| Popis: |
This chapter presents part of a research project entitled ‘Solo Mothers in the context of active citizenship’. The first stage in the project had as its comprehensive aim to examine and analyse, in a cross-national comparative legal study, social assistance regulations in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark (Wennberg 2004). In the project the theoretical and analytical concept ‘solo mothers’ is utilized, which challenges both the traditional legal dogmatic position (as explained in the Introduction to this book) and the notion of formal gender equality in law. How maintenance, care and dependency are understood in last-resort schemes, i.e. social assistance, affects their potential to function inclusively or exclusively. This chapter shows how solo mothers are at risk of being excluded from the concept of citizenship when it is understood as ‘active’ citizenship and argues that a more pluralistic notion of citizenship is required if the EU is to meet its social inclusion objectives. The inspiration to compare social assistance in four Nordic countries arises from the EU policies that have been adopted in the EC Treaty. First, the fight against social exclusion as encoded in article 137 motivates an examination of how ‘active’ policies are reflected in national regulations.1 Although there are no regulatory Europeanlevel harmonizing measures regarding social assistance, the enactment by the EU institutions of non-binding measures of soft law may encourage the convergence of national practices in welfare provision.2 Second, gender mainstreaming, which formalizes the importance of promoting equality between men and women, has gained widespread acceptance in the international community as a new approach to gender equality and a policy-making tool in the EU public policy context (see for instance Beveridge and Shaw 2002, 209-212). Mainstreaming has also occasionally been translated into a legal norm.3 In the field of social protection, mainstreaming requires that all aspects are to be taken into account when setting specific targetsor selecting gender gaps where there is a very significant difference in poverty outcomes in general or in some specific aspect of poverty and social exclusion.4 One such specific aspect is the situation of solo mothers, who are shown throughout the European Community to be vulnerable, both on the labour market and in the welfare state (see for instance Bjornberg 1994; Bjornberg 1996; Hobson 1994; Hobson and Takahashi 1996, 1997; Bradshaw et al. 1996; Duncan and Edwards 1999; Gahler 2001). |
