Shelley A. M. Gavigan

Welfare Law, Welfare Fraud and the Moral Regulation of the 'Never Deserving' Poor

The dismantling and restructuring of Keynesian social security programmes have impacted disproportionately on women, especially lone parent mothers, and shifted public discourse and social images from welfare fraud to welfare as fraud, thereby linking poverty, welfare and crime. This article analyzes the current, inordinate focus on ‘welfare cheats’. The criminalization of poverty raises theoretical and empirical questions related to regulation, control, and the relationship between them at particular historical moments. Moral regulation scholars working within post-structuralist and post-modern frameworks have developed an influential approach to these issues; however, we situate ourselves in a different stream of critical socio-legal studies that takes as its point of departure the efficacy, contradictions and inherently social nature of law in a given social formation. With reference to the historical treatment of poor women on welfare, we develop three themes in our critical review of the moral regulation concept: the conceptualization of welfare and welfare law, as illustrated by welfare fraud; the relationship between social and moral with respect to the role of law; and changing forms of the relationship between state and non-state institutions and agencies. We conclude with comments on the utility of a ‘materialist’ concept of moral regulation for feminist theorizing.

Social control: analytical tool or analytical quagmire?

ConclusionIn this paper we have undertaken what we regard as a preliminary critique of the concept of ‘social control’ and its utility for a critical criminology in Canada. In tracing its emergence and historical development as a key concept in American sociology, we have illustrated that its ascendancy represented a victory for liberal sociology. The recent attempts by critical criminologists and sociologists to rehabilitate the concept of ‘social control’ by insisting upon the essentially coercive nature of control have not resulted in an advance over traditional theorizing.By examining the ‘women, law and social control’ literature, in particular the use of the ‘formal/informal’ dichotomy, we have attempted to illustrate the limited utility of the concept for developing an historically and theoretically informed understanding of the complex and contradictory relationship of women to the state and law. The concept of ‘social control’ is ahistorical: when coupled with law, moreover, it lends itself to instrumentalism. It is our view that the concept of ‘social control’ ought to be abandoned by critical scholars in favour of one attentive to the dynamic complexity of history, struggle and change.