Mitch Wagner has a post up about mothers being indicted for “neglecting” their children when they come to harm. He mentions two cases. In the first, a mother was arrested and now faces 16 years in prison because when she left her children aged 1 and 9 at home to go to work at McDonalds, an arsonist burned her appartement down and killed them. Both children suffered from sickle cell anemia, which is only mentioned in the context of why the mother is supposedly guilty of neglect. Me, I wonder why there was no support to help her cope with two handicapped children.

In the second case, the mother of a 12 year old bully victim who committed suicide was actually convicted on one felony count of having put her child at risk by creating a home environment that was unhealthy and unsafe. It seems their home was filthy and disgusting: “witnesses during the trial testified that the conditions inside the house were a nightmare of dirty clothes, dishes and debris.” Which may be because the mother worked two jobs to make ends meet and the kid’s father was in prison. The kid frequently soiled himself to have an excuse to not go to school and escape the bullying and slept in a closet surrounded by knives to create a sense of safeness. Nobody but his mother was there for him, nobody cared else cared if he lived or died and yet, after the mother sued the school over the death of her son, she was the one arrested. It’s a fucking disgrace.

Mitch wonders why it’s only the mother who is blamed for these incidents, when in both cases the primary guilt for the childrens death lies with others. Where for example was the father of the first two children? Why did the school in the second case not stop the bullying? What is going on here?

Something that goes beyond just lousy luck, goes beyond being in a singular bad situation. Both these cases are just symptoms, logical outcomes of a rotten system. Dad’s away or in jail, mother has to work two jobs to make a living and has not support whatsoever to help her raise her children, because there are no support systems for her in place. She must work to feed her children but we also expect her to be “a good mother”. In the meantime, the socalled professionals in the school and social services systems neglect their duty, to the point of not just allowing but actually encouraging bullying in the case of the boy who committed suicide.

These women, like millions of other working class mothers in America actually have no choice. They do not have the luxury of childcare available to them and they certainly cannot afford to put their children above their jobs: if they did, they wouldn’t have a job anymore.

What you got here is an interlocking tangle of class, race and gender issues, all excaberating the situation these women got themselves in. First, despite several decades of emancipation, there’s still the default assumption that a mother is solely responsible for her children and the only one to blame if something goes wrong with them, a convenient scapegoat that lets others of the hook. Whatever choice these women made, it would’ve been wrong. If they don’t work they and their children don’t eat, if they do work they’re not taking care of their children.

Second, there is the class issue. If they’d been nice middle class women they would’ve had so many more options, so much more support systems to fall back upon and more importantly, they’d also had had the education to make use of them. It’s an automatic assumption in this sort of discussion that everybody knows how to claim their rights, deal with the city council/school system and make themselves heard. This is not the case. Quite often to claim even the minimum support you’re entitled to you have to make a nuisance of yourself, be persistent and know who to speak to. It helps if you also have a nice middle class accent, as I found out in my partner’s (who does have a nice middle class accent) dealings with the English social security system.

Finally, at least in the arson case there’s race. In spite of the happy “coulour blindness” of those who never have to worry about racism themselves, this does still play a role in how you are treated. Like your class, your race is either an automatic handicap or a unearned advantage. Especially when dealing with state bureaucracy.

All of which isn’t helped by cynical politicians making hay of family values, while refusing to actual help those families and in fact punish those single mothers who put their children above work. Welfare mothers being the lowest of the low, after all. What also doesn’t help is not educating people, especially not educating people about birth control.

This is not an easy problem to solve, partially so because there are large vested interests who don’t want an answer to this problem. The US economy and increasingly every other western economy needs a large, docile working class of disposable workers. Keeping single mothers working long weeks just to survive fits in nicely with this. After all, paying them enough to survive on just a regular job would cut too much into shareholders’ profits… Worse, an educated working class with some job security may turn out awfully militant.

It’s easy for me to say what needs to be doing. There needs to be money and resources available for single mothers so that they don’t have to make the choice between taking care of their children and working. Everybody should be able to earn a living wage for themselves and their children and not have to work eighty hours a week just to pay the rent. Everybody should be taught the skills to be able to deal with government bureaucracy, to survive in a modern society. Birth control should be freely available.

Easy to say, less easy to put into practise. But it can be done. There is no western society that doesn’t have the resources to put this into practise, if it wants to, But first it needs to want it. If you feel about this the same way as I do, get involved. Fight for a living wage, a decent social safety net and education. It’s worth it.