hartsock, the opposition of man
to woman and perhaps even man to man is not simply a transitory opposition of arbitrary interests, but an
opposition resting on a deep-going threat to existence. She argues that we re-encounter in the context of
gender, as in class, the fact that the experience of the ruling group, or gender, cannot be simply dismissed
as false.""" This raises the question of how we conceptualize and understand not only the
'patriarchal state', but also the relationship between the patriarchal nation-state requiring in the
context o competitive struggle with other states militarism and internal hierarchy.'"If liberal
feminists are correct in their view of the state as a 'neutral arbiter', rather than a patriarchal power, and if
women's inequality is largely a consequence of bias, it is possible that attitudes towards women in the
military would change over time as women proved themselves, just as they have in other spheres from
which they were once excluded. However, for many feminists the proper question to ask is not how
women's status can be furthered by participation in the military, but how women and other 'outsiders'
might focus their opposition to military institutions and strengthen institutions to build peace-orientated
communities. As Sriehm acknowledges, even if women were to participate in combat roles, and were
accepted, it would not solve the problem of their relation to other states' bprotectors$ and 'protected', a
relationship which feminists should be concerned to problematize. It seems that, while recognition of the
close linkages between citizenship and participation in combat is an obvious starting point for feminists in
their quest for gender equality, it may be that 'NOW's brand of equal opportunity or integrationist
feminism' could merely function to 'reinforce the military as an institution and militarism as an ideology
by perpetuating the notion that the military is central to the entire social order' arid thereby perpetuate a
gendered order which damages both women and men. 105 Human survival may depend upon breaking
the linkage between masculinity, military capacity and death. It is for feminists and others
committed to peace to provide new thinking about the nature of politics, to redefine 'political
community' and our ideas of 'citizenship' and, in so doing, confront the 'barracks community'
directly with its 'fear of the feminine'.'" Feminist challenges to dominant conceptions of citizenship,
political community and security and feminist 'revisions' are the subject of chapter 5.

Unchecked patriarchy causes extinction via nuclear war critique is


necessary to avoid unending conflict
Betty A. Reardon, Director of the Peace Education Program at Teachers College Columbia
University, 1993, Women and Peace: Feminist Visions of Global Security, p30-2

In an article entitled Naming the Cultural Forces That Push Us toward War
(1983), Charlene Spretnak focused on some of the fundamental cultural
factors that deeply influence ways of thinking about security. She argues that
patriarchy encourages militarist tendencies. Since a major war now
could easily bring on massive annihilation of almost unthinkable
proportions, why are discussions in our national forums addressing
the madness of the nuclear arms race limited to matters of hardware
and statistics? A more comprehensive analysis is badly needed . . . A
clearly visible element in the escalating tensions among militarized
nations is the macho posturing and the patriarchal ideal of
dominance, not parity, which motivates defense ministers and
government leaders to strut their stuff as we watch with increasing
horror. Most men in our patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns
that are radically inappropriate for the nuclear age. To prove
dominance and control, to distance ones character from that of women, to
survive the toughest violent initiation, to shed the sacred blood of the
hero, to collaborate with death in order to hold it at bayall of these
patriarchal pressures on men have traditionally reached resolution in
ritual fashion on the battlefield. But there is no longer any battlefield.
Does anyone seriously believe that if a nuclear power were losing a
crucial, large-scale conventional war it would refrain from using its
multiple-warhead nuclear missiles because of some diplomatic
agreement? The military theater of a nuclear exchange today would
extend, instantly or eventually, to all living things, all the air, all the
soil, all the water. If we believe that war is a necessary evil, that
patriarchal assumptions are simply human nature, then we are
locked into a lie, paralyzed. The ultimate result of unchecked terminal
patriarchy will be nuclear holocaust. The causes of recurrent warfare
are not biological. Neither are they solely economic. They are also a
result of patriarchal ways of thinking, which historically have
generated considerable pressure for standing armies to be used.
(Spretnak 1983) These cultural tendencies have produced our current
crisis of a highly militarized, violent world that in spite of the decline
of the cold war and the slowing of the military race between the
superpowers is still staring into the abyss of nuclear disaster, as
described by a leading feminist in an address to the Community Aid Abroad
State Convention, Melbourne, Australia: These then are the outward signs of
militarism across the world today: weapons-building and trading in them;
spheres of influence derived from their supply; interventionboth overt and
covert; torture; training of military personnel, and supply of hardware to, and
training of police; the positioning of military bases on foreign soil; the
despoilation of the planet; intelligence networks; the rise in the number of
national security states; more and more countries coming under direct military
rule; 13 the militarization of diplomacy, and the interlocking and the
international nature of the military order which even defines the major rifts in
world politics. (Shelly 1983)

Gender inequality guarantees extinction.

Sandra L. Bem, professor of psychology at Cornell University, 1993, The Lenses of Gender:
Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality, p195
In addition to the humanist and feminist arguments against gender
polarization, there is an overarching moral argument that fuses the
antihumanist and antifeminist aspects of gender polarization. The essence of
this moral argument is that by polarizing human values and human
experiences into the masculine and the feminine, gender polarization
not only helps to keep the culture in the grip of males themselves; it
also keeps the culture in the grip of highly polarized masculine
values. The moral problem here is that these highly polarized masculine
values so emphasize making war over keeping the peace, taking risks
over giving care, and even mastering nature over harmonizing with
nature that when allowed to dominate societal and even global
decision making, they create the danger that humans will destroy not
just each other in massive numbers but the planet.

Patriarchy Impact Environment Scenario


A. The devaluation of women is intricately linked to environmental
exploitation.
J. Ann Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, former
Vice President of the International Studies Association, 1992, Gender in International Relations
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, Chapter 5
Previous chapters have also called attention to the extent to which these
various forms of military, economic, and ecological insecurity are connected
with unequal gender relations. The relationship between protectors and
protected depends on gender inequalities; a militarized version of
security privileges masculine characteristics and elevates men to the status of
first-class citizens by virtue of their role as providers of security. An analysis of
economic insecurities suggests similar patterns of gender inequality in the
world economy, patterns that result in a larger share of the world's wealth and
the benefits of economic development accruing to men. The traditional
association of women with nature, which places both in a subordinate
position to men, reflects and provides support for the instrumental
and exploitative attitude toward nature characteristic of the modern
era, an attitude that contributes to current ecological insecurities.

B. Extinction.
Major David N Diner, Judge Advocate General's Corps, United States Army, 1994, The Army
and the Endangered Species Act: Whos Endangering Whom? Military Law Review. 143 Mil.
L. Rev. 161. Winter
By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified
many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of
ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl
conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of
what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new
animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and
intertwined affects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and human
extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a
mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, 80
mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.

Womens rights are key to human rights.


Yifat Susskind, Communications Director at MADRE, 2007, Its Not Just An Abortion Ban:
The Christian Rights Global Agenda,
http://www.madre.org/articles/usfp/christianright.5.07.html

Second, we need to expand our understanding of "women's issues." The


attack on abortion rights is just one aspect of a religious
fundamentalist agenda that is threatening not only women's freedom,
but international peace and security, Indigenous cultural survival, and
secular, democratic political traditions around the world. All of these
are women's issues. Third, we need a new progressive dialogue that makes
more room for religious people who are working to counter fundamentalist
agendas, fueled by their own faith-based politics. In short, we need a
strategy that recognizes the connections between women's
reproductive rights and the full range of human rights, and between
women in the US and women around the world. It's not that we each
need to be addressing every possible political issue simultaneously. But
wherever our convictions move us to action, let's act with an awareness of how
our piece of the puzzle fits into a bigger picture of the world we're working to
create. Because while it may seem like last week's Supreme Court ruling is
only about restricting access to abortion, those who worked for years to
bring it about see the decision as one battle in a war to remake the
whole world in Jerry Falwell's image.

Human rights violations and other forms of dehumanization make


war, genocide, and extinction inevitable.
Michelle Maiese, research member at the Conflict Research Consortium, July 2003,
Dehumanization, http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/dehumanization/
Once certain groups are stigmatized as evil, morally inferior, and not
fully human, the persecution of those groups becomes more
psychologically acceptable. Restraints against aggression and
violence begin to disappear. Not surprisingly, dehumanization increases
the likelihood of violence and may cause a conflict to escalate out of
control. Once a violence break over has occurred, it may seem even more
acceptable for people to do things that they would have regarded as
morally unthinkable before. Parties may come to believe that
destruction of the other side is necessary, and pursue an
overwhelming victory that will cause one's opponent to simply
disappear. This sort of into-the-sea framing can cause lasting damage to
relationships between the conflicting parties, making it more difficult
to solve their underlying problems and leading to the loss of more
innocent lives. Indeed, dehumanization often paves the way for human
rights violations, war crimes, and genocide. For example, in WWII, the
dehumanization of the Jews ultimately led to the destruction of millions of

people.[9] Similar atrocities have occurred in Rwanda, Cambodia, and the


former Yugoslavia.

