User:Jmha2016/sandbox

Update: 05/13/2019

I have modified the Criticism section to the following:

Criticism

Frances Fox Piven said that the problem with AFDC was not a problem with the welfare system, but with low-wage work:"Logically, but not in the heated and vitriolic politics created by the attack on welfare, a concern with the relationship of welfare to dependency should have directed attention to the deteriorating conditions of the low-wage labor market. After all, if there were jobs that paid living wages, and if health care and child care were available, a great many women on AFDC would leap at the chance of a better income and a little social respect.[55]"PRWORA has been accused of attempting to fight poverty by “controlling the reproductive capacity of women, compelling unmarried mothers to work outside the home, and coercing women into relations with men.”[49] Barbara Ehrenreich, a feminist political activist, has said that the bill was motivated by racism and misogyny, using stereotypes of lazy, overweight, slovenly, sexually indulgent and "endlessly fecund" African-American welfare recipients, and assumed that out-of-wedlock births were "illegitimate" and that only a male could confer respectability on a child. PRWORA dismissed the value of the unpaid work of raising a family, and insisted that mothers get paid work, "no matter how dangerous, abusive, or poorly paid"[56][57]

Three assistant secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mary Jo Bane, Peter B. Edelman, and Wendell E. Primus, resigned to protest the law.[58]According to Edelman, the 1996 welfare reform law destroyed the safety net. It increased poverty, lowered income for single mothers, put people from welfare into homeless shelters, and left states free to eliminate welfare entirely. It moved mothers and children from welfare to work, but many of them are not making enough to survive. Many of them were pushed off welfare rolls because they didn't show up for an appointment, because they could not get to an appointment for lack of child care, said Edelman, or because they were not notified of the appointment.[59][60]

Causes of poverty[edit]
Welfare reform efforts such as PRWORA have been criticized for focusing almost exclusively on individual failure and irresponsibility, especially among people of color, as factors leading to poverty.[61] However, there is no scholarly consensus on the etiology of poverty, and many theories focus instead on structural inequalities such as disparities in pay and hiring discrimination.[41] The concept of "personal responsibility" is further critiqued for its lack of consideration of familial responsibilities, such as caring for children and elderly parents, which are placed more heavily upon mothers.[41][62]

Propagating stereotypes[edit]
Many critics have argued that the PRWORA bases its reasoning on the stereotype of single black mothers who receive welfare, commonly known as the “welfare queen.” [49][63][61]The welfare queen is one who often deliberately and intentionally becomes pregnant in order to increase their welfare. The woman is envisioned as being lazy, uncaring of her children (who are also stereotyped as having been born out-of-wedlock), and unwilling to work.[49] This version of the woman is labelled as “undeserving” of their welfare.

Gendered and racial poverty[edit]
The bill has also been criticized for ignoring and not accommodating for the complexities of gender, color, and sexual preference discrimination within society that contribute to the poverty of people of color, women, and non-heterosexual people.

Diana Pearce, the director of the Center for Women’s Welfare, writes that poverty for women is fundamentally different from that for men, but welfare itself is created for poor men[64]. She asserts that women’s poverty is caused by two problems that are unique for women: the responsibility to provide all or most financial support for their children and the disadvantages they face in the labor market. In 1988, the average woman received 66 percent of the income of what an average man earned; the average female college graduate working a full-time job still learned less than the average male high school graduate.[65]

But the income disparity is not the only form of disadvantage that women face in the labor market. Many women are unable to obtain a full time job not just due to gender discrimination, but also because of unavailable, expensive, or inadequate day care.[65] This problem is only amplified when considering the issue of the segregation of women into underpaid work, limiting possibilities of economic growth[66].

Susan L. Thomas made similar arguments, stating that these disadvantages were created from masculinism. She argued that masculinism gives men more roles in the labor market, while reserving the responsibility of “family” and reproduction to (white) women, resulting in a loss of opportunities for promotions and pressure on women to prioritize their domestic duties and to work jobs that can accommodate for these duties[49]. She asserts that welfare systems, including PRWORA, were not made for women, because they have been created based on the male Breadwinner model, which believes that people are poor because they are jobless and the solution is to give them jobs. But because of the discrimination women faced, simply finding full-time jobs that paid enough money for independence from welfare is not easy for poor women, Thomas proclaimed and added, “for women it is not the lack of employment that leads to their disproportionately high rates of poverty, rather their poverty stems from the ideological consequences of a gender-biased structuring of the distribution of power and privilege.”[49] Thomas then criticized the bill for not taking all these factors into consideration when deciding who is “worthy” and “unworthy” of welfare.

