The language of Poverty
VIN is reporting on a superb piece written by Northamptonshire’s former ICB chair, Naomi Eisenstadt, who now supports Resolve Poverty.
This piece is about two issues: the language used to describe low-income families, and the way data is sometimes presented about families in poverty. Both the language and the data can lead to discriminatory assumptions about families living in poverty.
For most of my working life I have been engaged in services designed to mitigate the impact of poverty on children. At some point I began to think about balancing policy to reduce the associated risks of growing up in poverty with policy to reduce poverty itself. We can narrow the gap in outcomes for children in low-income families by targeting supplementary education programmes and social welfare activities or we can devise a social security system that reduces the number of children growing up in low-income households. We could and should do both.
Low-income families suffer a double deficit. They live with the inability to provide their children for their basic needs, let alone the luxury of holidays, special birthday treats etc. Secondly, they are stigmatised by the media and some politicians as being the creators of their own difficult situations. The risk of stigma comes when policy makers and the media attach labels to low-income families that are descriptive of behaviours rather than income. In 2017 the DWP stopped referring to income in relation to poverty. It referred specifically to workless households, and the ‘risks’ associated with worklessness. These include family breakdown, substance abuse and debt, all of which can be seen as avoidable behaviours. The relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and poor childhood outcomes are well known. The data is clear that poor child outcomes are corelated with increasing numbers of ACEs. Most, but not all children with complex and multiple problems like school exclusion, juvenile crime, and drug abuse, live in low-income families. The converse is not true. Most families on low income are struggling with the challenges of living without enough money to feed, clothe, and pay rent. Most are not involved in crime, drug abuse, or domestic violence. Using the language of disadvantage and vulnerability implies wider difficulties and fails to address the key problem; not enough money. There is an odd shyness about using language that specifies lack of money as the core problem. Even the word money becomes replaced with resources. Language like disadvantage and vulnerability can mean any number of problems including but not exclusively poverty. This narrative gives the impression that most if not all of families in poverty have additional characteristics related to how they live their lives. We offer parents struggling on low-income parenting programmes while the real problems may be not enough cash for the end of the week or the spare cash to fix the broken washing machine.
The presentation of data often reinforces this view. The Families and Children Survey of 2005 found that the risk of being in trouble with the police for teenage boys was ten times higher in families with five or more disadvantages compared to teenage boys in families with one or no disadvantages. The most common disadvantage is poverty itself. Others include family breakdown, parents’ poor mental health, drug and alcohol problems, etc. On reading this one would probably assume that a majority of boys growing up in families with complex problems become young offenders. 1% of boys in families with none or one difficulty become offenders. 10% of boys in families with complex problems get involved in the justice system. 90% of boys, even from families with complex disadvantages, do not have a criminal record. What the data tells us is that while family difficulties increase the chances of teen boys getting into trouble, most teen boys do not wind up with a criminal record. Both these presentations of the data are technically correct. Policy makers and charities will rightly want to attract funding to deal with the problems faced by their beneficiaries. They will present data in ways that tend to emphasize how much greater the risk for the disadvantaged group, rather than the likelihood of the risk itself. This creates strong negative associations with families in poverty. This is old data, but the principle remains.
Narratives about families on low income can be disrespectful and stigmatizing for the majority of low-income families struggling to do the best for the children with rising costs of basic food and housing. As the cost-of-living crisis begins to bite at a wider range of income groups, perhaps the public are becoming more aware of the scaring impact of poverty on adults and children. Most parents, rich or poor, want to do the best for their children. The ability to do the best is made significantly more difficult without a decent income.
Well said Noami..!!