Challenging forms of male domination allows us to open new


avenues of thought that overcome traditional security concerns and
prevent the root causes of war.
J. Ann Tickner Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, former
Vice President of the International Studies Association, 1992, Gender in International Relations
Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, Chapter 5
Including previously hidden gender inequalities in the analysis of
global insecurity allows us to see how so many of the insecurities
affecting us all, women and men alike, are gendered in their historical
origins, their conventional definitions, and their contemporary
manifestations. Using gender as a category of analysis reveals the
masculinist assumptions of both traditional and revisionist theories of
international politics and economics. It also allows us to see the extent to
which unequal gender relationships are a form of domination that
contributes to many of the dimensions of the contemporary
insecurities analyzed by various new thinkers. Feminists deny the
separability of gendered insecurities from those describable in
military, economic, and ecological terms; such problems cannot be
fully resolved without also overcoming the domination and
exploitation of women that takes place in each of these domains.
Such a conception of security is based on the assumption that social
justice, including gender justice, is necessary for an enduring peace.
While acknowledging that unequal social relations are not the only
sources of insecurity, feminists believe that contemporary
insecurities are doubly engendered. Beyond the view that all social
institutions, including those of world politics, are made by human beings and
are therefore changeable, they recognize that comprehensive security
requires the removal of gender-linked insecurities. Revealing these
gender inequalities allows us to see how their elimination would open
up new possibilities for the alleviation of the various domains of
global insecurity that I have described. Overcoming gender inequalities
is necessary, not only for the security of women but also for the realization
of a type of security that does not rely on characteristics associated
with the hegemonic masculinity that has produced a kind of security
that can be a threat to men's security also. Men are themselves
insecure partly because of the exclusionary, gendered way their own
security has been defined.

This form of control of peoples lives necessitates extinction wars


are waged in the name of the population .
Michel Foucault, Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France,
1978,
Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of
power. "Deduction " has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among
others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power
bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding
them, making them submit, or destroying them. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at
least a tendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself
accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the
reversal of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as
bloody as they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes
visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidable power of death--and this is perhaps
what accounts for part of its force and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits--now
presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to
administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars
are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the
existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name
of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,
that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many [people] to be killed. And
through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward
all-out destruction, the decision that initiated them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly
informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the
power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's
continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle--that one has to be capable of killing in
order to go on living--has become the principle that defines the strategy of states. But the existence in
question is no longer the judicial existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a
population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the
ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race,
and the large-scale phenomena of population.

Patriarchy demotes women to jobs like prostitution.


Brian Martin, author who specializes on warfare. 1990.
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw10.html

The masculine ethos of military life has much in common with the
oppressive treatment of women in both military and civilian life,
including rape, batterings, prostitution and poor working conditions.
In direct person-to-person violence, it is primarily men who are the
perpetrators.
Another connection between modern patriarchy and war is the service
provided by women to men in both military and civilian life. Cynthia Enloe in
her book Does Khaki Become You? has analysed a range of areas in which
women serve the military: as prostitutes, as military wives, as nurses, as
soldiers, and as workers in arms industries. In each of these cases women are
placed in a subordinate position where they are easily exploited. The service
of women to men is carried out in civilian life in a similar fashion, and in
very similar categories: as prostitutes, as wives, as workers in the 'helping
professions,' and as workers in occupations which are poorly paid, lowskilled and lacking security and career prospects.
Also quite revealing is the gender division of labour in the military. This is
clearest in the category of 'combat soldiers,' from which women are often
excluded in theory. In fact, the actual role of women in combat has varied
considerably in different countries and at different times, as Enloe has ably
documented. When the need is urgent, women are used at the front lines in
positions that at other times would be called combat positions. But when this
happens, the definition is 'combat' is changed so that women are not seen to
be involved. So while what women do in the military varies
considerably, one thing remains constant: the gender-based
distinction between 'combat' and 'non-combat.' This suggests that
military interests have a strong ideological concern to maintain
'combat,' the place where direct violence is seen to take place, as an
exclusively male preserve.
In some guerrilla warfare struggles, women have played a role as combat
soldiers. But as soon as the urgency of the fighting is reduced, women are
pushed back to other, less vital positions. This applies equally to the Israeli
army and the Vietnamese army. A similar process applies to women who work
in armaments factories during wars. After the war they are pushed out by men
and forced into the private sphere. It would seem that maintaining a central
role for men in the preparation for and implementation of organised violence is
a key feature of the war system.

Status quo discourse sets poor women up as societies scapegoat,


which is used to justify the actions of the elite.
Jyl Josephson. 8/28/03. Associate Professor, Dept. of Politics and
Government, Illinois State University. Coercive Visibility: Gender
Deviance, TANF Reauthorization, and State Control of Low-Income
Women and Men.

scapegoats for a wide range of social ills (Williams 1997). Hirschmann


notes how the
construction of women who receive benefits as welfare subjects sets
the privileged up in
opposition to low-income people. The well-off (e.g. taxpayers) have,
according to the terms of
this construction, already fulfilled their social obligations; the
personalized supervision of welfare recipients (through regulatory
and paternalistic policies) ensures that these welfare subjects fulfill
their social obligations (Hirschmann 2003, 165).

Bureaucracy and patriarchy have a clear connection.


Brian Martin, author who specializes on warfare. 1990.
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/90uw/uw10.html

The connection between patriarchy and bureaucracy can be seen as


one of mutual mobilisation. In short, men use bureaucracy to sustain
their power over women, while elite bureaucrats use patriarchy to
sustain the bureaucratic hierarchy.
The first part of this dynamic is men using bureaucracy to sustain
their power over women. In a typical bureaucracy, whether a state agency,
a corporation, or a trade union, most of the top positions are occupied by men.
Women are concentrated in lower positions such as typists, process workers or
cleaners. In addition, top male bureaucrats usually have wives who do
most of the work of child-rearing and housework and who provide
emotional and career support. The power, prestige and privileges of the
top bureaucrats thus depend on the subordinate position of women both on
the job and at home. To maintain this power, the top bureaucrats can use
their power in the bureaucracy to keep women in their subordinate
place. This can take place in several ways:
formal exclusion of women from top positions;
discrimination against women in hiring and promotion;
promoting conformity to the bureaucratic values of emotional
aloofness and technical rationality as a means of deterring or
restraining women who operate best in an environment providing
emotional support and opportunities for cooperative work;
creation and maintenance of gender-linked job categories, which tie women
into lower-level positions;
maintenance of male career patterns which require mobility, full-time work and
no interruptions (for child-bearing);
maintenance of on-the-job work organisation which excludes integration of
child-rearing and work, and opposition to alternatives such as independent
work at home, or neighbourhood-based decentralised office arrangements;
supporting other elite groups with similar practices, such as when trade union
elites do not protest against corporate sexism;
lobbying and applying political pressure to maintain policies that keep women
in subordinate positions.
In these and other ways, the power that men have as top bureaucrats is used
to keep men collectively in a dominant position over women. In this way,
bureaucracy is mobilised by men to support patriarchy. The domination of men
over women does not occur in the abstract. In this case it operates via the
unequal power distribution within bureaucracies.
Equally important is the way patriarchy is mobilised to serve bureaucracy. Top
bureaucrats can maintain and strengthen their power by using, within
the bureaucracy, the wider cultural dominance of men over women.
The existence of a promotion path which favours men ensures the
loyalty of many men in lower positions. The discrimination against women
in lower levels (for example, the low salary, lack of autonomy and low prestige
of typing positions) provides an opportunity for low-level men to feel superior
to someone. In this way the psychology of masculine domination is mobilised

to support bureaucratic hierarchy. A patriarchally organised bureaucracy


is structured to maximise the linkages between male-female
inequality and bureaucratic inequality. This ensures that any fundamental
challenge to bureaucratic hierarchy would also require a fundamental
challenge to prevailing male-female power relations.

