Managing anxiety: neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity, fantasy and child abuse in New Zealand

Abstract

The neoliberal direction of social policy under New Zealand’s fifth National government (2008–) is demonstrated in its 2012 White Paper for Vulnerable Children. This document advocates increased monitoring and policing of welfare populations and the downgrading of child protection policy to a technical administrative system for managing ‘risky’ families. The White Paper’s release came soon after the coroner’s report into the deaths of the ‘Kahui twins’, which were treated by the media as a shocking case of child abuse, and exemplified the media’s use of a fantasy of a ‘savage’ Maori welfare underclass in reporting cases of child abuse. Drawing on Isin’s analysis of ‘governing through neurosis’, this article explores how these media and policy discourses reinforce normative patterns of neoliberal citizen subjectivity by offering compelling pathways out of anxiety that re-route citizens’ anxiety over child abuse in support of neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity.

Keywords:

• Neoliberalism
• subjectivity
• citizenship
• fantasy
• child abuse
• anxiety
• moral panic

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Neilson (University of Waikato), Tom Ryan (University of Waikato) and Priya Kurian (University of Waikato) for their helpful comments and advice. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers who made useful suggestions and detailed comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. According to Daly, ideology subsists on the fantasy of establishing society’s consistency by generating straw enemies – fictional embodiments of the impossibility of social harmony – which if eliminated would enable the reconciliation of society (Daly 1999).

2. Chris and Cru Kahui, 3-month-old twins, died of traumatic head injuries on 18 June 2006. The parents were both accused of killing them. The father was eventually charged and acquitted. The case was the subject of unprecedented media attention.

3. The articulation between child abuse, welfare and indigenous people has variants in other countries with histories of internal colonisation such as Australia and Canada. See for example, (Proudfoot and Habibis 2015).

4. Newstext Plus indexes 22 daily newspapers including all the country’s main daily papers as well as a weekly newspaper (Sunday Star Times), ensuring a national coverage of news sources. The study was able to examine the ways various societal actors responded to the case via the news media. After repetitions of the same article and letters to the editor were deleted, a total of 94 articles were critically analysed.

5. The deaths of the Kahui twins were frequently referred to as ‘killings’ in the media suggesting malicious intent on the part of the killer(s).

6. Black power is a prominent gang in New Zealand involved in drug manufacture and dealing. Its members are predominantly Maori and Pacific Islander.

7. While the media accounts did not specifically claim Macsyna was savage, a large majority of the media accounts depicted her in those terms. Exploring earlier phases of welfare reform within gendered discourses of poverty in the US and New Zealand, Kingfisher (1999, 4) shows how these discourses articulate with colonisation discourses in which the colonised other is constructed as savage, wild and ungovernable.

8. One study suggests that the correlation between shifts in employment levels and child abuse may reflect household role changes as women seek employment during economic downturns and unemployed men take on the care of children (Steinberg, Catalano, and Dooley 1981).

9. New forms of masculinity that reflect shifts in labour markets and women’s changing social position are dependent on new ways of valuing caring and voluntary work outside of the labour market. Neoliberalisation of social policy reinforces rather than challenges traditional gender roles, particularly in poorer communities because it makes labour market participation the standard of social respectability for both men and women and privatises childcare. Child caring in the home is increasingly under-valued and socially disrespected particularly if you are a beneficiary.