Theoretical and Empirical Insights into Child and Family Poverty: Cross National Perspectives

335 Pages·2015·6.14 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Fernandez

Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research 10
Elizabeth Fernandez
Anat Zeira
Tiziano Vecchiato
Cinzia Canali Editors
Theoretical and
Empirical Insights
into Child and
Family Poverty
Cross National Perspectives
Theoretical and Empirical Insights into Child
and Family Poverty
Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research Series
Volume 10
Series Editor:
ASHER BEN-ARIEH
Paul Baerwald School of Social Work & Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Editorial Board:
J. LAWRENCE ABER DAGMAR KUTSAR
New York University, USA University of Tartu, Estonia
JONATHAN BRADSHAW KEN LAND
University of York, U.K. Duke University, Durham, USA
FERRAN CASAS BONG JOO LEE
University of Girona, Spain Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
ICK-JOONG CHUNG JAN MASON
Duksung Women’s University, Seoul, Korea University of Western Sydney, Australia
HOWARD DUBOWITZ KRISTIN A. MOORE
University of Maryland Baltimore, USA Child Trends, Washington, USA
IVAR FRONES BERNHARD NAUCK
University of Oslo, Norway Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany
FRANK FURSTENBERG USHA S. NAYAR
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Tata Institute, Mumbai, India
USA WILLIAM O’HARE
ROBBIE GILLIGAN Kids Counts project, Annie E. Casy
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Foundation, Baltimore, USA
ROBERT M. GOERGE SHELLY PHIPPS
University of Chicago, USA Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova
IAN GOUGH Scotia, Canada
University of Bath, U.K. JACKIE SANDERS
AN-MAGRITT JENSEN Massey University, Palmerston North,
Norwegian University of Science and New Zealand
Technology, Trondheim, Norway GIOVANNI SGRITTA
SHEILA B. KAMERMAN University of Rome, Italy
Columbia University, New York, USA THOMAS S. WEISNER
JILL E. KORBIN University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Case Western Reserve University, HELMUT WINTESBERGER
Cleveland, USA University of Vienna, Austria
This new series focuses on the subject of measurements and indicators of children’s well being and their
usage, within multiple domains and in diverse cultures. More specifi cally, the series seeks to present
measures and data resources, analysis of data, exploration of theoretical issues, and information about
the status of children, as well as the implementation of this information in policy and practice. By doing
so it aims to explore how child indicators can be used to improve the development and the well being of
children.
With an international perspective the series will provide a unique applied perspective, by bringing in
a variety of analytical models, varied perspectives, and a variety of social policy regimes.
Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research will be unique and exclusive in the fi eld of measures
and indicators of children’s lives and will be a source of high quality, policy impact and rigorous scientifi c
papers.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8162
Elizabeth Fernandez (cid:129) Anat Zeira
Tiziano Vecchiato (cid:129) Cinzia Canali
Editors
Theoretical and Empirical
Insights into Child and
Family Poverty
Cross National Perspectives
Editors
Elizabeth Fernandez Anat Zeira
School of Social Sciences Paul Baerwald School of Social Work
University of New South Wales and Social Welfare
Kensington , NSW , Australia The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalem , Israel
Tiziano Vecchiato
Fondazione Emanuela Zancan Onlus Cinzia Canali
Centro Studi e Ricerca Sociale Fondazione Emanuela Zancan Onlus
Padova , Italy Centro Studi e Ricerca Sociale
Padova , Italy
ISSN 1879-5196 ISSN 1879-520X (electronic)
Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research
ISBN 978-3-319-17505-8 ISBN 978-3-319-17506-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17506-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015941511
Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
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Dedicated to Anthony Maluccio