Local, grassroot movements provide the foundation for stable global


system.
J. Ann Tickner, Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, former Vice
President of the International Studies Association, 1992, Gender in International Relations Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, Chapter 5

When women have been politically effective, it has generally been at


the local level. Increasingly, women around the world are taking
leadership roles in small-scale development projects such as
cooperative production and projects designed to save the natural environment.
Women are also playing important roles in social movements
associated with peace and the environment. While these decentralized
democratic projects are vital for women to achieve a sense of
empowerment and are important building blocks for a more secure
future, they will remain marginal as long as they are seen as women's
projects and occur far from centers of power. Hence it is vitally important that
women be equally represented, not just in social movements and in local
politics but at all levels of policy-making. If foreign policy-making within states
has been a difficult area for women to enter, leadership positions in
international organizations have been equally inaccessible. While women
must have access to what have traditionally been seen as centers of
power where men predominate, it is equally important for women and
men to work together at the local level. Victories in local struggles
are important for -the achievement of the kind of multidimensional,
multilevel security I have proposed. The feminist perspectives presented in
this book suggest that issues of global security are interconnected with,
and partly constituted by, local issues; therefore the achievement of
comprehensive security depends on action by women and men at all
levels of society. -Such action is only possible when rigid gender
hierarchies are challenged.

Patrirachy is the root causes of extinction and oppression.


V. Spike Peterson, Professor, Department of Political Science at the University of Arizona and Anne
Sisson Runyan, Head and Associate Professor, Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati, 1999,
Global Gender Issues, p14-15
gender-sensitive studies improve our understanding of global
crises, their interactions, and the possibilities of moving beyond
them. These include crises of political legitimacy and security as
states are increasingly unable to protect their citizens against
economic, epidemic, nuclear, or ecological threats; crises of
maldevelopment as the dynamics of our global economic system
enrich a few and impoverish most; and crises of environmental
degradation as the exploitation of natural resources continues in
unsustainable fashion. These global crises cannot be understood or addressed without
Finally,

acknowledging the structural inequalities of the current world system, inequalities that extend well beyond
gender issues: They are embodied in interacting hierarchies of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual
orientation, physical ability, age, and religious identification. In this text, we focus on how the structural
inequalities of gender work in the world: how the structural inequalities of gender work in the world: how the
hierarchical dichotomy of masculinity-femininity is institutionalized, legitimated, and reproduced, and how

gender
hierarchy interacts with other structural inequalities. The dichotomy
of masculinity and femininity is not separate from racism, classism,
ageism, nationalism, and so on. Rather, gender both structures and is
structured by these hierarchies to render complex social identities,
locations, responsibilities, and social practices. Gender shapes, and is
shaped by, all of us. We daily reproduce its dynamics and suffer its costs in multiple ways.
By learning how gender works, we learn a great deal about
intersecting structures of inequality and how they are intentionally
and unintentionally reproduced. We can then use this knowledge in
our struggles to transform global gender inequality by also
transforming other oppressive hierarchies at work in the world .
these processes differentially affect men's and women's lives. We also begin to see how

Patriarchy effects everyone justifies rape, violence, prostitution, porn, feminicide


World March of Women, international feminist action movement connecting grass-roots groups and
organizations working to eliminate the causes at the root of poverty and violence against women, 9
(11/28/9, Violence against Women, http://cadtm.org/Violence-against-women, 7.10.15)
Violence against women is structural it is an inherent feature of the patriarchal and capitalist systems
and is used as a tool of control of the lives, bodies and sexuality of women by individual men, groups of
men, patriarchal institutions and States. Although it affects all women as a social group, each violent act
has a specific context, and we have to understand how, when, and why violence against women occurs.
The general belief about violence against women is that it is an extreme or isolated situation involving
individual people. Whereas, on the contrary, it affects us all because we all have experienced fear,
changed our behaviour, and limited our options due to the threat of violence. Another common idea is that
violence against women is a problem limited to low social classes and to barbarian cultures, but we
know that this kind of violence is transversal, that it cuts across all social classes, cultures, religions, and
geopolitical situations. Although violence against women and girls is more common in the private
sphere as domestic violence, be it sexual, physical, psychological or sexual abuse it also occurs in the
public sphere, including (but not limited to): feminicide, sexual and psychological harassment in the

workplace, different forms of rape, the commodification of womens bodies, trafficking of women and
children, prostitution, pornography, slavery, forced sterilisation, lesbophobia, denial of safe abortion and
reproductive options and self-determination, etc. Silence, discrimination, impunity, womens dependence
on men, and theoretical and psychological arguments tolerate and aggravate violence against women.
Violence, or the threat or fear of violence, is used as a way of excluding women from the public sphere.
Women pay with their lives for working outside the home instead of staying within the private sphere as
dictated by patriarchal culture, for going to school or university, for daring to live their sexuality openly,
for prostituting themselves for lack of options. In the context of criminalisation of social movements and
of protest, repression against women activists engaged in the struggle often takes the form of sexual
violence. Furthermore, discrimination against women is compounded by the intersection of different
modes of oppression: they are discriminated against for being women, but also because of their skin
colour, language, race, ethnicity, class (and financial situation), religion, sexuality...

Racism Links
This is a crucial site for challenging racial oppression
Lefkovitz 11 Alison Lefkovitz received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2010 and is
currently a visiting assistant professor at Miami University in Ohio, Men in the House: Race, Welfare, and
the Regulation of Men's Sexuality in the United States, 1961-1972 Project Muse
Sex and reproduction have been identified as crucial sites of racial struggle ever since the arrival of
African slaves on American shores. Slaveholders struggled to determine how to define race when faced with interracial children,
engaged in coercive sexual relationships with their slaves, wielded the specter of family separation as a weapon against unruly slaves, and
justified slavery in terms of patriarchy. One

of the abolitionists' most potent weapons was to criticize the lack of


patriarchal power slaves wielded as fathers and husbands .2 Long after emancipation, the regulation of sex
continued to be a source of power over African Americans . Bans on interracial marriage served as an anchor for Jim Crow
regimes, the repressive legal system of racial segregation in the southern states; factions of the 1960s racial pride Black Power movement tried to
empower black men by establishing their place in the patriarchal order; and government policy targeted and regulated black women for their
sexual activity.3 Many scholars-including Linda Gordon, Premilla Nadasen, Martha Davis, Annelise Orleck, Mimi Abramovitz, Rickie Solinger,
Gwendolyn Mink, Marisa Chappell, and others-have shown that black mothers were treated [End Page 595] differently than white mothers when
they applied for welfare and other assistance from local, state, and federal governments. Black women were more frequently deprived of welfare,
lost custody of their children more often, and were likelier to be forcibly sterilized because of bureaucrats' and politicians' beliefs about black
women's irredeemable sexual "deviance."4

PRWORA is premised on a construction of racialized notions of what it means to be


moral
Docka-Filipek 13 Danielle E. Docka-Filipek, Case Studies in Compassion: Need Interpretation,
Gender, and Family in an Era of Faith-Based Provision,
http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/157862/DockaFilipek_umn_0130E_14146.pdf?
sequence=1
The Two-Tiered Welfare State: Race, Class, and Gender Implications of Social Welfare Broader cultural ideals about the gendered, public
versus private, division of labor inform U.S. welfare state structures and associated, implicit interpretations of need. Historically, the

U.S.
welfare state is a two-tiered, dual system (Smith 1984; Pateman 1988; Nelson 1990). Programs coded male are geared
towards individual heads-of-household, are administered on a standardized national level, and are modeled after the male bread
winner model of family life. Programs coded female are means-tested, more often include punitive and
surveillance mechanisms, construct clients as dependent on public charity, and are designed for perceived family failuresmost
often, the absence of a male breadwinner. Both faces of the gendered welfare state serve recipients in the context of
their assumed and idealized familial roles. Arguably, one of the primary ways race, class, gender, and family are institutionalized
in the structures of the welfare state is through maternalism a concept associated with the tier of the welfare state that is coded female.
Essentially, maternalism refers to an ideology that "exalt[s] women's capacities to mother and extend[s] to society as a whole the values of care,
nurturance and morality" (Koven & Michel 1993). Mink (1998) highlights two aspects of the maternalist agenda: support for the malebreadwinner family structure and resulting disapproval for wage-earning mothers; and their furtherance

of a white, middle-class
ideal of good mothering through supervision contingent AFDC benefits and mandatory education. Mink (1998; qtd. in Padamsee &
Adams 2001) further claims that the maternalism should be read as white middle-class womens politics, as associated policies either tacitly or
overtly relied on dominating women of color and immigrants (16). Mothers Pensions in the early 1900s were designed to promote female
domesticity and render racial exclusion acceptable (Skocpol 1992; Fraser & Gordon 1994; Gordon 1994). Women were considered morally
unfit for assistance if they engaged in a series of inappropriate behaviors, including living with a man who was not their husband, bearing
children out of wedlock, performing gender inappropriate paid work, and failing to maintain a home environment that met white, middle-class
standards (Skocpol 1992). Many Black women were excluded from such programs through regional variation or because caseworkers deemed
African Americans unfit (Roberts 1997). 49 Later programs also grounded in maternalist ideologyAFDC and ADC being the most notable
exemplarsexcluded Black women at a higher rate than white women (Borris, 1999). Codes invoking race, class, and gender further extended
into the logic of welfare reform, as increasing numbers of unmarried women of color receiving public assistancestereotypically represented as
Welfare Queensincreasingly fueled calls to eliminate universal entitlement (Hill-Collins 2009; Zucchino 1999). Stryker & Wald (2009) argue
that passage of the PRWORA depended on the invocation of racially problematic imagery , considerable increases
in womens labor force participation, and associated shifts away from gender norms dictating a male-breadwinner/female-caregiver model. I

