This book has sought to examine the nature, process and effects of child support law and policy in order to illustrate the norms that are expressed and reinforced therein. The assumption underpinning the analysis is that internationally child support systems reflect and reinforce social hierarchies, in this case on the basis of gender and class. As the analysis outlined in the preceding chapters revealed, for low-income women across countries, child support is organised in ways that buttress the interests of men and the masculine interests of the state. In this context, the analysis sought to understand child support as gendered governance practice and, in doing so, expose the mechanisms through which child support is used to manage and discipline single mothers, thus rendering child support largely ineffective when fathers do not pay voluntarily and willingly. While the contours of child support vary from country to country, there are several features – inaccessibility, inactivity and irresponsibility – that remain remarkably consistent.

Most significantly, child support rarely does what it says it does, rendering it an inactive and inefficient means of redistributing money to children or allowing them to share in both of their parents’ resources. Child support systems also typically contain design features that render them inaccessible. Judicial and administrative systems require mothers to have at least some combination of knowledge of the system, time to spend completing documentation or attending appointments and hearings, geographic access to offices, and sufficient evidence of their and their ex-partners’ circumstances. Herd and Moynihan (2018) describe such administrative burdens as limiting access to justice along existing social hierarchies. This book provides a high-level account of how gender and class, in particular, shape programme participants’ burdens and impose barriers to accessing and enacting the child support system. While I have provided the first analysis of the role of burdens in child support system functioning (Cook, 2021b), far more research – academic and government – is required in each country to understand how programme participants make their way through, are prevented from entering or fall out of the child support system. Given low-income women's already subordinate positions, existing child support systems should work harder to ensure women's inclusion rather than assuming that women's lack of engagement is voluntarily chosen.