Paper short abstract:

This paper zooms in on the work of child welfare caseworkers, exploring how they enforce middle-class norms and act as ‘social police officers’ punishing poverty. I question how state agents reconcile the punitive nature of their work with their altruistic motivation for choosing this profession.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary Hungary, under the fifth Orbán-government, implements “selective pronatalist” (Szikra, 2018) policies tying social rights to having children (Fodor, 2022). These policies target heterosexual families in formal employment with tax benefits, marriage and child-related loans and debt reductions (Geva, 2021). However, they disadvantage the Romani and/or lower-class population (Kóczé, 2016), and are justified through productivist and anti-gender equality discourses and the sentimentalization of feminised carework (Fodor, 2022).

Drawing on ethnographic material on the subjectivation of Hungarian child welfare caseworkers, I explore how state agents assess clients' “responsible parenting” through “middle-class” norms and values. I argue that the current policy regime’s upward wealth redistribution and scapegoating of racialised minorities subjectivise these street-level bureaucrats to become ‘social police officers’ who punish clients for their poverty.

I ask: How do state agents reconcile the punitive nature of their work with their altruistic motivations for entering this profession? The insensitivity of the Hungarian social and family policy regime to vulnerabilities faced by adult citizens contrasts with a focus on children’s vulnerabilities as the ultimate innocent subject to be protected. This leads to practices blind to the structural poverty of the entire family unit, advocating child removal as a solution to child poverty.

I argue that “middle-classing” acts as a boundary maker with caseworkers demanding elements of “middle-classness” from their clients. Failure to comply with these requirements, in the absence of institutional tools for support, instead of being effects of structural inequality, gets re-framed as clients not fulfilling their responsibilities as parents, which warrants punishment.