Families And Social Policy Flashcards
Family policies: china’s one child policy
- the policy discourages couples from having more than one child
- women genes permission to try and get pregnant and there’s often a waiting list and quota for each family
- couples who comply get extra benefits eg free child healthcare and higher tax allowances
- an only child gets priority in education and housing later in life
- couples who break the agreement have to repay the allowances and pay a fine. Women also face pressure to undergo sterilisation after their first child
Family policies: communist Romania
The former communist government of Romania wanted to drive up the birth rate by
- restricted contraception and abortion
- set up infertility treatment centres
- made divorce harder
- lowered the legal age of marriage to 15
- made unmarried adults and childless couples oh an extra 5% income tax
Family policies: nazi family policy
The state pursued a twofold policy:
- it encouraged the healthy and supposedly racially pure to breed a master race. Policies kept women out of work and confined them to children , kitchen, church
- it also compulsorily sterilised 375K disabled people that it deemed unfit to breed. They were then murdered in nazi concentration camps
Family policies: democratic societies
The family is a private sphere of life in which the government doesn’t intervene except when things go wrong eg child abuse
Functionalist perspective on families and social policy
- policies help families to perform their functions more effectively and make life better for their members
- Fletcher says health, education and housing policies led to the welfare state that supports the family in performing its functions more effectively
- the national health service means that the family is better able to take care of its sick members
Critiques of the functionalist perspective
- it assumes all members of the family benefit equally from social policies whereas feminists say policies often benefit men at the expense of women
- it assumes there is a march of progress with social policies steadily making life better. However Marxists say that policies can reverse progress eg by cutting welfare benefits to poor families
Donzelot: policing the family
- He sees policy as a form of state power and control over families
- He uses Foucault’s concept of surveillance. Focault sees power as not just for the government but diffused throughout society and found in all relationships
- Donzelot applied these ideas to the family and says social workers, health visitors and doctors use their knowledge to control and change families. This is the policing of families.
- surveillance is focused more on poor families who are seen as problems and the cause of crime and anti social behaviour
Criticisms of Donzelot
Marxists and feminists say he fails to identify who benefits from the policies of surveillance
- Marxists say that social policies operate in the interests of the capitalist class
- feminists argue that men are the main beneficiaries
New right perspective on family and social policy
State policies undermine the nuclear family. Almond argues that:
- laws making divorce easier undermine the idea of marriage
- civil partnerships for same security couples shows the state no longer sees hetero marriage as superior
- increased rights for unmarried cohabitants make cohabitation and marriage more similar which shows the state doesn’t see marriage as special or better
New right views on welfare policies
Murray says providing generous welfare benefits undermines the nuclear family and encourages deviant and dysfunctional family types that harm society. The benefits offer perverse incentives ie reward irresponsible, antisocial behaviour. They create a dependency culture which threatens
- the successful socialisation of the young
- the maintenance of the work ethic among men
The new rights solution
- policy must be changed with cuts in welfare spending and tighter restrictions on who is eligible for benefits.
- denying council housing to unmarried teenage mothers would remove an incentive to become pregnant when young
- policies which support the nuclear family eg making absent fathers financially responsible for their kids
- the less the state intervened in families, the better family life will be
Evaluation of the new right view
- feminists say it is an attempt to justify a return to the patriarchal nuclear family that oppressed women
- it wrongly assumes the nuclear family is natural rather than socially constructed
- Abbott and Wallace say that cutting benefits would drive poor families into greater poverty and make them even less self reliant
- they ignore the policies that support and maintain the conventional nuclear family rather than undermine it
Feminism: policy as self fulfilling prophecy
Land: social policies assume the ideal family is the nuclear family which affects the kind of policies governing family life. The effect of the policies reinforces that particular type of family at the expense of other types, creating a SFP. Therefore policy makes it harder for people to live in other family types which aren’t the one policymakers assume they live in
Feminism: policies supporting the patriarchal family
- tax and benefits policies may assume that husbands are the main wage earners which makes it impossible for wives to claim social security benefits in their own right, reinforcing their dependence on their husbands
- childcare
The gov pays for some childcare but it isn’t enough to allow parents to work full time. Also policies regarding school timetables make it hard for parents to work full rime - care for the sick and elderly
gov policies assume that the family will provide this care but it’s mainly women who do it which prevent them from working full time. Leonard says even where policies appear to support women, they may still reinforce the patriarchal family and act as a form of social control over women
Evaluation of feminism
- not all policies are directed at maintaining patriarchy eg equal pay and sex discrimination laws.
- rape writhing marriage was made a criminal offence in 1991
These policies improve the position of women in the family and wider society
