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CHAPTER 10 Single Mothers—Clients or Citizens? Social Work with Poor Families in Russia ——————————————————————————————————— Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov Introduction As the standard of living decreased during market reforms in Russia, the pressure on the social welfare system increased considerably. Due to the costliness and ineffectiveness of universalistic approaches, means-tested schemes became the dominant form of social support. That has led to a decrease in the number of groups eligible for welfare, and to the introduction of monetary benefits instead of social services and privileges (such as free public transport and reduced fees for communal services). The process of social policy liberalization in contemporary Russia is characterized by this shift to a market welfare system and the use of means-testing in the distribution of welfare and social support. The system of means-tested assistance (adresnaia pomoshch’) now depends, more than before, on social workers to determine the degree of need (nuzhdaemost’—neediness)1 and reliability of the clients’ applications. The procedures and techniques for checking “neediness” are not fully defined; nor are they or the legal status of such procedures clearly described. Thus this process was given to executors guided in this area by everyday life definitions, stereotypes, and informal organizational norms within the welfare services. Although means-tested assistance was supposed to increase the effectiveness of the social welfare system, it nevertheless has negative effects on the most vulnerable parts of the population, especially women with small children. In the contemporary theory of social welfare, the concept of citizenship as formulated by T.H. Marshall (1998) is one of the key theoretical tools used to explore the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different groups in a society. In recent decades feminist scholars have provided an understanding of how various groups of a population (depending on their gender, race, and other categorical attributes) are included in or excluded from various spheres of social life (Bussemaker and van Kersbergen, 1994; Lister, 1997; Okin, 1992; Walby, 1994). They also emphasize that there is a direct connection between the discourses and practices of state welfare policies with respect to various population groups and how these groups perform their role as citizens (Lessa, 2006). In this chapter we aim to examine the discourses created and reproduced through the interaction between single mothers and representatives of social services. In the process of interaction, clients tend to have similar perceptions of their social rights (opportunities and limitations), while social workers arrive at an understanding of the essence of the problems their clients experience and the criteria for inclusion into the client category. The analysis is based on twenty-six interviews with single mothers and six interviews with social workers conducted in 2001–2003, and six interviews with single mothers and three with social workers conducted in 2006 in the Saratov region in Russia,2 as well as official documents and the publications of other researchers. In our interviews with mothers, we focused on the issues of familial well-being and interactions with social services, while social workers were asked to discuss their experiences with clients. A short overview of statistics and social policy terminology prefaces a discussion of how mother-headed families and state social policy interrelate and affect each other. The subsequent sections contain analysis of the interviews with single mothers who, as the heads of low-income households, interact with the social service system. The analysis demonstrates that single mothers are frustrated by inadequate assistance and the impossibility of improving their life situations. The discussion goes on to show that social workers, who are used to interpreting complex issues in the life situations of single mothers as individual psychological peculiarities, tend to blame the victim, thus ignoring important social conditions and imposing on women a responsibility for problems that are societal in origin. One-parent Families in the Rhetoric and Practice of State Social Policy The number of women who are raising their children without a spouse or a partner is increasing worldwide. The same process has been observed in recent decades in Russia, where the number of one-parent families has been steadily rising. By 1989 every seventh child under eighteen years old was living in a one-parent family (Brui, 1998, p. 73). Thirty years ago the proportion of out-of-wedlock births was hardly more than 10 percent, while by 2006, according to official statistics, the number of such births was 29–30 percent (UNDP, 2009, p. 47; see also Vishnevskii and...

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