argue welfare reform signaled the end of maternalist welfare policies that defined womens role as mothers first and workers second, which
Stryker & Wald (2009) observe as presenting an ironic contradiction with the family values rhetoric promoted by many of the policys
supporters (cf. Orloff 2006; Stryker & Wald 2009). In addition, Stryker & Walds (2009) deployment of Somers & Blocks (2005) perversity
thesis is especially useful in understanding the discursive and historical background that explains the legitimacy of ideas driving welfare reform,
helps provide insight into the ways racialized categories of the deserving and undeserving poor are tied to enduring structures of inequality,
and provides a foundation for understanding the affinity between conservative religious logics and the idea that the market should be the central
organizing principle of public life (Somers & Block 2005). The

perversity thesis deployed by supporters of the PRWORA


operated to reassign blame for the poors plight from structural conditions to flaws in character and moral
failings. Such flaws and failings were attributed to the dependency created by welfare, which
represented the poor as lacking sexual morals, a work ethic, and personal responsibility . Furthermore, the
logic of perversity rhetoric is tied to broader neoliberal ideas about the need for the retreat of the state due to the threat to the moral order
presented by big governments tendency to dictate a set of disincentives for individuals and institutions who would otherwise engage the
stimulating and invigorating effects of the private marketplace. Criticisms of the perversity thesis lodged by Hicks (2006) contend that Somers
& Block failed to attribute significant causal power to the machinations of the Christian Right in developing and supporting the PRWORA. In
response, Somers & Block (2006:511) forward: there is much to be said for an elective affinity between market fundamentalism and
evangelical Christianity, as both doctrines draw on individualistic, egoistic, and materialistic emphases. However, Somers & Block also
caution against overstating the power of religious conservatives at the expense of understanding the power of big business and finance in
forwarding the agenda of market fundamentalism, and also express apprehension about speaking of the evangelical right as a unified monolith
due to internal diversity within the grouptwo points with which I agree wholeheartedly.

The data the federal government gathers for its federal surveillance perpetuates
racism and patriarchy
Neubeck & Casenave 12 Kenneth J. Neubeck is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut-Storrs, Noel
A. Cazenave is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America's Poor RaceBlind Pretensions

p. 205

In our view, much of the research that has been conducted on the impact of welfare reform in recent years
can be viewed as a dimension of racial control. Whether funded, shaped, or otherwise influenced by the
federal racial state , most of this research has sought to measure the state's success in effecting and thus
controlling what welfare recipients of color are doing. Most recent analyses bear on work behavior, an
area in which racial state actors at the federal and individual state levels might most easily hope to finetune welfare policies and their administration. Work behavior is also an area that is less politically
sensitive for racial state actors to evaluate than are the PRWORA's provisions encouraging procreationfocused race population control. The vast bulk of welfare reform research has been conducted without any
attention to race or racism, gender or sexism, as if the simultaneous oppression of racial inequality and
patriarchy were simply irrelevant to poor women's lives. In effect, the subjects of welfare reform research
have been deraced and degendered. Treating impoverished women of color as if they had no race or
gender obscures the role that welfare reform plays as an expression of gendered racism. It prevents
consideration of how patriarchy and racial inequality interact with the conditions imposed by welfare
reform in determining the daily lived experiences of poor women of color. Such research also diverts
attention away from how welfare reform contributes to white racial hegemony.

Racism Impacts
Racism perpetuates dehumanization
Wilder and Memmi, 1996
[Gary and Albert, WEB Dubois institute, racial theorists, Irreconcilable differences. Transition, 71,
1996, pp. 158-177, Accessed online vis JSTOR] /Wyo-MB
Perhaps Memmi's most precocious and valuable insights emerge from his belief that racism traps its
victims in "an impos- sible condition ... a condition which can have no solution in its actual structure." We
can read Memmi's work as an inven- tory of possible responses to colonization, racism, and antiSemitism. He believes that racialized subjects are inevitably im- pelled by contradictory gestures of selfrejection and self-affirmation, and that it is as impossible to secure recognition as different but equal as it
is to gain full ac- cess to "universal" humanity: "No matter which way I turned I always found my- self an
accomplice of the established or- der." He has profound empathy for op- pressed peoples' attempts to
survive with dignity, and he allows us to see the desire to disappear into the mainstream and the wish to
retreat into ghettoized enclaves as natural reactions to the racial dilemma.

DEHUMANIZATION DESTROYS THE VALUE TO LIFE AND OUTWEIGHS


ALL CALCULABLE IMPACTS
Berube 97 [David M., Professor of Communication Studies at University of South Carolina.,
NANOTECHNOLOGICAL PROLONGEVITY: The Down Side,
http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/faculty/berube/prolong.htm]
This means-ends dispute is at the core of Montagu

and Matson's treatise on the dehumanization of humanity. They warn[s]: "its


destructive toll is already greater than that of any war, plague, famine, or natural calamity on record -- and
its potential danger to the quality of life and the fabric of civilized society is beyond calculation. For that
reason this sickness of the soul might well be called the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse.... Behind the genocide of the holocaust lay a
dehumanized thought; beneath the menticide of deviants and dissidents... in the cuckoo's next of America, lies a dehumanized image of man...
(Montagu & Matson, 1983, p. xi-xii). While

it may never be possible to quantify the impact dehumanizing ethics


may have had on humanity, it is safe to conclude the foundations of humanness offer great opportunities
which would be foregone. When we calculate the actual losses and the virtual benefits, we approach a nearly inestimable value greater
than any tools which we can currently use to measure it. Dehumanization is nuclear war, environmental apocalypse, and
international genocide. When people become things, they become dispensable. When people are
dispensable, any and every atrocity can be justified. Once justified, they seem to be inevitable for every
epoch has evil and dehumanization is evil's most powerful weapon.

Racism is the root cause of violence


Foucault '76 [Michel, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, p.
254-257 Trans. David Macey]
What in fact is racism? It is

primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power's
control: the break between what must live and what must die. But racism does make the relationship of war-"If you want
to live, the other must die" - function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one
hand,

racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is
not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: "The more
inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated , the fewer degenerates there will be in the species

as a whole, and the more Ias species rather than individual-can live, the stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to
proliferate." There is a direct connection between the two. In a normalizing society,

race or racism is the precondition that


makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or
in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. And we
can also understand why racism should have developed in modern societies that function in the biopower mode; we can understand why racism
broke out at a number of .privileged moments, and why they were precisely the moments when the right to take life was imperative. Racism

first develops with colonization, or in other words, with colonizing genocide. If you are functioning in the
biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill populations, and to kill civilizations?
By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to a racism. War. How can one not only wage war on
one's adversaries but also expose one's own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million (and this
is precisely what has been going on since the nineteenth century, or since the second half of the nineteenth
century), except by activating the theme of racism

Confonting racial history is essential


Holder Attorney General of the United States 2k9

Eric; Department of Justice

African American History Month Program http://www.justice.gov/ag/speeches/2009/ag-speech-090218.html


Every year, in February, we attempt to recognize and to appreciate black history. It is a worthwhile endeavor for the contributions of African
Americans to this great nation are numerous and significant. Even as we fight a war against terrorism, deal with the reality of electing an African

the need to confront our racial


past, and our racial present, and to understand the history of African people in this
country, endures. One cannot truly understand America without understanding the
historical experience of black people in this nation. Simply put, to get to the heart of this
country one must examine its racial soul. Though this nation has proudly thought of itself
as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too
many ways, essentially a nation of cowards. Though race related issues continue to occupy
a significant portion of our political discussion, and though there remain many unresolved
racial issues in this nation, we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each
other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and given our nations
history this is in some ways understandable. And yet, if we are to make progress in this area we must feel comfortable enough with one
American as our President for the first time and deal with the other significant issues of the day,

another, and tolerant enough of each other, to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us. But we must do moreand we in this room bear a special responsibility. Through its work and through its example this Department of Justice, as long as I am here, must
- and will - lead the nation to the "new birth of freedom" so long ago promised by our greatest President. This is our duty and our solemn
obligation.We commemorated five years ago, the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. And though the world
in which we now live is fundamentally different than that which existed then, this

nation has still not come to grips with


its racial past nor has it been willing to contemplate, in a truly meaningful way, the diverse
future it is fated to have. To our detriment, this is typical of the way in which this nation
deals with issues of race. And so I would suggest that we use February of every year to not only commemorate black history but
also to foster a period of dialogue among the races. This is admittedly an artificial device to generate discussion that should come more naturally,
but our history is such that we must find ways to force ourselves to confront that which we have become expert at avoiding.As a nation we have
done a pretty good job in melding the races in the workplace. We work with one another, lunch together and, when the event is at the workplace
during work hours or shortly thereafter, we socialize with one another fairly well, irrespective of race. And yet even this interaction operates

We know, by "American instinct" and by learned behavior, that certain


subjects are off limits and that to explore them risks, at best embarrassment, and, at worst,
the questioning of ones character. And outside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no
within certain limitations.

significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the
country that existed some fifty years ago. This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for
me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is
voluntarily socially segregated.

