ABSTRACT
Each year, hundreds of women—and a handful of men-are prosecuted for “failing to protect” their children (Swift, 1995). “Failure-to-protect” has become a broad charge that covers a multitude of offenses, from negligence, neglect, child abuse to murder. At this particular moment in the United States, cases that fall under the umbrella of failure to protect are growing exponentially, and they range in type from parents who abandon their children to mothers who use drugs or abuse alcohol while pregnant; they include mothers who “allow” boyfriends, partners, or husbands to abuse their children, mothers whose children drown in bathtubs, and even, most recently, mothers whose children commit suicide. This broader conception of neglect, and the resulting increased criminalization of mothers, coincides, unsurprisingly, with a current social and political moment that favors the withdrawal of public support. The effect of the shrinking public sphere—what Eisenstein (1997) called the “politics of privatization” (p. 142)—is that, as the state relinquishes its social responsibility, it places the burden for care back on the families themselves and, within families, specifically, on the shoulders of women. Fine and Carney (2001) wrote, “We suggest that it is during these periods of conservatism … that women are particularly burdened and doubly threatened” (p. 405). The inherent, gendered nature of “the new neglect” makes it clear that it is women who are responsible for caring for and managing the family, because men are only rarely charged with failure to protect, failure to act, or failure to resist. When families erupt in violence, and when children get hurt—most often by fathers, step-fathers, partners, and so forth—women will often be the target of blame (Fine & Carney, 2001). The vividness of accounts of female neglect works to overshadow an absence of comparable accounts about male culpability; fathers and male partners will not be held similarly responsible when mothers murder their children.
