RESEARCH
Felicity An Guest advocates for social justice and the protection of women and children.
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Felicity founded a Facebook group “Child Maintenance Difficulties in South Africa” in 2014 to provide a free platform for parents, particularly mothers to become educated and informed on their children’s rights to financial support. Through the group, Felicity shares information on maintenance, economic abuse, coercive control and gives access to various financially empowering services for women. Currently the private Facebook group has over 84 000 members. Felicity has built a credible following on Linkedin and her personal Facebook page.
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Much research has been conducted covering various subject matter related to maintenance and single mothering on the Facebook group by postgrad students doing Honours, Masters and Doctorates.
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“My vision is for women to live in a world where women are safe, there is equity and equality and women can take up space and use their voices and femininity to bring balance to the world.”
Felicity An Guest
ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL ABUSE
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There are many layers and impacts on mothers and children not getting financial support. Intentionally not supporting one’s child is child neglect and abuse and it should be a priority of the Department of Justice to enforce maintenance.
Historic gender roles and norms are still very prevalent, men being the providers and women the caretakers in spite of the landscape changing fundamentally.
From my observations and research on my group maintenance is often used to coerce, manipulate and punish the mother which has a direct impact on the child whether the parents were married, living together or had a causal relationship, children become collateral damage. Most men still benefit from economic privilege, they have higher paid jobs, higher employment rate, less unpaid labour; money is the most powerful tool to abuse women post relationship and there is not enough research on this aspect of financial abuse. In fact there is uncertainty in academia and civil society organisations if economic abuse and financial abuse are the same or different as they are used interchangeably. I believe financial abuse is a form of economic abuse and not the same, it requires a specific legal definition as it is currently interpreted by individuals and clouded with their own understanding from their own bias which makes the application and enforcement difficult.
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Financial abuse is not considered a severe form of domestic violence and therefore not given the same attention as other better-known forms of abuse, it is a silent but devastating form of gender-based violence, it is seldom done in isolation and it is normalised. The historical gender roles and economic exclusion of women still has deep-rooted implications for women and children.
I made submissions to the GBV steering committee unsolicited, who were drafting the National Strategic Plan out of concern of the inclusion and understanding of the impacts of financial abuse, of which some were included in the final draft. On receiving the draft I was disappointed with the limited inclusion and understanding of financial abuse, particularly through maintenance. The gains made are stepping stones to build upon for greater inclusion and change.
A 2020 poll of 1526 participants indicates that over 50% of primary caregivers are not receiving any form of financial contribution or maintenance from the other parent
Felicity An Guest
THE LINK TO POVERTY
There are over 13 million children who receive child grants of R510, approximately 70 % of 19 million children grow up without their fathers who pay little or no child support according to the latest figures from Stats SA.
The abject food poverty baseline is R735pm per person; it is obvious that the child grant of R510 is insufficient to provide children with the absolute basic necessities to reach their full potential as prescribed in the constitution. The most vulnerable and marginalised are being pushed further into poverty from which they will probably never escape, women in the lower and middle-income groups are becoming poorer as they battle to provide for their children on their own against rising food, housing and education costs. If the government were to enforce maintenance it would go some way in achieving its commitment to alleviating poverty by 2030.
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Mothers are dependent on family and friends to assist them in providing the absolute basic requirements for their children; children are dependent on community and school feeding programs for their only meal and it was no more obvious than when South Africa went into lockdown and children were unable to attend school for most of 2020, it exposed their vulnerability and dependency.
COVID IMPACT
The Covid pandemic revealed many masks, the irony is that some masks were not protecting citizens but were used to hide the systemic and systematic failures. Family courts were open but accessing them was difficult due to outbreaks and lockdown regulations, had the courts been digitised access would have been immediate and safe as it was in other countries.
Covid certainly had many casualties but there were many who used lockdown as an excuse not to attend court or to pay maintenance. The Department of Justice itself was perpetuating injustice by not resolving unpaid maintenance garnisheed for up to seven months while the money was accumulating interest in their bank account; mothers had to borrow money to get to court and were constantly told the system is down without any resolutions offered.
There were several protests held at the East London court, including mine. On my return to Cape Town we served the department with legal notice giving them 7 days to resolve the problems otherwise we would launch a class action, payments were mostly resolved within 3 weeks.
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The was a maintenance relief benefit for a six-month period but instead of the onus being placed on the person who is meant to pay maintenance to apply, it was placed on the primary parent who already does most of the unpaid labour, not just in trying to enforce maintenance but also in child care. The primary parent had to secure food under extremely difficult circumstances, had to provide education for those fortunate enough to have access to online schooling, most of the learners were not able to due to the schools being under-resourced as well as the parents not having internet access. The mothers who were fortunate enough to work from home had to work, facilitate education, provide meals and do the normal parenting duties without physical and financial assistance from the father, the unequal responsibilities exposed.