As a nation we

should use Black History month as a means to deal with this continuing problem.
By creating what will admittedly be, at first, artificial opportunities to engage one another
we can hasten the day when the dream of individual, character based, acceptance can
actually be realized. To respect one another we must have a basic understanding of one
another. And so we should use events such as this to not only learn more about the facts of
black history but also to learn more about each other. This will be, at first, a process that is both awkward and
painful but the rewards are potentially great. The alternative is to allow to continue the polite, restrained mixing that now passes as meaningful
interaction but that accomplishes little. Imagine if you will situations where people- regardless of their skin color- could confront racial issues
freely and without fear. The potential of this country, that is becoming increasingly diverse, would be greatly enhanced. I fear however, that we
are taking steps that, rather than advancing us as a nation are actually dividing us even further. We still speak too much of "them" and not "us".
There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action.

This debate can, and should, be

nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is
too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own, narrow self

Our history has demonstrated that the vast majority of Americans are uncomfortable
with, and would like to not have to deal with, racial matters and that is why those, black or
white, elected or self-appointed, who promise relief in easy, quick solutions, no matter how
divisive, are embraced. We are then free to retreat to our race protected cocoons where
much is comfortable and where progress is not really made. If we allow this attitude to
persist in the face of the most significant demographic changes that this nation has ever confronted- and remember, there will be no majority
race in America in about fifty years- the coming diversity that could be such a powerful, positive force
will, instead, become a reason for stagnation and polarization. We cannot allow this to
happen and one way to prevent such an unwelcome outcome is to engage one another more
routinely- and to do so now.
interest.

Racism causes extinction. We have a moral obligation to resist every instance.


Josephy Barndt, co-director of the Crossroads Ministry, 1991, Dismantling Racism
To study racism is to study walls. We have looked at barriers and fences,
restraints and limitations, ghettos and prisons. The prison of racism
confines us all, people of color and white people alike. It shackles the
victimizer as well as the victim. The walls forcibly keep people of color
and white people separate from each other; in our separate prisons we
are all prevented from achieving the human potential that God intends for us.
The limitations imposed on people of color by poverty, subservience,
and powerlessness are cruel, inhuman, and unjust; the effects of
uncontrolled power, privilege, and greed, which are the marks of our
white prison, will inevitably destroy us as well. But we have also seen that
the walls of racism can be dismantled. We are not condemned to an
inexorable fate, but are offered the vision and the possibility of
freedom. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the prison of individual,
institutional, and cultural racism can be destroyed. You and I are
urgently called to join the efforts of those who know it is time to tear
down once and for all, the walls of racism.

Heteronormativity Links
The paternity surveillance structure endorses heteronormativity
Lefkovitz 11 Alison Lefkovitz received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2010 and is
currently a visiting assistant professor at Miami University in Ohio, Men in the House: Race, Welfare, and
the Regulation of Men's Sexuality in the United States, 1961-1972 Project Muse
Conservative lawmakers' desire to punish absent fathers arose at the same time that liberal policymakers
were identifying the absence of black fathers as one of the major problems of welfare .69 Even liberals believed
that welfare policy forced mothers to drive unemployed or underemployed fathers out of the house in order to qualify for welfare benefits. As
Addie Garel, the president of a local welfare union on Chicago's racially segregated and poor South Side, put it, "His wife tells him, 'Get out. I
can do better without you.'"70 Johnnie Tillmon, the president of the National Welfare Rights Organization, explained that "in half the states there
really can't be men around because AFDC says if there is an 'able-bodied' man around, then you can't be on welfare. If the kids are going to eat,
and the man can't get a job, then he's [End Page 607] got to go. So his kids can eat."71 The Chicago Welfare Rights Organization went so far as to
compare welfare policies to "genocide" because such policies forced poor black men to "leave their families when they cannot support them."72
Racism in the labor market and welfare policies together reached into the black family and snatched out fathers and husbands. Sympathizers in
Congress concurred that AFDC fractured families. Representative Wilbur Mills (a Democrat from Arkansas) argued that AFDC "encourages
family breakup. Do not think for 1 minute that it has not made a contribution to many, many fathers leaving their families in order that the family
could eat and have clothing to wear. Yes. Take my word for it."73 Representative John William Byrnes (a Republican from Wisconsin) concluded
a family got more through welfare than from a working man earning minimum wage.74 Even President Nixon, not commonly allied with liberals,
pointed to welfare as "economic pressure to split apart."75 Conservatives saw welfare as encouraging sexual immorality; as Freeman expressed
it, men traditionally had "some concern about getting a girl pregnant because of the consequences to her and to him. But he won't, if he knows
that he not only will not have to accept financial responsibility but that a child will enable her to get a dependable monthly income from the
government."76 Senator Russell B. Long (a Democrat from Louisiana), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, queried: "Why should [a
father] give up his freedom and accept the burdens that go with marriage and the status of a husband if the result is going to be a large loss of
overall income?"77 John Peter O'Brien, the supervisor of Milwaukee's Department of Public Welfare, referred to these men as "weekenders" who
"on the surface desert their family, come back for weekend visits, but . . . let the taxpayers of the U.S. Government support their children instead
of doing the supporting themselves."78 Conservatives agreed with welfare rights advocates that welfare encouraged men to leave their families
but disputed the motivation behind the fathers' [End Page 608] absences. Welfare critics believed that welfare provided untrustworthy men
simultaneously with an incentive to have children and an opportunity to escape their family obligations; these men were not leaving their families
because of unfair welfare regulations. Anxiety over deserting fathers imbued the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), prepared for the Nixon
administration by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1969.79 FAP was notable for its attempt to implement a very low guaranteed annual income-lower
than most AFDC benefits at the time-and accompanied by new stricter work requirements. It guaranteed only $1,600 annually for a family of four
as compared to the National Welfare Rights Organization's demand for "$5,500 or Fight!"80 The plan nonetheless created an uneasy alliance
between liberals, who sought a guaranteed annual income, and conservatives, who wanted more punitive treatment of welfare recipients. It also
revived the battle over substitute father laws. Liberal members of Congress, on the one hand, envisioned FAP as a mechanism to fortify a father's
legitimate place in the family. Conservatives, on the other hand, saw it as an opening within which to restore the morality and financial logic that
had ruled welfare before the Flemming Ruling and King v. Smith. Such a pairing resulted in an uneven course in FAP's development and led to its
eventual defeat. The bumpy trajectory began in the House of Representatives, whose members tried to address the issue of the absent father
through legislation that would provide financial support to preserve the two-parent household. One of the major innovations of the bill was to
extend what was called the AFDC-Unemployed Father benefit, which had been passed in twenty-three states during the 1960s, to all states.81 The
benefit, also known as AFDC-U, supplemented families whose father earned less than $2,000 a year working fewer than thirty-five hours a
week.82 Advocates of AFDC-U envisioned it as a necessary bridge between underemployment and the idealized patriarchal family structure. FAP
would extend this benefit to families with fathers to all states, enshrining it in federal law. For conservatives, FAP would also impose strict federal
penalties on fathers who abandoned wives and children. These penalties included significant liens against a father's federal entitlements, including
veterans' and Social Security benefits. Elliot L. Richardson, then secretary of HEW, extolled FAP for "provisions for fulfilling a Federal plan
against a deserting father. It would provide for withholding any Federal payment from him, whether in the form of veteran's benefits or a tax
refund or soil bank [End Page 609] payment or anything else."83 FAP could impose a fine of up to $1,000.84 The legislation would also make
desertion a federal crime punishable with jail time. Freeman testified that "about two million fathers have left the families they spawned to the
tender care of AFDC and most of them contribute nothing. . . . Parental failure to support should be made a federal offense-because federal
money is involved." Such penalties were supposed to hold men responsible for their children when the men had the means to support them but
left their families anyway. As one bureaucrat explained, the purpose was not "incarcerating these people but have them go to work and contribute
to the support of their children."85 Such penalties were designed both to restrict men's sexuality and to confine them to their marriages. Some
FAP supporters stated outright that "when you establish to their satisfaction that the long arm of this Government can reach out and get them and
make them pay to support those families, we might be able to make some of these fathers interested in family planning as well as some of these
mothers."86 Representative Mills, who had earlier lamented the way that AFDC broke up families, claimed the provision holding men
responsible to the federal government for their children's welfare debt acted "as a brake upon parental desertion and births out of wedlock, two of
the most significant problems that plague the present AFDC program."87 Moynihan, too, called for "a sharp curtailment of the freedom now by
and large enjoyed by low-income groups to produce children they cannot support."88 Representative Byrnes, who had also bemoaned welfare's
incentive to break up families, noted obliquely that this legislation tacitly made divorce and separation the privilege of the wealthy. He told
Congress that "we do not say that poor people have to live under the same roof, but we do say to the fathers that you cannot avoid your financial

