Black Mothers, Bad Mothers: African Refugee Women and the Governing of ‘Good’ Citizens Through the Australian Child Welfare System

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore how the child welfare system in Australia is a basis of governmentality, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with 35 women resettled in Australia as refugees originating from African countries. Although the explicit aim of the child welfare system is to protect children from a risk of significant harm, the findings presented here suggest that such systems can concurrently operate to evaluate, monitor, and demand behavioural change from women who are the subject of intervention in accordance with logics of white neoliberal motherhood, in which parental merit is measured through, and problematised by, factors of racialisation, assumptions of cultural difference, counter-heteronormativity, and socio-economic marginalisation. I argue that the child welfare system not only operates to protect children, but can also function as an instrument to govern women to ‘fit’ with an idealised standard of citizenship in Australia. Thereby supplanting maternal guardianship with the mandate of government institutions, operations of child welfare position the paternalistic authority of the state as absolute and render mothers who do not conform to white neoliberal motherhood as vulnerable to intervention.

Acknowledgements

Georgina Ramsay developed this article as a 2015 participant in the AFS Mentoring Programme for New Academic Writers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Georgina Ramsay (PhD) is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on refugees and displacement, sovereignty and citizenship, gender and kinship, violence and racism. She is a Research Assistant with the Centre of Excellence for Equity in Higher Education and a Visiting Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington. Her current project focuses on the impact of gendered violence on higher education experience, and she is finalising the manuscript for her forthcoming book, Impossible Refuge.

Notes

1. The research was given ethical approval from the University of Newcastle Human Research Ethics Committee.

2. Pseudonyms have been used for the names of participants throughout the article to preserve anonymity. Identifying details such as country of birth and number of children have been obscured for the same purpose.

3. ‘Moise’, a pseudonym, is a commonplace name in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The real name of the child referred to in this example was similarly commonplace, but nonetheless continually mispronounced by the workers.

4. Other research has similarly documented that ‘play’ is not always an imperative of parental care in sub-Saharan African contexts, particularly where other children in collectivised neighbourhood settings are close enough to interact with younger children and amongst each other (Evans 1993, 18).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Postgraduate Award was administered through the University of Newcastle.