Mother's benefits nightmare

LOUISE PETERS'S nightmare was revived two months ago by a call from the Child Support Agency. Officials from the agency, which was launched last week, were making an early start to their task of collecting maintenance payments from absent parents.

Mrs Peters (not her real name) has good reason to want to forget the absent father of her two children. Three years ago, she says, she was raped by him, four weeks after she had had a hysterectomy.

She was too distressed to call in the police. 'It took me a long time to get over it all,' she says. 'I took to the bottle for about a fortnight, I attacked myself with a hammer and just kept scrubbing myself down. It would have been better if a stranger had raped me. I had had this man's children.'

Mrs Peters, 34, a qualified nurse with a daughter aged 12 and a son of 10, has since remarried. Her new husband knows of the attack, but she has not told the children. 'He visits the children every Sunday, but stays outside when he comes to pick them up.'

Under a voluntary agreement he pays pounds 100 maintenance a month. Under the new system, maintenance payments must average pounds 48 a week per child.

The agency has been attacked by children's charities which say that its work will expose women and children to a greater risk of violence, and harassment, or increased poverty. Under the new system, parents living on benefits will be asked to name ex-partners. If they refuse, without what agency staff consider to be good reason, they face a 20 per cent cut in their benefits.

Even though the agency knows who Mrs Peters's ex-husband is, she will not receive any of the extra money that the agency collects on her behalf because she and her present husband are eligible for social security benefits. The extra maintenance is deducted pound for pound from benefits claimed. Likewise, when maintenance payments pass the Income Support threshold, families lose free school meals and other benefits. The Treasury is expected to gain pounds 530m in the first year.

After eight months on weekly Income Support of pounds 137.66, Mrs Peters's new husband is now in a job earning pounds 120 a week. Mrs Peters has been out of work for eight months, but has signed on with a nursing agency. The couple are in the process of applying for Family Credit and say they have been warned that if they do not comply with the agency over the maintenance payments, they will be penalised. Mrs Peters says she told officials that her ex-husband was abusive and that she wanted no further contact with him.

'They went ahead and contacted him behind my back. He phoned me up and said what's all this about. They shouldn't have contacted him, they should have let me know first. I am really frightened about what it could entail for me. I don't want to tell them that I was raped, I told them he abused me, I couldn't go through it all with someone I didn't know. All I want to do is put the past behind me. It has taken a long time to deal with and now it is all being dragged up again.'

The Peterses have pounds 450 mortgage arrears and have already dipped into the children's savings. 'We are not spending money on things that we don't need,' Mrs Peters says. ' Why penalise me because they want more money?'