responsibility to your family by failing to do so."89 [End Page 610] The

plan inflicted a heteronormative family model on


men by enlisting welfare recipients to punish their deserting partners. The laws "would require . . .
mothers to cooperate in locating a deserting spouse, or be subject to losing all benefits ."90 In addition to her
cooperation locating her former spouse, an applicant mother was expected to sue her children's father for child support.91 To enable all women to
do so, the national government proposed founding "regional blood labs to establish paternity."92 Women who did not identify and then prosecute
their former husbands could lose the benefits even if they had expelled their former partners from their homes and had no wish to punish them
further. FAP advocates also endorsed this tactic even while some critics objected that pressing charges posed a threat to "women from errant
husbands or ex-husbands for divulging to the authorities their husbands' addresses."93 Such regulations were yet another means of purging
women from welfare rolls through their relationships with men. Congress members clearly intended these rules to benefit taxpayers rather than
mothers, as also evidenced by the relative lack of interest in Congress in helping women who were not on welfare to retrieve missing child care
payments from negligent fathers.94 Nonetheless, FAP passed in the House of Representatives with 140 Democrats and 103 Republicans
supporting the bill and 84 Democrats and 71 Republicans against it.95

PRWORA reinforces the heteronomative family model and forces domestic violence
upon women
Cammett 14 Ann Cammett, professor at the CUNY School of Law, former Reentry Policy Analyst
at New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, former Clinical Teaching Fellow at Georgetown University Law
Center, received a JD in law from the City University of New York School of Law, also received a LLM
in Advocacy from Georgetown University Law Center, 2014. (VAWA@20: VAWA and Welfare Reform:
Criminalizing the Most Marginalized Women, CUNY Law Review, Novermber 21st, 2014, Available
Online at: http://www.cunylawreview.org/vawa-20-vawa-and-welfare-reform-criminalizing-the-mostmarginalized-women-by-ann-cammett/ Accessed 7-8-15)
The weakened social safety net had particularly dire consequences for women attempting to separate from
domestic violence situations. Apart from an emphasis on work to the exclusion of nearly all other
activities, PRWORA institutionalized a reactionary vision of family construction. Central to the logic of
welfare reform is marriage promotionthe preferred solution to poverty, which is clearly laid out in the
legislation. In fact, PRWORA itself exalts the heteronormative family as a policy prerogative , as
indicated in Congressional findings on the importance of marriage and two-parent households.[8] In the
absence of reconstituting a two-parent household through marriage promotion, PRWORA requires
women to participate in paternity establishment and child support enforcement in order to aggressively
transfer the obligation of support for very poor children from the state to absent parents, usually fathers.
In this gendered framework, it is easy to imagine why meeting enhanced requirements for necessary
benefits would be even more onerous for women fleeing marriages or relationships plagued by
intimate partner violence . For example, these women often have difficulty fulfilling work requirements
given the other immediate priorities that dovetail with their safety needs, including safe housing and the
need to manage altered childcare and school responsibilities. To this end advocates fought for, and
obtained, important exemptions and specialized services for victims of domestic violence.[9] Specifically,
the Family Violence Option (FVO) gives states the option to screen recipients for domestic violence and
to grant exemptions from work and paternity/child support enforcement.[10] However, while these
provisions have mitigated the impact of PWRORA for many women, their limited scope, haphazard
application, local implementation problems, and even caseworker hostility have left a weakened system
of support for many battered women.[11] These problems undermine the intent of VAWA, and put
pressure on some women to return to dangerous and unhealthy relationships, as they often are compelled
to make choices between survival and punitive state regulation.

Federal paternity policy promotes heteronormativity but is a complete failure


Jacobs 12 Melanie B. Jacobs- Professor, Michigan State University College of Law, SYMPOSIUM:
THE NEW "ILLEGITIMACY": REVISITING WHY PARENT AGE SHOULD NOT DEPEND ON
MARRIAGE: INTENTIONAL PARENTHOOD'S INFLUENCE: RETHINKING PROCREATIVE
AUTONOMY AND FEDERAL PATERNITY ESTABLISHMENT POLICY, American University
Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 2012 American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy
& the Law 20 Am. U.J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 489, Lexis/Nexis
Federal paternity establishment policy is a reflection of the strict adherence to a two-parent paradigm . n32
It is predicated on wanting to eliminate the negative implications of "illegitimacy" and ensure that children have both a
mother and father. n33 For many years, a child born out [*496] of wedlock only had one legal parent, the mother. n34 In fact, unwed
fathers often had no rights or responsibilities to their biological children. n35 In the 1960s and 1970s, the Supreme Court rendered a number of
opinions in which it determined that non-marital children were entitled to many of the benefits of marital children. n36 The Court made several
rulings to protect the rights of children born out of wedlock, such as the right to receive child support, n37 sustain an action for wrongful death,
n38 and recover under a state's worker's compensation law. n39 In response to these Supreme Court decisions, and in an effort to equalize the
rights of non-marital and marital children, the UPA was promulgated in 1973. n40 The Act's purpose was to establish a civil scheme whereby
legal parentage would be established for non-marital children, allowing for corresponding child support obligations and custody benefits, and to
ensure that a child has two legal parents to provide financial and emotional support. n41 Soon thereafter, Congress entered the paternity arena. As
Professor Laura Oren has observed, "ever since 1975, with increasing vehemence, federal

policy has encouraged and, indeed, coerced


the identification of the biological fathers of non-marital children ." n42 Paternity establishment and a child's
corresponding entitlement to support and benefits are often based purely on biological connection. n43 Regardless of the father's intent or desire
to parent, he will be adjudicated the child's legal father and will have all the responsibilities of fatherhood. [*497] Professor Katharine Baker has
written, "much paternity law seems to be based on a strict liability theory for genetic contribution." n44 Federal

paternity
establishment policies are not predicated on a two professionals scenario, but rather on a low-income mother who will
require state assistance if the father does not pay child support . n45 Ironically, many of those mothers still require
assistance, regardless of a support order, given that most men to whom the system is directed cannot afford enough
child support to remove the mother and child from assistance . n46 Professor Leslie Harris has argued, "This
evidence strongly suggests that the problem of childhood poverty cannot be solved simply by pursuing
absent biological parents, mostly fathers, for child support. Yet the rhetorical and policy emphasis on this
strategy effectively diverts discussion and attention from the question of our collective responsibility to
provide for children economically, thus serving political ends." n47 Despite protestations that federal paternity and child support
policy unduly impinges on a man's procreative rights, courts and commentators rely on the argument that it is necessary for a child to receive
child support from her or his father. n48 Unfortunately,

though, the reality of child support collection and


enforcement does not accord with our current system. Professor Daniel Hatcher has studied the federal
policy of paternity establishment and child support collection and has concluded that the current model is
largely a failure. n49 Like Professor Oren, Hatcher points out that poor mothers are forced to name absent fathers and
sue them again and again to try to collect child support but the fathers are also poor and generally cannot
afford to pay. n50 Moreover, the relationships between the mothers and fathers "can be obliterated through the
process [and] the hopes of children to have fathers who are supportive and involved in their lives are
often dissolved." n51 Worse, Hatcher's analysis reveals that, "the net financial benefit to the government resulting
from welfare cost recovery [*498] is minimal and may actually be negative." n52 So it is often inaccurate that paternity
establishment with a corresponding child support order serves the best interests of children.