Violation of universal human rights[edit]
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act has continuously been criticized for its violations of universal human rights. Susan L. Thomas, a professor at Hollins University, wrote the bill violates Articles 2, 5 and 16 of the Women’s Convention as it allows states to fail to “condemn discrimination in all its forms”, by promoting patriarchal, heterosexual marriage; discriminating against unmarried mothers and women of color; and infringing on women’s constitutional rights to privacy and procreation[49]. Gwendolyn Mink, an Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has criticized TANF for using marriage to “privatiz[ing] poverty, reaffirm[ing] patriarchy, and spotlight[ing] women of color as moral failures.”[61]

Violation of women's constitutional rights[edit]
PRWORA requires unmarried mothers to identify the father and receive child support from said father.[49] If mothers refuse to comply with these requirements, then their assistance grant is either reduced by at least 25 percent or withheld completely from them by their state.[67] The bill also confers the legal status of parent to the biological fathers, and require unmarried mothers to permit biological fathers to develop “substantial relationships” with their children and to have a claim on the rearing of their children[49][61]; this is the opposite of paternity law, which holds the “substantial relationship” a prerequisite to parental rights. These requirements have been criticized for violating women’s constitutional right to family privacy and their decisions about child-rearing and family life[68], and ignoring the danger that establishing a connection with an abusive father may cause for both the mother and her children.[61]

PRWORA requires states to submit a written documentation of their goals and strategies to reduce non-marital pregnancies and births, even offering a financial incentive of $20 million each to five states with the largest declines in their “illegitimacy ratios” and abortion rates.[69] This has resulted in states making abortions more inaccessible and legally punishing childbearing by not granting more assistance to families even after the number of children increases.[49]  This policy has been criticized for being a punitive system that violates the rights of both the women and their children by intruding on the mothers’ constitutional rights to procreation[70], privacy[71], and reproductive choice[72], which includes their decisions to be a parent[70][73] or not[72][74]; and penalizing mothers for exercising their right to have children. Susan L. Thomas has pointed out the bill fails to prove enough governmental interest warrants its child exclusionary policy and attempts to conserve money through the penalization of women who exercise their constitutional reproductive rights.[49]

Discrimination against unmarried women and non-heterosexual women[edit]
When the bill was passed, critics denounced the bill for promoting and enforcing heterosexual marriage[49], which they argued was made implicit in the bill itself as it states: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential constitution of a successful society, which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and well being of children[75]

The bill was also stated to discriminate against mothers “who parent[ed] without legal partners.”[49] Mothers who “encourage[d] the formation and maintenance of [heterosexual] two-parent families” did not have to work outside the home, even if them not working forced the family to continue to require state assistance. However, mothers who could not or did not want to find men to marry them were required to work outside the home, and unmarried mothers who had received state assistance for two months were required to perform community service[76]. It also required single mothers who had received up to twenty four months of financial assistance, consecutively or not, to work outside the home thirty hours a week, and penalized mothers who did not work thirty hours a week by reducing or terminating her benefits[49].

Critics have accused PRWORA for discriminating against unmarried women who have never been married, as they are required to “reveal the details of their children’s conception to state officials”, while divorced, unmarried women are exempt from submitting information, as PRWORA assumes the biological father of the children is the man to whom they were married to when the child was conceived[49]. This has been criticized for violating the women’s 14th Amendment right to make marital decisions without governmental interference (based on Loving v. Virginia) and coercing women into creating or maintaining relationships with the biological fathers; this interference also does not satisfy the heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause[49].

Strict regulations[edit]
PRWORA has been criticized for its terms, which permit all states to not assist people in poverty, even if they meet all the necessary criteria. It also does not offer additional federal funds to states that have depleted their block grant and contingency funds, thus leaving mothers and children (who meet the eligibility criteria) with no financial assistance.

States are granted more freedom to create regulations that are stricter than federal laws. This manifests in regulations that[49]:


 * Make women work outside the home sooner than is required
 * Create shorter working time limits than is required
 * Allow states to withhold cash benefits in cases where single mothers do not identify the biological father of her children
 * Discriminate households in which children are born while the mother is enrolled in welfare by not giving said households benefits
 * Withhold welfare from mothers whose children do not attend school without an explanation
 * Sanction households with adults younger than fifty-one who do not have and are not actively working to receive a high school diploma
 * Require drug tests of recipients
 * Enforce welfare regulations of former states for new state residents
 * Do not require states to provide cash benefits at all

Impeding access to higher education and employment[edit]
Diana Spatz, executive director of Lifetime, a statewide organization of low-income parents in California, advocates for the repeal of PRWORA because it prevents a woman from doing what she did prior to its passage: earn her bachelor's degree while supported by welfare.[77] Vanessa D. Johnson, a professor at Northeastern University, asserts that the implementation of PRWORA cut access for single mothers, namely African American single mothers, to attaining a higher education for themselves.[78] By creating time limits that force them into working without finishing a degree, Johnson says African American single mothers are left unable to better themselves through education. With education having such a strong correlation to higher wages, she considers it crucial that welfare policies allow for mothers to attend college in order to lift themselves out of poverty.

