Yesterday, the government published its Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy, setting out an ambition to halve VAWG within the next decade. This is an important step toward tackling abuse in all its forms, including economic abuse, which affects many single-parent families.

Economic abuse and child maintenance

Gingerbread welcome the strategy’s commitment to prevent economic abuse, including the withholding of child maintenance and the misuse of the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) as a tool of coercion. These behaviours are all too common forms of post-separation economic abuse and coercive control, with devastating consequences for victim-survivors and their children.

For many single parents who have experienced abuse, the CMS represents the only safe and viable way to secure child maintenance, reducing the need for direct contact with an abusive ex-partner. It is no suprise that Gingerbread’s Fix the CMS report found that 77% of parents using the CMS had experienced domestic abuse from the other parent.

Where the CMS lets families down

Despite its intended role as a safeguard, the CMS has significant shortcomings. Weak enforcement, payment loopholes and insufficient domestic abuse training for staff means victim-survivors are not adequately protected. In some cases, CMS involvement actually makes things worse. Our research has found:

• 45% of parents with care reported an increase in abusive behaviour after CMS involvement.
• 39% said the abuse was still ongoing.

These figures highlight the urgent need for reform.

What’s changing and what still needs to happen

The strategy reaffirms the government’s intention to remove the Direct Pay service type, a change Gingerbread has long called for and which could strengthen protections for victim-survivors. However, this reform must be implemented with care and the government must go further to ensure the CMS delivers a trauma-informed service that robustly safeguards those who rely on it.

With the Child Support Collection (Domestic Abuse) Act 2023 not yet in force and with consolidation of the CMS into a single ‘Collect and Pay’ system at least two years away, there remains a serious gap in protection for victim-survivors in the meantime.

What’s next?

Gingerbread will continue to assess the implications of the VAWG Strategy for single-parent families and will publish a full response in due course. We’ll also release new findings on victim-survivors’ experiences of the CMS in the new year.