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The National Women's Law Center (NWLC) and the Center on Fathers, Families, and Public Policy (CFFPP) released a report this week from their collaborative initiative, Reaching Common Ground. The collaboration is an ongoing series of discussions funded by the Ford Foundation with the purpose of bringing together the potentially conflicting agendas of low-income fathers and mothers to find commonality on issues facing low-income families. The report, Family Ties: Improving Paternity Establishment Practices and Procedures for Low-Income Mothers, Fathers and Children, addresses issues specific to paternity establishment. The report makes the following conclusions:
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) increased federal pressure on states to establish paternity and collect child support. States have responded with an increasingly informal procedure to establish paternity. This more casual process may lead parents to overlook the serious implications of paternity establishment. Participants agreed that a process that does not ensure that paternity is established for the right father can be harmful to all family members, particularly since the collected child support is usually retained by the state.
Under PRWORA, low-income women must assign rights to child support to the state as a condition of receiving welfare benefits. This assignment allows the state to collect and retain child support in order to repay the cost of providing public assistance to the family. The report recommends that, with the goal of maximizing the income of poor families, the state should rescind the required assignment of child support to the state for women on welfare. At the very least, states should pass through and disregard support collected to the mother instead of retaining it. Such a measure will ensure that child support is economically beneficial to children and give low-income fathers more incentive to cooperate with the formal child support system.
To receive federal assistance, a woman on welfare must disclose the name of the father. Participants agreed that the decision to establish paternity and pursue support should be made by the family rather than the state. Forced paternity establishment often undermines informal arrangements of families in which the father is already offering economic and emotional support.
Since the paternity establishment and child support process leads to forced legal contact between mother and father, in cases of domestic violence more women need access to the good cause exemption from child support cooperation requirements.
Low-income mothers and fathers, and the social service staff who are working with them need to be educated on the full range of implications of paternity establishment, including custody and visitation rights and possible consequences on immigration status.
For parents who choose to establish paternity, the procedure should be accessible and easy. The state should work to facilitate, rather than force paternity establishment.
The paternity establishment procedure should be fair to both parents. Considering the significant implications that paternity establishment has for low-income men and their families, at a minimum the following should be ensured: a procedure for rescission of paternity that is as accessible and simplified as that of paternity establishment, more conservative default judgments that are reserved for the parent who is purposely avoiding the paternity establishment process, and free genetic testing for low-income fathers contesting paternity.
Future reports of the Reaching Common Ground Initiative will address the setting and modification of child support awards, child support enforcement, and custody and visitation for low-income families. The full report can be obtained by clicking on the following link Reaching Common Ground Family Ties: Improving Paternity Establishment Practices and Procedures for Low-Income Mothers, Fathers and Children or from NWLC at http://www.nwlc.org/.
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