Aww, I didn't get to make my point. But I will anyway since I went to the trouble of looking up stats and everything.
If non payment of maintenance is some kind of civil disobedience, it doesn't seem to be working very well. In fact I'm aware of one change within my lifetime - when my father neglected to pay maintenance, the DSS (as I believe it was at the time) assumed that he was paying it, and hence my mother received the princely sum of ten pence per week. She asked for help and they changed her to a system where the amount of maintenance no longer came off her benefits, but if he chose to pay extra, then she didn't get the extra. It all went into Her Majesty's fund instead.
Latest data says that of the men who go through CSA, 60% pay in full. But this data is flawed, firstly it includes payments set up through "maintenance direct" which is not enforced at all, and comprises around 30% of child maintenance arrangements. So potentially up to half of those parents assumed to be paying in full may not be paying in full, or at all. (I expect that my ex would count as "direct maintenance" since this was the advice I received at the time although I have not had a payment from him since 2010.). The estimate is that 28% of direct maintenance arrangements are not paid in full or at all. Using this estimate takes the 60% figure down to 43.2%, under half of all NRPs.
To add another layer, this is only parents who have contacted the CSA at all who are included in the 100% of these figures. But we don't know what proportion of separated parents this is. There are other separated parents who either have a private arrangement, a non-monetary arrangement (such as the NRP providing clothes or education fees for example), resident parents who have never sought maintenance from their child's NRP for one reason or another, or RPs who didn't know about/didn't want to contact the CSA even though the NRP is not paying in full or at all.
So what we really have is a nonsense figure, the likelihood is that it is quite a lot lower.
The old CSA (Child Support Agency), now replaced with the CMS (Child Maintenance Support) closed because of "effectively breaking down in 2006 under the weight of a backlog of unpaid claims". Now claimants must pay to have their child support claim enforced, and NRPs who don't pay (under this system) must pay 20% more, with 16% going to the RP/children and 4% going to the CMS.
It seems like this "civil disobedience" is having an effect but not in the way that Tom and his chums say they are intending, and not a way that appeals to feminists or single parent organisations, either, as they recognise that the £20 application fee can be prohibitive for single parents, especially if they are not guaranteed a return on that. The actual effect is that it's become even easier for NRPs to avoid paying child maintenance, not harder.