The receipt of welfare may itself be taken as evidence of some moral deficiency.
Certain classes of recipient have been seen as pathologically immoral - in other words, there
is something in their personal makeup which makes them different from other people and
explains why they behave immorally. Promiscuous women and unmarried mothers were
treated in the past as 'moral defectives' (a term used in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act,
abolished in 1959) and committed to mental institutions, where some of them are still living
now.