ATLANTA — Six Georgia parents who have spent time in jail over missed child support payments filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday seeking to force the state to secure them lawyers.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Fulton County Superior Court, said Georgia law bans authorities from jailing a parent who cannot pay child support. But it said the six plaintiffs haven’t had the opportunity to prove they can’t fulfill their obligations because they don’t have attorneys.

“Languishing in jail for weeks, months, and sometimes over a year, these parents share one trait in common besides their poverty: They went to jail without ever talking to an attorney,” said the lawsuit, filed by the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights.

“Not one plaintiff had an appointed attorney to explain to a court that, through no fault of his own, he had no ability to pay.”

The Georgia Attorney General’s office declined to comment.

“We have not seen the complaint, talked to the client or reviewed the individual circumstances of the plaintiffs so we are not in a position to comment,” said Lauren Kane, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office.

The six parents have all tried to pay the child support, but haven’t been able to make ends meet amid the tough economic times, the lawsuit said. One plaintiff, Lance Hendrix, is a military veteran who hasn’t been able to find a job. Others have been “caught in a cycle of incarceration” stemming from their inability to pay, it said.

The filing cites the case of Joe Hunter, a 20-year-old who has been in the Walton County Jail since October 2010. If Hunter had an attorney at his hearing, he would have been able to prove he couldn’t pay the $528 he owed for his four-year-old son, the lawsuit said.

“Instead, Mr. Hunter was left to defend himself and was jailed, in effect, for being too poor to pay,” said the lawsuit, which said he also cannot afford the $250 fee that would secure his release after five months behind bars.

The child support woes have also had a devastating effect on the families of the six plaintiffs, said Sarah Geraghty, an attorney with the center.

“Children are not served when parents who are searching for work to support their families are repeatedly carted off to jail,” she said. “Dividing families while preventing parents from finding jobs is both fundamentally unfair and ineffective social policy.”