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The plight of international child support enforcement

Child & Family Social Work

Published online on

Abstract

Arising from the landscape of global development and fueled by the demographics of increasing rates of mobility and divorce, the international enforcement of child support is a challenging and growing problem. Current initiatives to rectify this critical problem cut across geopolitical divides and have resulted in the creation of uniform procedures for child support enforcement that are awaiting ratification in the USA: the 2007 Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance. In the following paper, we will trace the evolution of these efforts and extrapolate a framework for social work practice illustrated by examples drawn from a case study of a family's plight with international child support enforcement. While thousands of families are impacted by this issue, there is a gap in the social work literature about this critical issue.