Parenting Index: Care Now Has a Price

Through a shocking survey we learned that seven out of ten Buenos Aires parents do not pay the child support quota. The situation is alarming and calls for concrete action. For that and many other reasons that we will analyze below, there is a new figure in the INDEC: the Parenting Index.In order to deepen, I interviewed Sabrina Cartabia, one of the creators of this measure and a lawyer specializing in the subject who argues that this number is a great advance towards equal parenting care. “Single-parent households in our country are mainly composed of female heads of household. The non-payment of the maintenance obligation, according to the studies we did in the province of Buenos Aires but also the studies carried out by UNICEF, is widespread. Approximately 7 out of 10 parents fail to comply and abandon their children when couples break up, “says Cartabia.Por what the numbers say, it is women who weigh with the responsibility of care and everything that economically entails. If we add to this problem the wage gap and the feminization of poverty, the scenario is one of overwhelm. “We have to understand that there is a labor gap, that women do not charge the same for the same task as men and that this is censored, for example for the province of Buenos Aires the gap amounts to 34% and 37% when we talk about informal activities not informal work, “specifies the specialist. Although the most complex thing is to charge, the road from the claim to the end is conflictive and winding among many things due to the absence of data. “When from the province of Buenos Aires we made the report on the breach of the maintenance obligation, we noticed that one of the great obstacles is that there is a very large delay in determining precisely the amount of the maintenance obligation,” says Cartabia. “When they start the path of a claim in this sense, lawyers always ask them to put together each ticket of each expense they make in parenting and then there is usually a hearing. Or even in the negotiations that take place outside the judicial litigation, at one point the lawyer of the counterpart together with the father of the child, girl, adolescent, will question all those expenses and each of those tickets, “explains Sabrina and adds: “this figure we had been claiming since that report, the need for the State to set a minimum floor of the cost of upbringing. ” One of the pertinent clarifications when talking about this new figure is that, first, it is an approximate number and, second, it is a floor and not a ceiling. “It is a floor from which to begin to give these discussions about food so that women avoid the violence that is exercised in the food processes when it is questioned that parenting has a cost. It is very important to bear in mind that INDEC measured two things: first the basket of goods and services but also the cost of care per hour that varies according to age, “explains Cartabia.For decades feminist movements have insisted on putting care and household chores at the center of the scene. The invisibility of this type of work impoverishes women who are socially and culturally associated with them. “This figure obtained by INDEC is fundamental because it is a pioneering tool in the world. We are the first country to determine what the minimum cost of parenting is,” says Cartabia.Putting a number on care is a way to denaturalize its invisibility and be able to maneuver fairer figures. “It will be updated monthly because one of the components for the calculation of this breeding basket is the total basic basket that is disseminated every month by INDEC. This removes the need to be constantly litigating women to insist on the change of amount, “he says.
Dilating is the task
The strategies for not paying are many and although there are some more common, the conversation around non-compliance happens in a systematic and naturalized way. “They are very widespread among men, among lawyers and there is also a great impotence on the part of the Judiciary to repel these strategies,” says Sabrina. The imagination that many men put into these matters astonishes but does not surprise. In order to avoid payment, they do everything. “Men who dispossess their assets and put them in someone else’s name, men who choose to have unregistered income,” says Cartabia. While there are many tacticsThus, the most common of all is to avoid the registered salary so that the Justice does not find out about that income. “In the research we carried out, we found many cases of men who negotiate with their employers to pay them a part of their salary in an unregistered way so as not to declare their real income to the Judiciary. Then there are strategies that have to do with the procedural, for example, not showing up at the hearings, not appearing in front of the family counselors and, of course, the most common strategy that is simply not paying it, “concludes the lawyer.

Original source in Spanish