Feminist Ethics Midterm Practice (1)

2024-2 Feminist Ethics

 

Segment 1

 

1. What are Gheaus’s solutions to the Romanian care drain?

In order to solve the Romanian care drain, Gheaus suggest four possible policy solutions as follows: (1) eliminating poverty, (2) bringing the fathers in, (3) enabling migrants to bring their children with them, and (4) supporting institutional care in sending states.

To eliminate the economic need for migration is the most obvious, and possibly the only complete solution to the problems triggered by care drain. While admitting that this option is most less feasible one, Gheaus points out that it is possible at an EU level provided by a wider internal redistribution of wealth and universal provision of adequate care services.

A second obvious way to increase migrants’ children’s chances to receive adequate care is to bring fathers into care. Given the proportion of female migration, and the fact that increasing numbers of children remain in countries of origin in the custody of their fathers, men’s presence and increased competence as care givers could prove a– perhaps partial– solution to the care shortage. This approach requires the extensive changes of general norms and expectations with respect to gender roles and the gendered division of labor.

A third solution is to make provisions for the care workers to take their children with them. It requires participation of both sending and receiving states because economic inability, inflexible working schedules and the unavailability of child care arrangements in the destination country hinder migrants to take their children with them.

The most promising solution is that sending and receiving states provide extra support to childcare institutions in the sending states, such that they can better address the emotional and developmental needs of the migrants’ children. This is particularly important as a matter of fairness to migrant parents and to their extended families, who should not be required to take over the entire work of care for the children left behind. Most importantly, good public care would be part of an adequate response to the situation of the migrants’ children themselves, who usually need more guidance and emotional care in order for their lives to go as well as those of their peers, and who often end up feeling a burden on others. This requires the creation and maintenance of daycare and after-school institutions, and the enabling of schools to hire counsellors and psychologists.

 

2. What price do poor people pay for state support for children?

The level of state support for kinship caregivers is directly correlated with the level of state intrusion into their lives: the higher the payment, the greater the intensity of state supervision. First and foremost, states often induce transferring custody to them, which means losing control over important child-rearing decisions. Kinship foster care also requires waiver of protections against state intrusion in family life. Thus, although the children are cared for by kin, it is the state that has authority over them. The parents and kin caregivers must submit to surveillance by caseworkers and requirements that the agency prescribes. Kin foster parents must comply with agency rules specifying the type of home and care they provide, and they must allow periodic visits by caseworkers to check compliance. They must give the agency access to personal information and may have to undergo psychological evaluations. The family also runs the risk that the agency will move the children to another foster home if the relatives fail to comply with agency demands.

 

3. What are some forms of state involvement in the lives of individuals?

Involvement in the child welfare system entails intensive supervision by child protection agencies, which often includes losing legal custody of children to the state. This state intrusion is typically viewed as necessary to protect maltreated children from parental harm.

Once child welfare agencies have custody of children, they take control of childrearing and place conditions on parents' involvement. Parents have no say over where their children are placed or in important decisions about their children's health and education. The child welfare agency may require parents to complete training courses and therapy sessions as a condition of reunification.

When it comes to kinship foster care, the amount of payments depends on whether or not the kin caregiver is licensed by the state child welfare agency. Most states require relatives to meet the same licensing requirements as nonrelative foster parents to receive foster care payments. The process involves another layer of intrusion into relatives' lives. The agency inspects relatives' homes, including sleeping arrangements, the number of bedrooms, and square footage, and investigates relatives' backgrounds to check for compliance with licensing requirements. If relatives are not licensed, they are paid less than licensed foster parents.

 

4. How do Gheaus’s and Roberts’s assessments of kinship care differ?

Gheaus points out that extended family often fail to provide continuous care, and children find themselves shuffled between different relatives or guardians. The negative impacts of kinship care are extensive and significant. On the one hand, migrants’ children can feel they are unwanted by the relatives who take care of them, or worry that the care they receive is conditioned by the gifts and economic favors their new care-givers receive from their parents. In other words, these children suffer from what they perceive as a lack of secure love. On the other hand, relatives who take care of the children may feel exploited, especially when care arrangements are made ad hoc and there are no clear standards and expectations of who is supposed to do what in the relationship. Add to this the migrant parents’ sense of the impossibility of ever repaying the debt to the relatives who care for their children and it is easy to see how connections within the extended family may collapse under the burden of doubts, guilt and economic conditioning.

On the contrary, Roberts focuses on the positive impact of private kinship care by examining the historical cases of African American Society. According to her, childrearing by relatives was often a response to poverty and other hardships that made it difficult for parents to raise children by themselves. Indeed, for a century black families had no recourse to the formal child welfare system. Kinship care continued in more recent decades as an informal safety net for struggling black families. By temporarily moving children to the care of kin, parents could avoid either voluntarily relinquishing them to the state or running the risk of coercive state intervention. Kinship care, then, served as a family-preserving alternative to foster care.

However, the black community's cultural tradition of sharing parenting responsibilities among kin has been mistaken as parental neglect by the states. Specifically, the transformation of kinship care from a private to a state-run arrangement suppresses the historical strengths of this family form. Social scientists have remarked at the success of black kin networks in meeting the challenges of raising children under conditions of poverty and racial discrimination. Some have called for policymakers to "affirm a black family kinship system that was historically strong, intact, resilient and adaptive. " Yet research shows that many caseworkers devalue the important role that kin traditionally have had in helping to raise children.

 

5. Analyze kinship structures as customary care practices

Customary care practices are defined as practices that secure care within a given social form. Actual caregiving arrangements exist as combinations of numerous kinds of customary care practices.

Customary care practices are comprised of: (1) Unit-delineating principles. These principles-often implicitly- specify which people are connected to another in a caring unit. (2) Norms and values that shape expectations within the actual practice, thereby specifying the division of labor within that unit.

For instance, customary care practices include arranged marriage or marriage based on romantic love, as well as nuclear families, extended families, and other alternatives. Customary care practices also include daycare and elder-care institutions. The implicit norms and values within these institutions will distribute how care is provided internally within these customary care practices, which is typically assigned by gender. A particular form of the family, such as a nuclear family, may be re-described as a customary care practice.

Many customary care practices rely on the appropriation of the labor and bodies of “outsiders.” When caregivers are not mothers, their labor may become invisible even while it remains essential to the functioning of society. Thus, their labor is appropriated even while they are excluded from social recognition.

Therefore, in terms of customary care practices, practices involving kinship structures such as kinship private care and kinship foster care are often neglected by society and the care provider are excluded from social recognition despite their significance. For instance, relatives who take care of migrant’s children may feel exploited, especially when care arrangements are made arbitrarily and there are no clear standards and expectations of who is supposed to do what in the relationship. Likewise, migrants who suffer from care drain are forced to provide their employers with emotional care instead of their families due to economic reasons.

 

Reading Lists

Gheaus, Anca (2013). Care drain: who should provide for the children left behind? Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 16:1, 1-23.

Roberts, Dorothy E. (2001), "Kinship Care and the Price of State Support for Children." Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law. 821

Bhandary, A. (2024). “Freedom to Care, for Women of Color”. In Bloomsbury Handbook of Care Ethics, ed. Matilda Carter. Bloomsbury Press.