Guilt and Gingerbread

Douglas Curtis

There are some mothers, and fathers too, who don't have to worry about the outcome of the tax credits/family allowance squabble. They are the ones without a marital partner to ' rip-off ' the welfare benefits and more often than not it's their children who are 'rippedoff ' by local authority social workers.

The circumstances which lead to the creation of a singleparent family are as varied as the situations in which the hapless parents find themselves discriminated against. Young widows or widowers struggling to bring up a family and hold down a job, unmarried mothers facing economic deprivation and social ostracism, separated and divorced persons recovering from the trauma which so often accompanies the break-up of a marriage, and the wives of men who have been sent to prison are all faced with similar problems. Their degree of moral guilt or innocence varies but one thing they all have in common is that their sense of isolation tends to lead to a lack of selfconfidence and a withdrawal from social life.

Because so little research has been done no one knows the true extent of the problem but the growth of voluntary agencies to deal with it is a sure indication that it exists on a large scale. In Bristol alone six voluntary agencies have full-time workers trying to combat effects and one young YWCA worker, at least, has no doubts about where the blame lies: The council's housing policy reates problem areas like the ones we have in St Paul's, Easton and Montpelier. There's a lot of voluntary agency effort with very little overlap but we have to deal With a large number of cases every week. One of the worst problems is homelessness but the Housing Department are reluctant to accept women as tenants even when their

rent is guaranteed by Social Security. It's part of the whole pattern of sex-discrimination and mothers without husbands suffer from it more than most. All the weight is stacked against these women anyway and unless they follow society's moral code to the letter they and their children can become veritable outcasts. There's a lot of inter-departmental buckpassing in the Social Services, too, and the Social Security people are always spying on women to see if they are cohabiting.

The motivation behind council policy is very clear. If all the problem families, and those who are unacceptable elsewhere on social or moral grounds, can be drawn into certain 'localities they are easily contained and can do little damage to the amenities of other, more prosperous, areas. The fact that this policy results in the creation of ghetto areas and that blameless women and children are made to suffer severe deprivation seems not to concern some of the local councillors whom one women described as "the fat cats who sit under Bristol's unicorns."

The problem of homeletsness has manifested itself in the recent spate of ' squatting ' in Bristol and one summons, taken out by a large property company in London, sought eviction orders against a pregnant woman and a six-month-old child. The unborn baby was not named in the actioa,... presumably because it was impossible to determine its sei. In another case, a prisoner's wife and her two children were threatened with eviction from a Councilsponsored hostel two days before Christmas because the Department of Health and Social Security and the local Social Services Department were haggling over which department should meet the nightly charge of £1.50. In that case the children would have been taken into the care of the local authority, at a cost far in excess of accommodating the whole family, and the mother would have been left to fend for herself. Only an uproar among voluntary social workers caused the Council to think again.

Homelessness is, of course, not the only problem singleparent families have to face and the phenomenon is not peculiar to Bristol. House prices everywhere have rocketed upwards in recent years and it is now virtually impossible for a woman, any woman, to get a mortgage unless she enjoys a very high income. Most end up 1:•; paying extortionate rents for sub-standard rooms in deprived areas, living on social security and facing the humiliation of seeing their children grow up without proper nutrition or adequate schooling. Poor areas tend to have a high pupil/ teacher ratio and a shortage of educational resources. They are also short on nursery schools and working mothers without a husband find it impossible to care properly for their children.

The stress can prove too much for many distraught mothers and is at least partly responsible for the 'battered baby' syndrome. Modern living is stressful enough for the most stable and well-adjusted among us so should we really apportion blame to the tired, over wrought mother, faced with a fractious, inconsolable child, who gives in to her baser instincts? Such women deserve our sympathy and help, not our condemnation, but all too often they are reluctant to seek help and even shrink from acknow ledging that they have a problem by withdrawing further inside themselves. Perhaps their best hope for the future lies in the existence of an organisation calling itself Gingerbread.

With a London office and local groups springing up all over the country, Gingerbread attempts to promote self-help in a way that breaks down the barriers of isolationism and restores self-confidence. One of the latest groups to form is just seven months old and Jackie Bates, the organiser, told me:

The problems of single parent families are not peculiar to working mothers from deprived backgrounds, although they are obviously a very large element. Here in Cambridge we have over fifty members and they all come from roughly the same social class: well-educated ..working mothers who have suddenly found themselves thrown into the unfamiliar situation of not being able to rely on their husbands' support.

We are aw'ar that there must be many others in the city who could benefit from joining us. Every time we advertise in the local news

paper we get ten or twelve replies. There must be hundreds of other lonely women but their own lack of confidence makes it difficult to offer them help and the ones who need it most are not the sort who respond to newspaper advertisements. Then, of course there's the problem of baby-sitters. Lonely women don't have many friends who can look after their children whilst they attend meetings.

No lonely or deprived mother, whatever her social class and upbringing, should be afraid to approach Jackie Bates. She is a pleasant, friendly woman whose own experience has made her only too aware of the problems they have to face:

We try to build self-confidence by mutual support. Most of our members were very withdrawn to start with, especially if it meant going out in mixed company. We encourage them to mix more and already it's showing results. We also arrange trips and outings for the children so that they realise they're not the only ones with only one parent.

In Cambridge, as opposed to the situation facing voluntary groups in some other parts of the country, the Gingerbread group enjoys a co-operative working relationship with the Social Services and other council departments. They have developed a system of mutual reference to deal with fringe difficulties but, as elsewhere, the real problems remain. It's difficult to rebuild selfconfidence when you haven't a decent home to bring your children up in, impossible to retain your self-respect when the Social Security payments don't run to an occasional new dress. Deprivation tends to be cumulative and only a massive concentration of resources on the problem areas can offer a solution to their difficulties.

As long as we all demand higher wages to pay for our stereo equipment and new cars, as long as prices continue to rise and inflation threatens to burst through the ceiling, the people on low and fixed incomes will be the ones to suffer. The need for more houses, better schools, hospitals and social services demands a new order of priorities in social spending and the distribution of wealth.

The whole of society must share the burden of guilt for our deprived minorities. It is the strongest trades unions who command the largest pay increases for their members, the richest shareholders who receive the highest returns on their investments. Justice demands that blameless women and children should not be forced to suffer because they have no economic power. Unless we give real meaning to the Welfare State the guilt on the gingerbread will turn the whole cake stale.