Putting Teeth Into Child-Support Law

A little-known $3-billion deficit damages the lives of people who are too young to vote or start a political action committee. This is the amount of child support that is awarded by courts but never paid each year for children in as many as 2-million female-headed families, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A tough new federal law that took effect Oct. 1, the Child Support Enforcement Amendments of 1984, is designed to change this situation. All states must establish laws and enforcement procedures that are in compliance with the new federal law.

Among the provisions of the new law are that all states must establish tested enforcement procedures such as wage withholding, expedited legal processes, improved enforcement of interstate cases and other systems for enforcing support orders. Wage withholding is required whenever a parent falls behind by the amount of one month’s payment.

Imposing Liens

Other enforcement procedures include:

--States must provide for collection of overdue support from state income tax refunds.

--States must be able to impose liens against real and personal property for overdue support where appropriate.

--States must have procedures for requiring security bond or other guarantee from parents with a pattern of overdue support.

The law also provides for states to report delinquencies to credit bureaus and has federal funding incentives to encourage interstate enforcement.

California has been a leader in some aspects of enforcing child-support payments, but does not yet meet the requirements of the new federal law. It currently requires wage attachment when child support is two months behind, and not all judges enforce this.

Network of Groups

To monitor compliance with the new law nationally, the Washington-based Children’s Foundation and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund announced that they have joined forces in a new Child Support Enforcement Watch. Among the plans for the project are to establish a national resource bank on child support, a system for monitoring the law on a state-by-state basis--with a litigation strategy if necessary--and a network of groups to work for state and national policy changes.

“Women who are raising their children alone have new legal mechanisms to ensure that the financial responsibilities are shared by both parents,” said Marsha Levick, legal director of the NOW-LDEF, in the organizations’ announcement of Enforcement Watch. “We intend to monitor the law and take necessary actions to make sure the statute is enforced and women know their rights.”

“Few women know this new law exists,” said Kathy Bonk, who is also with NOW-LDEF. “I think if you asked the average woman if she knew there was a new way to get child support, she’d say no.”

Bonk said that the Enforcement Watch has not yet developed information on the compliance of California or other states, and the project will take time as states have been given four months after their next legislative sessions to begin to bring their laws into compliance--for some as late as 1987.

“We will be looking at those states that claim to be in compliance and we will be suing,” she said. “It is also hard to say what will happen now that Mrs. (former Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret M.) Heckler is gone. This (child-support enforcement) was a pet project of hers.”

The foundation and NOW used the term child-support crisis to describe current findings in the field. It is estimated that 80,000 fewer families would be in poverty if they received their child-support payments. On average, those who receive court-ordered payments receive only about half of what is due.

Persistent Unwillingness

However, collection is only a part of the problem. There appears to be a persistent unwillingness on the part of many men to help support the households headed by their ex-wives. There may be as many reasons for this as there are reasons for divorce, but it appears that neither financial ability nor lack of interest in children are factors in whether fathers pay support. A major study in the field conducted by Lenore Weitzman at Stanford University found that high-income men were as likely as low-income men to be delinquent and also that there was no relationship between the frequency of a father’s visits to his children and his payments.

Amounts of court-ordered child support (the average in 1983 was $2,290 for a year) tend to be less than half of the cost of rearing a child, and not enough to even cover day care.

In addition, by no means do all mothers receive a legal order for child support, and obtaining such an order appears to be related to race and class. According to the compilation of figures released by the Census Bureau in July, 67% of white women are awarded child support, but only 41% of Latina women and 34% of black women. There is also a link between level of education and awarding of child support, which indicates that the women least equipped to earn a good living are also the least likely to be getting help in supporting their children--71% of women with four years or more of college and 61% of women with four years of high school receive child support awards, but only 41% of women with less than a high school education are awarded support.

The new federal law provides mechanisms to address some of these issues. It provides that governors will appoint state commissions to oversee child-support enforcement systems with broad representation from the groups most affected, and it says that to assist judges and other officials, states must develop guidelines on appropriate support amounts for children.