For most of their operating time, the majority of their work was finding absentee fathers from Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain, and then coercing them into paying maintenance payments. These maintenance payments would go towards supporting their wives and children. This re-enforced a family structure where the father was a provider and the mother was unable to support herself or her family. As attitudes towards policing among the upper ranks moved away from social management and into crime and punishment in the 1920s, it came to be that the police and social activist groups alike agreed that this work was no longer a job for the police. In 1929, the newly established family court system took over the management of these payments.