PRWORA perpetuates the idea of a heteronomative marriage


Sparke 5 Matthew Sparke, Professor of Geography and International Studies Univ of Washington,
Received a PhD in University of British Columbia, 2005. (In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational

Geographies of the Nation-state, 2005, Available Online at: https://books.google.com/books?


id=mQyM6h9vnp4C&pg=PA223&lpg=PA223&dq=PRWORA+and+heteronormativity&source=bl&ots=
nNkVVKrl1M&sig=7mNvKTNoLrN4pN65DnGwhIZB1M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Z4idVeakK8agNpHUvKgK&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBQ#v=onep
age&q=PRWORA%20and%20heteronormativity&f=false p. Accessed 7-9-15)
Also hinted at in the Findings section but, much more significantly, emerging as a result of PRWORAs
implementation were also a whole series of inequities racial implications that overlaid the class and
gender politics associated with the desire to put and keep poor women in waged work and
heteronomative marriage . The acts call to tackle the crisis in our Nation and remake the United
States as a successful society through enforced marriage was probably not what Hollinger had in mind
when he commented in 1999 that the United States is the most successful nationalist project in all of
modern history. His own nationalist multicultural vision of American success has more to do with the
nation-stats longevity, its absorption of a variety of peoples and its sheer power. However, this paean to
Americas assimilative power and other statements like it in Postethnic America still seem wanting in
light of PRWORAs powerfully racist ramifications . National success, the Findings section implies,
also invokes tackling the problem of inner cities.

PRWORA protects the heteronomative marriage and polices womens lives


Kandaswamy 8 Priya Kandaswamy, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies
at Mills College, received a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies and Molecular and Cell Biology from
Berkley, received MA and PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Berkley, 2008. (State Austerity and
the Racial Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in the US, Sexualities, 2008, Available Online at:
http://socialproblems.voices.wooster.edu/files/2011/08/Kandaswamy.pdf Accessed 7-10-15)
Instituting a five-year lifetime limit on aid, mandatory work requirements, stricter eligibility requirements
and stricter paternity identification practices, PRWORA effectively articulated state austerity toward
working class single mothers to protecting the heteropatriarchal institution marriage (Mink, 1998).
Although the law had negative impacts on a wide array of women, support for the law was framed
specifically as a means of disciplining sexually promiscuous, lazy black (and more recently Latina)
welfare queens who supposedly used government assistance to live outside the confines of both the
labor market and the heteropatriarchal family (Collins, 1991; Roberts, 1997; Chang, 2000; Hancock,
2004). In its efforts to crack down on these women, the law sent a clear message that the welfare states
new mission was to police womens personal lives and to coerce low-income women to trade reliance
on state assistance for the uncertainties of the low wage labor market or dependence on a man.

PRWORAs stance on race reifies the heteronormative marriage structure


Kandaswamy 8 Priya Kandaswamy, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies
at Mills College, received a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies and Molecular and Cell Biology from
Berkley, received MA and PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Berkley, 2008. (State Austerity and
the Racial Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in the US, Sexualities, 2008, Available Online at:
http://socialproblems.voices.wooster.edu/files/2011/08/Kandaswamy.pdf Accessed 7-10-15)
PRWORA was the culmination of three decades of anti-welfare sentiment that drew heavily upon
racialized anxieties about out of wedlock births and an even longer history of using the rubric of
marriage to organize social welfare provision in ways that were highly stratified along racial and gender

lines. In the more than 10 years since the passage of PRWORA, marriage has remained at the center of
debates about economic inequality in the US, or perhaps more accurately, the language of marriage has
displaced the question of political economy almost entirely. The assumption that inequality is caused by
inappropriate family forms and might be solved by moral reform and marriage continues to
structure debate about the problem of poverty . Notably, the Bush administration has made marriage
promotion a very visible part of their poverty policy with the 2002 Healthy Marriage Initiative explicitly
identifying two-parent families as the key to economic security for impoverished children
(Administration for Children and Families, 2007), and the 2006 TANF reauthorization law specifically
allocated federal funding for TANF programs designed to promote marriage and responsible fatherhood.
Because of the way it has articulated concepts of heteronormativity, race, class and citizenshi p, the
language of marriage has effectively been used to undermine welfare rights and to depoliticize
economic inequality altogether.

Heteronormativity impacts
Challenging heteronormativity is key to stop all forms of violence and war
Peter Tatchell, internationally renowned human rights and political activists, sixth on the New
Statesman's "Heroes of our time", May/June 1989, GAY LIBERATION IS CENTRAL TO HUMAN
EMANCIPATION, http:www.petertatchell.net/masculinity/gay%20liberation.htm
Lesbian and gay liberation is of critical importance to the broader project of human emancipation. It is not
merely a minority issue, nor purely a question of civil rights and sexual freedom. The ultimate aim is a
cultural revolution to end heterosexual supremacism and the concomitant cult of heterosexual masculinity
which underpins all relations of oppression and exploitation. This was the revolutionary agenda of the lesbian
and gay liberation movement which emerged 20 years ago following the Stonewall Riots in New York in June
1969. In contrast to earlier liberal-oriented movements for homosexual equality, the lesbian and gay
liberation movement did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of homosexuals
within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions rejecting not only heterosexism but also heterosexual masculinity with its oppressive predisposition to
rivalry, toughness and aggression (most potently symbolised by the rapist and the queer-basher). In contrast
the "radical drag" and ''gender-bender" politics of the Gay Liberation Front glorified male gentleness. It was a
conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of masculinity and subvert
the way masculinity functions to buttress the subordination of women and gay men. Lesbian and gay
liberation is therefore truly revolutionary because it specifically rejects the male heterosexual cult of
masculine competitiveness, domination and violence. Instead, it affirms the worthwhileness of male
sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and
love independent of heterosexual men. By challenging heterosexual masculinity , the
politics of lesbian and gay liberation has profound radical implications for oppressed peoples everywhere: it

actively subverts the male heterosexual machismo' values which lie at


the heart of all systems of domination, exploitation and oppression.
Lesbian and gay liberation is therefore not an issue which is peripheral. It is, indeed absolutely
central to revolutionary change and human liberation in general.
Without the successful construction of a cult of heterosexual
masculinity and a mass of aggressive male egos, neither sexual, class, racial,
species, nor imperialist oppression are possible . All these different forms of
oppression depend on two factors for their continued maintenance. First, on specific economic and political
structures. And second, on a significant proportion of the population, mainly heterosexual men, being
socialised into the acceptance of harsh masculine values which involve the legitimisation of aggression and

The embracing of these culturallyconditioned macho values, whether consciously or unconsciously, is what makes so
many millions of people able to participate in repressive regimes . (This
the suppression of gentleness and emotion.

interaction between social structures, ideology and individual psychology was a thesis which the communist
psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, was attempting to articulate nearly 60 years ago in his book, The Mass

In the case of German fascism, what Nazism did was


merely awake and excite the latent brutality which is intrinsic to
heterosexual masculinity in class societies. It then systematically
manipulated and organised this unleashed masculine violence into a
fascist regime of terror and torture which culminated in the
holocaust. Since it is the internalisation of the masculine cult of
toughness and domination which makes people psychologically suited
and willing to be part of oppressive relations of exploitation and
subjection, repressive states invariably glorify masculine "warrior"
ideals and legally and ideologically suppress those men - mainly
homosexuals - who fail to conform to them. Given that this internalisation of
masculine aggression within the male population is a prerequisite for injustice and tyranny, love and
tenderness between men ceases to be a purely private matter or
simply a question of personal lifestyle. Instead, it objectively becomes an
act of subversion which undermines the very foundations of
oppression. Hence the Nazis vilification of gay men as "sexual subversives" and "sexual saboteurs"
Psychology of Fascism).

who, in the words of Heinrich Himmler, had to be "exterminated- root and branch." In conclusion: the goal of
eradicating injustice and exploitation requires us to change both the social structure and the individual
personality to create people who, liberated from masculinity, no longer psychologically crave the power to
dominate and exploit others and who are therefore unwilling to be the agents of oppressive regimes
(whether as soldiers, police, gaolers and censors or as routine civil servants and state administrators who
act as the passive agents of repression by keeping the day-to-day machinery of unjust government ticking

challenging the cult of heterosexual masculinity, lesbian and gay


offers a unique
and revolutionary contribution to the emancipation of the whole of
humanity from all forms of oppression and subjugation.
over). By

liberation politics is about much more than the limited agenda of human rights. It

Intersectional Cards
Federal paternity identification surveillance is racist, heterosexist, neo-liberal and
neo-eugenic
Enck-Wanzer 7
Suzanne Enck-Wanzer is Assistant Professor, Communication Studies Eastern Illinois Univ, Welfare
Reform and Sexual Regulation (review) American Studies, Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2007, pp. 176-177
Project Muse
Ending her book with the proclamation that the welfare mothers movement may . . . represent the future of American feminism, Anna Marie
Smith provides hope in the midst of a socio-political climate that demonstrates nothing less than disdain for women on welfare (259). Growing
her analysis from a thoughtful entanglement of Hardt and Negri, Piven and Cloward, and Foucault, Smith provides a theoretically dense and
personally well-informed exploration of welfare policies under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996
(PRA). [F]or it is only by studying the precise design that we can pierce the legitimating ideology of the neoliberals and religious right and grasp
the emerging structure of the postwelfare State (147). Critiquing especially paternafare policies associated with the Temporary Assistance to
Needy Families (TANF) program, Smith demonstrates painstakingly how the

federal government is steadily enhancing its


social control apparatus (85). Paternafare, Smiths term for mandatory paternity identification and support regulations,
functions to strip poor women of their dignity and privacy, whilst exposing them to violence at the hands of
former partners. Working carefully at intersections of identity, Smith demonstrates effectively the racist and
heterosexist underpinnings of contemporary welfare reform. [End Page 176] Smith argues poignantly that such policies
embody a neoliberal attitude that portrays poverty as the fruit of personal factors alone: irrational
decisions and insufficient effort (69). She condemns further that such ideological regulations are neo-eugenic:
TANF policies function to discourage poor women from reproducing.

