By Kay Cook, Adrienne Byrt, Terese Edwards, Ashlea Coen

This report draws on the experiences of 675 single mothers who have engaged with the Australian child support system. It reveals how violence is the backdrop to women’s engagement within each stage of the child support process and the compounding impact of violence and poverty. The report makes four recommendations that would reduce the capacity of the child support system to be weaponised. Child support, despite its straightforward and important aim of transferring payments between separated households, is regarded as a complex area of policy and a ‘black box’ in which there is a lack of data on how the system operates. The system’s opacity means that parents’ experiences are largely unknown – particularly for half of the caseload who transfer payments privately. Policy and service blind spots and loopholes allow harmful behaviour perpetrated through the child support system to go undetected and unaccounted for. The lack of evidence on the harms that the system enables in turn perpetuates the myth that child support is a benign administrative process. The recommendations in this report are a direct result of the survey findings and are intended to: bring about meaningful improvements;empower women with autonomy and choice that is directed by what they want and require for their family; andcreate a system that is safe for women to engage in.

Recommendations

Delink family payments from child support by eliminating the Maintenance Income Test.Co-design family violence processes within the child support system to recognise the high rates of violence experienced by system users.Move all child support collections back into the Australian Tax Office.Make all payment debts owed to and enforced by the Commonwealth.

Hawthorn, VIC: Swinburne University of Technology, 2024. 97p.

By Carolina Sampó, Nicole Jenne, Marcos Alan Ferreira

This article analyzes the criminal governance exercised by the Mexican criminal organ­ization Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), contributing to the scarce information available on this topic. Specifically, we ask how the CJNG has exercised territorial control to ensure the operation of its businesses, mostly concentrated in the production and sale of illegal drugs. Based on a small number of existing studies and publicly available information, we argue that the CJNG relies on a dual system of territorial control consisting of the prioritization of violent coercion vis-à-vis its opponents together with a discourse of protecting Mexicans sustained by selected initiatives to provide security and other basic services to the population to gain legitimacy. This combination has allowed the cartel to grow and expand rapidly over the last decade. 

Revista Científica General José María Córdova,  21(43), 647-665.2023