Another criticism placed on PRWORA by some scholars is that its transition to work provisions negatively affect the ability of low-income mothers enrolled in the program to find a job. Single mothers enrolled in TANF tend to have lower rates of literacy, and therefore finding employment that within the time frame of the "workfare" component becomes more difficult, or leads to underemployment.[79] Welfare-to-work programs have also been criticized for only offering training for low-wage work. An education-first approach has been proposed as an alternative that could provide welfare recipients with more options for employment. Although the incentivization of financial independence is a goal for both recipients and providers, many TANF enrollees feel disincentivized from finding paid work due to low pay and the instability of this transition.[80]

Varying rates of success[edit]
Critics of the law argue that poverty in America increased from 1979 onward after Reagan's presidential campaign criticized deficit spending[81] and that the temporary large reduction in the number of people collecting welfare was largely a result of steady and strong economic growth in the years following enactment of the law.[82]Political scientist Joe Soss questions the definition of success, asking whether "success", as measured by caseload reduction, was merely a political construction for policy makers to easily claim credit in front of their constituencies. In analyzing the effects of welfare reform, he notes that caseload reduction is not very demanding, especially compared to improving material conditions in poor communities:"The TANF program does not offer benefits sufficient to lift recipients out of poverty, and despite a strong economy, the majority of families who have moved off the TANF rolls have remained in poverty. Considerations of another traditional economic goal, reduction of inequality, only makes matters worse. Welfare reform has coincided with massive growth in income and wealth disparities; it has done little to slow the expansion of inequality and may have actually accelerated the trend. Has welfare reform created job opportunities for the poor? Has it promoted wages that allow low-wage workers to escape poverty? In both of these areas, the economic story remains the same: we have little evidence that reform has produced achievements that warrant the label of success.[25]"

Article assigned: Personal Responsibility Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act

What I'm doing:

I'm editing the Criticism portion of the article and adding more forms of criticism about the act. I'm primarily addressing the issue of how the Act is sectioned under "Human Rights Violations in the US," but the article itself doesn't explain why, so my group figured it should be explained in the Criticism section. There's also generally a lack of information about the criticisms of this policy being based on a discriminatory and unfair standard (for example, the "welfare queen" was often referred to by politicians to justify the reform. I'm a bit worried about maintaining a "neutral" tone on my part, because I find myself writing more and more like it's an argumentative paper than an expository one. I still have a lot more readings to include, but this is where I've gotten so far.

Chunk:

Criticism

AFDC has continuously been criticized for its violations of universal human rights. Many critics have argued that the AFDC heavily emphasizes on the stereotype of single, black mothers who receive welfare, commonly known as the “welfare queen.” The welfare queen is one who often deliberately and intentionally becomes pregnant in order to increase their welfare. The woman is envisioned as being lazy, uncaring of her children (who are also stereotyped as having been born out-of-wedlock), and unwilling to work. This version of the woman is labelled as “undeserving” of their welfare checks.

The bill has also been criticized for ignoring the complexities of gender, color, and sexual preference discrimination.

Diana Pearce, the director of the Center for Women’s Welfare, argued that a woman struggling to maintain her household alone correlates highly with poverty; households led by single men or two (hetero, cis) adults actually experienced a decrease in poverty rates. The number of poor households led by women alone increased by 100,000 each year in the seventies; There was a 998,000 household increase from between 1987 and 1988, but a decrease of 90% in families led by men only in the same time period. There was an even greater disparity amongst families of people of color. Black people

Susan L. Thomas, a professor at Hollins University, argued that the policy makes no accommodations to the fact that Black and Latina women have higher poverty rates than white women, nor the fact that women make up the majority of welfare recipients due to America’s foundation based on masculinism leading to gender specific discrimination. Thomas argues that Masculinism has assigned women’s roles to be family caregiving, thereby limiting their opportunities to work on equal footing with men beyond the household and leading to their work opportunities to decrease.

“Women are more likely than men to be found working in low-wage part-time temporary jobs without health insurance and pension plans; to have lower rates of protection against unemployment than men; to earn significantly lower wages than men; and to be segregated in “women’s jobs” which tend to have lower status, pay and opportunities for mobility. For women it is not the lack of employment that leads to their disproportionately high rates of poverty, rather their poverty stems from the ideological consequences of a gender-based structuring of the distribution of power and privilege”

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