A comparative view of family policy(unfinished) Flashcards
China’s One Child Policy
The goverment’s population control policy has aimed to discourage couples from having more than one child. The policy is supervised by workplace family planning committees; women have to seek permission to become pregnant. People who comply get extra benefits, e.g. free child healthcare and higher tax allowance. They also get educational and living priority. Couples who break this must pay a fine and women are pressured to undergo sterilisation.
Communist Romania
In the 80s introduces a series of policies to try to drive up the birth rate. It restricted contraception and abortion, set up infertility treatment centres, made divorce more difficult, lowered the legal age to marriage to 15. Unmarried adults and childless couples had to pay extra 5% income tax.
Democratic societies
The family is a private sphere of life in which government does not intervene, expect when things go wrong e.g. child abuse.
Nazi family policy
In the 30s the state pursued a twofold policy. It encourage the healthy and supposedly ‘racially pure’ to breed a ‘master race’ e.g. restricting access to abortion and contraception. Official policy sought to keep women out the workforce and confine them to ‘children, kitchen and church’ to perform their biological role. The state compulsory sterilised 375,000 disabled people that it deemed unfit to breed.
What is meant by Social Policy?
Social policy refers to the plans and actions of state agencies, such as health and social services, the welfare benefits system, schools and other public bodies.
What are policies based on?
-Based on laws introduced by the government providing the framework within these agencies to operate.
-Most social policies affect families in some way or other such as laws directly aimed at families e.g. marriage and divorce, abortion and contraception etc.
The perspective on families and social policies
-What is the functionalist perspective on family and social policies?
Functionalists see society as built on harmony and consensus and free from major conflicts.
They see the state as acting in the interests of society as a whole. Functionalists view policies as helping families to perform their functions more effectively.
What does Fletcher argue in terms of the functionalist perspective on family & social policy?
Fletcher argues that the introduction of health, education and housing polices in the years since the industrial revolution has gradually led to the development of a welfare state that supports the family in performing its functions more effectively.
Give an example to support Fletcher’s argument:
For instance, the existence of the NHS means that with the help of medical professionals, the family today is better able to take care of its members when they are sick.
What are the criticisms of the functionalist perspective?
It assumes that all members of the family benefit equally from social policies, whereas feminists argue that policies often benefit men at the expense of women.
-The functionalist perspective also presumes there is a ‘march of progress’, however Marxists argue that policies can reverse progress, such as cutting welfare benefits to poor families.
What is Donzelot’s view on policing the family:
Rather than a consensus view of policy as benefitting the family, Donzelot has a conflict view of society and views policy as a form of state power and control over families.
What is Michael Foucault’s (1976) concept of surveillance?
Foucault sees power not just as something held by the government or state, bus as diffused throughout society and found within all relationships.
-Foucault sees professionals such as doctors and social workers as exercising power over their clients by using their expert knowledge to turn them into ‘cases’ to be dealt with.
How does Donzelot apply Foucault’s ideas to the family?
-He argues that social workers, health visitors and doctors use their knowledge to control and change families.
-Surveillance is not targeted equally on all social classes. Poor families are more likely to be seen as ‘problem’ families and the root cause of crime and anti-social behaviour.
-These are the families that professionals target for ‘improvement.’
What does Rachel Condry note in relation to family and social policy?
-The state may seek to control and regulate family life by imposing compulsory Parenting Orders through the courts.
-Parents of young offenders, truants or badly behaved children may be forced to attend parenting classes to learn the ‘correct’ way to bring up their children.
How does Donzelot reject the functionalist march of progress view that social policy creates a better, freer or more humane society?
He sees social policy as a form of state control over the family. By focusing on the micro level of how ‘caring professions’ act as agents of social control through their surveillance of families, Donzelot shows the importance of professional knowledge as a form of power and control.
Why do Marxists and Feminists reject Donzelot’s view?
For failing to identify clearly who benefits from such policies of surveillance. Marxists argue that social policies generally operate in the interests of the capitalist class, while feminists argue that men are the main beneficiaries.
What do the New Right favour in relation to the family?
Strongly favour the conventional or ‘traditional’ nuclear family based on a married, heterosexual couple whose roles are dictated by the domestic division of labour, making them naturally self-reliant and able to provide for its members.
What do the New Right fear in regards to greater family diversity?
They believe greater family diversity threatens the dominance of the conventional family and increases social issues such as crime and welfare dependency.
State two(+one more) argument Brenda Almond poses to support the New Right perspective:
*Laws making divorce easier undermines the idea marriage as a lifelong commitment between man and woman.
*The introduction of gay and lesbian civil partnerships sends out the message that the state no longer sees heterosexual marriage as superior to other domestic set-ups.
*Tax laws discriminate against conventional families with a sole breadwinner. They cannot transfer the non-working partner’s tax allowances to the working partner, so they tend to pay more tax than dual-earner couples, each of whom has a tax allowance.
What does Murray argue that welfare benefits offer?
Murray argues that welfare benefits offer ‘perverse incentives’- that is, they reward irresponsible or anti-social behaviour.
Give 3 examples of the ‘perverse incentives’ welfare benefits offer:
*If fathers see that the state will maintain their children, some of them will abandon their responsibilities towards their families.
*Providing council housing for unmarried teenage mothers encourages young girls to become pregnant.
*The growth of lone-parent families, encouraged by generous benefits, means more boys grow up without a male role model or authority figure. This lack of paternal authority is responsible for the increasing crime rate among young males.
Give 3 examples of the solutions the New Right would use to tackle this issue:
*Cutting welfare benefits would mean that taxes could also be reduced, both these changes would give fathers more incentive to work and to provide for their families.
*Denying council housing to unmarried teenage mothers would remove a major incentive to become pregnant at a young age.
*New Right also advocate policies to support the traditional nuclear family e.g. taxes which favour married couples, make absent fathers responsible for their children.
