The right has chosen its scapegoat – the single mum. And she will bleed
The danger of the single woman and the threat she poses to civilisation is an ancient narrative
The facts about single mothers read nothing like the righteous narrative. Photograph: Kelly Redinger / Design Pics Inc
The rightwing press and politicians have pondered the burning of Poundland and delivered their verdict. They have found the cause of chaos, and will punish the guilty for shaking the foundations of Footlocker. Who brought us here, to this terrible place? Single mothers, yah.
The rhetoric is inspired by The Exorcist. In the Daily Mail Melanie Phillips wrote: "Most of these children come from lone-mother households … Successive generations are being brought up only by mothers, through whose houses pass transitory males by whom these women have yet more children." This is a scene of sexuality depravity.
Max Hastings, also in the Daily Mail, wrote: "They are essentially wild beasts … Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp." This one has bears.
Never mind that Phillips has no idea what percentage of the rioting children were from single-parent households. Never mind that the only single mother Hastings is on record as meeting is Princess Diana – although, to be fair, he didn't like her, either.
Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday, meanwhile, would like all benefits stopped for new unmarried mothers, although he does not say what should happen next in his utopia. This is the language of sadism; in fact, they all sound like Grand Inquisitors or Witchfinder Generals from Clapham. Hitchens is crazy, you may say, so remote in his Manichean universe that he deserves pity. But he has a lot of readers, and not all of them read him for comedy.
The danger of the single woman and the threat she poses to civilisation is an ancient narrative. Four hundred years ago we burned such creatures; 50 years ago they were consigned to homes for unmarried mothers or mental institutions, and deprived of their children. So what we have today is slightly better, but of the same vindictive hue.
The rhetoric can be subtle. The Sun wrote a piece about a very fat woman last week, and casually dropped the fact that she is a single mother into the second sentence. See the cause of her depravity and vast bulk! The phrase "single mother" is followed by a trail of associated words, from sexual immorality to council flat, by way of obesity, benefit scrounger, and fags. If she works, she doesn't love her children. If she doesn't, she is a drain on the state.
It is time to smash some myths. I am the child of a single mother and I am not like a polar bear, even if Max Hastings is on deadline and so fell into the world's stupidest metaphor, like a polar bear hurtling into a crevasse. We must have some facts about single mothers, amid all this sub-biblical commentary.
Only 3% of single mothers are teenagers, according to the charity Gingerbread. The average age of the single mother is 37, and the majority (55%) had their children within marriage. That poster girl for the End of Days, the sperm-bandit teenage mother in search of a council house, is not representative. She is a mere sliver of data, nearly an urban myth.
Twenty-three per cent of British households with dependent children are single-parent households; only 8% of single parents are fathers. (Single fathers suffer nothing like the same social fate, although their practical problems are identical. In the playground, they are heroes.) There are 1.9 million single parents in Britain, caring for three million children. They have a disproportionate number of disabled children (34%) and a disproportionate number of disabilities and illnesses of their own (33%).
They are also disproportionately poor. It is one of the most repulsive tendencies of humans to blame the poor for bringing hell to earth, but we do it. Some 46% of single-parent families are below the poverty line, compared with 24% of families with two parents.
The single mother is no more work-shy than any other mother: 57% of single parents work, an increase of 12 percentage points since 1997, which explodes the rightwing lie that New Labour did nothing but harm. As soon as their children reach the age of 12, this figure rises to 71%, which is the also the national average for mothers in relationships. These are the facts. They read nothing like the righteous narrative. But the scapegoat has been chosen, and she will bleed.
David Cameron said in 2010: "To that single mother struggling and working her heart out for her children we can now say: 'We're on your side; we'll help you work; we will bring that injustice to an end.'" Yet this government is punishing single mothers, while fantasising about tax breaks for women with wall-to-wall nannies. They have cut childcare tax credits and, according to a study commissioned by Gingerbread, a single parent of two children working full-time on the minimum wage and paying £300 a week or more for childcare will lose around £1,620 a year. That is 13% of their gross income, and makes nonsense of the government's rhetoric that it wants to help single parents into work.
Without childcare provision, better jobs are closed to single mothers. Even so, the Welfare Reform Bill now going through parliament wants single mothers to look for work when their youngest child is five (it is now seven), or her benefits will be cut. Jobcentre Plus is supposed to ensure single parents are only sent for jobs during school hours, or nearby, but anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case. Why? Perhaps the rhetoric is to blame.
Then there is the cut in child benefit to higher-rate taxpayers, due to land in 2013. Two parents on £40,000 each will keep it. A single mother on £44,000 will lose it. To use the Child Support Agency (CSA) to chase fathers for unpaid maintenance will now cost £100 for working mothers; and if the CSA does collect on their behalf, it will take a cut of between 7% and 12%. We want an in-family solution, says the government. You could call that faith in the redemptive power of love. Or you could call it a tax on escaping an abusive relationship.
The government says it wants a return to the stable nuclear family. The 1950s-style marriage was stable, yes indeed, principally because women could not leave it. Germaine Greer wrote: "The illusion of stable family life was built on the silence of suffering women, who lived on what their husbands thought fit to give them, did menial work for a pittance … and endured abuse silently because of their children." It seems we are headed there again, hurting real women in the cause of a bringing a brittle fantasy to life.
Sometimes I ponder this sadism. Cameron is all Teflon and pouting now, but he was once a child who was sent to boarding school at seven. What did this do to his capacity for empathy? I asked a shrink about it once, and she said it would make you hyper-functional, but emotionally closed. That should have stayed his tragedy, but he went into politics and made it ours.
I do not know why single mothers are singled out for judgment by the rest. I suspect it is, in the end, the remnants of an ancient misogyny, damning women for failing in that most basic role – making men happy – and seeking independence for themselves. A sane government would provide cheap childcare, of course, and force companies to offer jobs with flexible working hours. But they are not in the business of solutions. They want punishment.
Suzanne Moore is away.
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