The history of US welfare is based upon politics of race, class, and gender
Kandaswamy 8 Priya Kandaswamy, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies
at Mills College, received a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies and Molecular and Cell Biology from
Berkley, received MA and PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Berkley, 2008. (State Austerity and
the Racial Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in the US, Sexualities, 2008, Available Online at:
http://socialproblems.voices.wooster.edu/files/2011/08/Kandaswamy.pdf Accessed 7-10-15)
The highly stratified structure of the US welfare state has historically been defined by the politics of
race, class, and gender, and the contemporary rush toward marriage in American politics must be
understood in this context. In comparison to other industrialized democracies, the US has a relatively
incomplete and fractured system of welfare provision. While Marxists have explained this stratified
structure by emphasizing the role the welfare state plays in regulating class struggle (Negri, 1988; Piven
and Cloward, 1993), feminist scholars have stressed how the welfare state polices heteronormative
gender norms and defines womens citizenship in relation to domestic ideals (Gordon, 1994; LaddTaylor, 1994), and antiracist scholars highlight how policies have been engineered specifically to
maintain white privilege and exclude African Americans from social rights (Quadagno, 1994).
Although much of this scholarship has developed in isolation, a historically grounded analysis of the US
welfare state must take into account the articulations of race, class, gender and sexuality in the ways that
citizenship and belonging are imagined and social resources are allocated. Marriage has been a
particularly dense site through which these articulations have been organized.

AT Politics
Their politics disad is racistThe link is based on opposition to welfare that is itself
grounded in racismThey ask you to endorse a racist policy because people wont
like it because they have racist stereotypes of welfare
Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
Part II.A demonstrates how discussions of the

welfare system and welfare reform have been racialized, and how this
has spawned public resistance to providing welfare assistance due to pervasive racism in the United
States. Racist assumptions have turned public opinion and policy against providing the American poor
with welfare benefits as the image of its primary beneficiaries changed from deserving, chaste white widows to lazy, never-married black
baby-makers.1"6 As welfare recipients became racialized as black, standard rhetoric changed to implicitly blame unwed welfare mothers for the
impoverished conditions in which they and their families live and, consequently, for societal problems that often stem from poverty.' 7 Indeed,
Charles Murray, author and Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, once declared, "[I]llegitimacy is the single most important social
problem of our time-more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, or homelessness, because it drives everything else."' 8 In
essence, as Part II.A will show, the darker the welfare mother becomes, the more proponents of welfare reform argue that welfare mothers are
poor as a result of their own moral failures, specifically their failure to attach themselves to the fathers of their children through marriage, and
thus do not deserve public aid. Part II.B examines the marriage promotion provisions of PRWORA and H.R. 240 within a post-bellum context,
and shows that a primary goal of such provisions is to rein in "uncivilized" black welfare mothers and correct the broad range of problems that
policymakers argue spring from their deviant choice to remain single and place an unwarranted economic and social strain on the general public.
9 In other words, the proposed solution for the welfare crisis, or rather for welfare mothers' dependency on the government, has increasingly
become the private remedy of marriage, which reformers insist is needed to help contain the burdens that stem from the deviant behavior of single
black mothers; this argument is strikingly similar to post-bellum policymakers' misguided argument that marriage was the key to instilling
industriousness among former slaves. 1 0

The present system is an extension of post bellum slave codes


Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
Today's marriage cure to poverty in the United States is nearly identical in form to the post-bellum efforts
to marry off disadvantaged black women with children, although proposals like H.R. 240 are targeted at
modern outsiders instead of former slaves. Both "cures" to poverty suggest that all societal problems
would be resolved if unruly outsiders would simply behave in a civilized manner-in other words, if they
would conform to traditional white American culture by getting married and accepting their proper roles
as breadwinning husbands and economically dependent wives. If one of the primary purposes in
effectuating a cure to poverty is to ensure that children in poor families are cared for and educated-both
primary purposes of PRWORA and H.R. 2403 3 -then the government should support and protect
alternative parenting partnership agreements that have been proven to aid in the upbringing of healthy
children.3
"

AT WE read Black authors


The fact that they have black authors is irrelevantThere is a long history of black
advocates endorsing oppressive racist structures
Onwuachi-Wilig 5 Angela Onwuachi-Willig is the Charles and Marion Kierscht Professor of Law at
the University of Iowa, December 2005 The Return of the Ring: Welfare Reform's Marriage Cure as the
Revival of Post-Bellum Control http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1281&context=californialawreview
A significant segment of the black community has actually embraced the widespread campaign for the
marriage cure. Much like their postbellum counterparts who rushed to marry to prove their eligibility for
rights given to free white citizens and attempted to enforce traditional gender roles by turning in Blacks
who failed to abide by marital norms and laws and like post-bellum black religious figures who stressed
the importance of marriage'22' a number of Blacks today, especially religious leaders, vigorously defend
marriage as one means of saving black communities and society as a whole. 223 For example, during the
2004 presidential campaign, black religious leaders across the nation joined President Bush and his
supporters in taking an aggressive stand to insulate marriage against gays and lesbians,224 whom H.R.
240 excludes from its proposed marriage programs. 225 Reverend Walter E. Faunroy, a minister at New
Bethel Baptist Church in northwest Washington, D.C., described part of the reason for his opposition to
same-sex marriage by proclaiming, "As an African American whose people have not yet recovered from a
form of slavery that was based on the destruction of the family, I believe we do not need any more
confusion about what a marriage is and what a family is. '2 26 Similar to black newspapers that pushed
for marriage among former slaves as a means of proving their worthiness as free members of society,227
and to black church leaders who told newly freed black women that it was essential to fulfill their roles as
dutiful wives, 228 today's black church leaders have been at the forefront of sponsoring marriage
promotion programs and conferences since President Bush announced his "Healthy Marriage Initiative" in
2002.229

AT: Welfare Fraud Turn


Aff not the key link - Biometrics surveillance solves
Peterson 12 [Julia-is a writer that specializes in areas of technology, education and business, 1/23/12, Handbook of Surveillance
Technologies, Third Edition, https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1466554134, Date Accessed: 7/9/15]Kruger

fraud losses to retailers and financial institutions were estimated to be around $10 billion a
year by the mid-_1990s. Welfare and insurance fraud was also prevalent, particularly medical insurance fraud. One of the
ways in which people were defrauding welfare' and insurance providers was by using multiple identities.
The use of advanced copier machines to counterfeit negotiable notes (checks, food stamps, coupons, etc.) was also
increasing. Discovery and conviction rates for these crimes had traditionally been low. Signature verification has traditionally been used to verify contracts,
Check

documents, and negotiable items, but signature verification and handwriting analysis are hit-and- miss. Not everyone is good at interpreting or recognizing signatures,
not everyone writes his or her signature consistently, and many cashiers simply fail to check the signatures on checks and credit cards .

Biometrics has
been seen as a way to deter fraud , as well as a way to detect it_ once it has occurred, and as a means to
apprehend the perpetrators and prove fraud in a courtroom. By the late 1990s, a number of banks began
using fingerprint identification systems for noncustomers depositing or cashing checks. Again, this brings up
questions about the erosion of privacy. A further reason for promoting biometrics identification was the increasing
prevalence of electronic transactions. Through computer networks, it was possible to create contracts and enact financial transactions, but it was
difficult to authenticate the source and signer of these documents. Because of the potential for profit that is inherent in conducting transactions very quickly, business
agents wanted ways to bypass signatures that were sent by courier or postal service. Developers

biometrics as a solution to these problems.

and e-business proponents saw

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