Foreword
Child poverty is currently the world’s largest source of social harm; it causes more
death, disease, suffering and misery than any other social phenomenon. Poverty is
now a bigger scourge on humanity than plague, pestilence or famine. Yet there is no
need for any child in the twenty-fi rst century, anywhere, to starve or to go without
clean drinking water, toilets or access to basic health care and education. Providing
children with all these things would not have any signifi cant (or even noticeable)
impact on the lifestyles of the ‘rich’. Child poverty is not an ‘Act of God’ nor ‘inevi-
table’: it is a political choice. What is lacking is not suffi cient money 1 but the politi-
cal will to end child poverty.
T his lack of political will is surprising as child poverty is not a party political
issue. All politicians (on both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum) in all
countries agree that child poverty is a ‘bad’ thing which should be reduced and
eventually eradicated. There is also unanimity about how to eradicate child poverty.
The economics are very simple and are entirely concerned with redistribution –
where suffi cient resources are redistributed from adults to children, there is no child
poverty; where insuffi cient resources are redistributed from adults to children, child
poverty is inevitable (Gordon 2004). Children cannot and should not generate the
resources they need to escape from poverty. This is the job of adults. Children
should be spending their time playing and learning, not working at paid labour.
All countries in the world who are members of the United Nations have volun-
tarily signed the U N Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), yet Gordon
et al. (2003) estimated that half the children on the planet suffered from at least one
severe deprivation of basic human need and a third of the world’s children were liv-
ing in absolute poverty. The reason that children suffer from poverty is because the
UNCRC signatories have not implemented the policies needed to ensure that chil-
dren’s rights are fulfi lled. Child poverty is unjust and a violation of children’s rights
(Pemberton et al. 2005, 2007, 2012).
1 G lobal wealth is predicted to grow by 40 % over the next 5 years, from $263 trillion USD in 2014
to $369 trillion USD in 2019. It is also estimated that the richest 1 % of people own 48.2 % of
global wealth (Stierli et al. 2014).
vii
viii Foreword
T here is surprisingly little research into child poverty from a child-centred or
child rights perspective. Both the poverty and social justice literatures usually ignore
children (Gordon 2008) – often relegating them to a mere property of their house-
hold or family. Their needs are seen as, in effect, identical to those of their families
(for example, in anti-poverty strategies). Children’s agency is usually absent, and
where theory does engage with children, it is often as future workers or citizens
rather than as actors with justice claims in their own right. Minujin et al. (2006)
reviewed the literature on the concept and measurement of child poverty and
found that:
there is a lack of consideration of children’s issues in the debate on poverty. The lack of
visibility has negative implications for anti-poverty strategies, which seldom consider that
children and their rights are central to their design and implementation.
This book has been written by some of the leading authors in their fi elds from
around the world. It represents a signifi cant advance to our knowledge of child and
family poverty. It is one of only a few edited collections which approach the study
of child and youth poverty from a child rights and child agency perspective and
includes studies from both ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries. Many studies make an unjus-
tifi ed distinction between child poverty in ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries, adopting the
implicit assumption that ‘rich’ countries can learn little from successful anti- poverty
policies in ‘poor’ countries, or vice versa.
T he importance of a human rights perspective in work on child and family pov-
erty cannot be overemphasised. Hendrick (1994, 1997, 2003) has argued persua-
sively that one of the enduring principles of the UK social policy concerning
children in the twentieth century was the dual and paradoxical perception of chil-
dren as both victims and a threat to society. The idea that even young children are
both innocents who need protection but also a threat to society has a long history in
European Judeo-Christian thought about the inheritance of ‘original sin’.
Cunningham (2005) quotes from a German sermon from 1520:
Just as a cat craves mice, a fox chickens, and a wolf cub sheep, so infant humans are
inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness, idol worship,
belief in magic, hostility, quarrelling, passion, anger, strife, dissension, factiousness, hatred,
murder, drunkenness, gluttony, and more.
U nfortunately, European colonial powers exported the idea of children as simul-
taneously both ‘victims’ and ‘villains’ around the world, and this has resulted in
many unfortunate social policy consequences, including the view of children as
‘victims of poverty’ rather than citizens with agency whose basic human rights have
been ignored.
Similarly, the concept of children as individuals with agency who have indepen-
dent distributional justice claims on adults is almost entirely lacking from the eco-
nomic theory literature (Levison 2000). Neither the neo-classical nor, more
surprisingly, the feminist economics literature addresses the political concept that
children have a right to suffi cient economic resources to meet their needs and that
this is a fundamental requirement for a just society. A notable exception is the work
of the Norwegian feminist economist Hilde Bojer (2000, 2003) who criticises both
Foreword ix
Nozick’s (1974) libertarian theories of justice and Rawls’ (1971) liberal theory of
justice for entirely ignoring children. In A Theory of Justice , Rawls specifi cally
excludes children from the idea of the social contract as he considers the family as
outside the public sphere (Moller Okin 1989). His theory seems only concerned
with the rights and duties of adults (Gordon 2008). Nozick’s (1974) libertarian the-
ory of justice is also only applicable to adults and, arguably, only to adults that had
never been children (Bojer 2000). Nozick imagines a natural situation made up from
a group of solitary hunters who would be willing to give up a minimum amount of
their freedoms to a state which could protect them from robbery and murder – the
‘Night Watchman state’. Children (and non-hunting women) would have no rights
to economic goods in this theory of justice; children literally become the property
of their parents – the ‘fruits of their labour’. Bojer (2003) expresses puzzlement:
that the solitary hunter must have forgotten his own childhood. Otherwise, he would surely
have chosen to organise society in a way that at least guaranteed his survival to adulthood;
probably also that conditions during his childhood were such as to enable him to become a
fi t hunter.
Fortunately, the twenty-fi rst century has witnessed a rapid increase in sophisti-
cated multidimensional studies of children’s well-being which fully acknowledge
children’s rights and agency. My colleague, Peter Townsend, and I had the honour
of addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2006 when the fi rst
ever international defi nition of child poverty was adopted. This defi nition has proved
a spur for much research work, and UNICEF, NGOs, academics and many others
have fi nally begun to move the key issue of child and family poverty up the political
agenda.
T here are still many twentieth-century myths about child and youth poverty
which need to be confronted. For example, poverty is neither a behaviour nor a
disease; it is not something that is caught from parents nor is it ‘transmitted’ across
the generations. The idea of an underclass or ‘problem family’ that teaches their
children poverty-producing behaviours has been falsifi ed more times than virtually
any other concept in the social sciences (Bagguley and Mann 1992; Macnichol
1999; Welshmann 2012) – yet this false myth persists. This book will hopefully help
to contribute to its fi nal destruction.
Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research David Gordon
University of Bristol , Bristol , UK
References
Bagguley, P., & Mann, K. (1992). Idle thieving bastards? Scholarly representations of the under-
class. W ork, Employment and Society, 6 (1), 113–126.
Bojer, H. (2000). Children and theories of social justice. F eminist Economics, 6 (2), 23–39.
Bojer, H. (2003). D istributional justice: Theory and measurement . London: Routledge.