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Child Poverty and Social Exclusion
Published as: Redmond, G (2014) Child Poverty and Social Exclusion, in A Ben-
Arieh, F Casas, I Frones and J Korbin (eds), The Handbook of Child Well-Being,
Springer, Dordrecht, pp.1387-1426.
Author: Gerry Redmond, School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University,
GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia
e-mail: gerry.redmond@flinders.edu.au
3rd draft: February 2013
Note: there are some errors in this version that were corrected in the final published
version.
1
Introduction
After a hiatus of some decades, the definition of poverty is now back in fashion as a
subject for serious academic consideration (Alkire and Foster, 2011a; Kanbur and
Grusky, 2006; Lister, 2004; Spicker, 2007). However, the debate on poverty has
moved to new territories, encompassing a broader range of issues than before, and
becoming entangled in concurrent debates on well-being, capabilities, freedom,
human rights, social relations and agency. Or has it? The shifting of the poverty
debate to new ground can arguably be interpreted in two ways. First, that the strict
definition of poverty has remained exactly the same – inadequate command over
economic resources (Atkinson, 1989). Under this interpretation, a wide range of
interests have sought to capture the emotive and powerful associations that people
often attach to poverty in order to further particular agendas, such as human rights,
educational opportunities, access to health care, equality for ethnic minorities or
political freedom. But really, they are talking about different things that merely
muddy and confuse poverty debates?
The second interpretation would suggest that while in a strict sense Atkinson’s
definition still holds, it is now more widely recognised that lack of command over
economic resources in itself is problematic because it tends to be associated with a
range of outcomes that are of intrinsic importance, for example, participating fully in
the life of one’s community, or leading a life that one has reason to value (Sen, 1999).
This interpretation also allows space for more ‘bottom-up’ approaches to counter
criticisms that poverty has for too long been characterised as an objective condition
that is assigned by experts to individuals, with the individuals themselves being
‘objectified’, and given no say in their own status (Chambers, 1997; Lister, 2004;
Narayan-Parker, Patel, Schafft et al., 2000).
What Kanbur and Squire (1999, p.1) call the “progressive broadening of the definition
and measurement of poverty” raises an important issue for this review: what are the
implications for children of the different definitions of poverty? While there is now
quite a literature on the overall implications of measuring poverty using different
approaches (Alkire and Foster, 2011b; Kanbur and Squire, 1999; Ruggeri Laderchi,
Saith and Stewart, 2003; Wagle, 2002), there has been rather less discussion on the
implications of this wider debate for children. The main aim of this review will
therefore be to evaluate the literature that considers the definition and meaning of
poverty, in order to assess its implications for children. This literature encompasses a
number of competing and complementary terms – deprivation, exclusion, underclass
and capabilities, to name a few. These terms are sometimes conflated with ‘poverty’.
To the extent possible, this review will seek to define these terms separately and
analyse them as distinct aspects of the wider debate on child poverty.
Poverty is also commonly associated with a low standard of living. The standard of
living as Sen (1987) recognises, is at the one time a universally understood term, and
at the same time inherently subjective the way it is universally understood. Sen argues
that a person might consider herself to have a high standard of living because she lives
near the sea. But if she puts greater value on living in the mountains, then she might
not consider her standard of living to be so high. Or, she may consider herself to have
a high standard of living because she has a higher income this year than last. But
another person in the same ‘objective’ situation might not consider themselves to be
2
so lucky. So, while everyone uses the term ‘standard of living’ as if it is universally
understood, actual understandings can differ among people, and over time. In other
words, the standard of living is a measure of resources for well-being, but should not
be seen as equivalent to well-being. The relationship between poverty and low living
standards depends on how each of the terms is defined. So it is with discourse on
poverty. As Himmelfarb (1984) makes clear in her analysis of the evolution of
poverty as a ‘social problem’ in Elizabethan England, debates about poverty are
inherently value-laden. It is the job of the analyst or researcher to make those values
she is working with as explicit as possible.
It is worth noting at the outset a fundamental assumption that underlies most poverty
analysis, that being poor is discretely different from being non-poor (Alkire and
Foster, 2011b; Callan and Nolan, 1991; Lewis and Ulph, 1988; Sen, 1976). This is
apparent in Townsend’s (1979) hypothesis that as a household’s resources diminish, a
point is reached where withdrawal from participation in customs and activities
considered normal in the community accelerates, and in Sen’s contention that there is
“an irreducible absolutist core in the idea of poverty” (1983, p.159). It is also central
to theories of ‘underclass’ (Murray, 1984, 1990), and in Lister’s (2004) argument that
poverty should be viewed as a social relation between the ‘poor’ and the ‘non-poor’.
Many analysts highlight uncertainties in the ascription of poverty to individuals or
households (see for example, Burchardt, Le Grand and Piachaud, 2002; Cheli and
Lemmi, 1995). Nonetheless the assumption remains that it is important to identify
poor people (and poor children) because they experience some fundamental deficits
that impact on their lives and opportunities in a basic and absolute way, or that
differentiates them from the rest of society. To remove this assumption is to move
away from poverty analysis, and into examination of inequality (Lewis and Ulph,
1988).
This chapter follows a pattern of considering poverty first in term of lack of command
over economic resources, and then gradually broadens the informational field to take
into consideration wider aspects of children’s wellbeing and development associated
with opportunities, capabilities, and exclusion. Section 1 describes approaches to
defining and measuring child poverty as a lack of material resources – income and
consumption poverty, and absolute and relative deprivation. This section is the
longest, not because it is more important than the other sections, but because literature
on material poverty is the most developed. Section 2 looks at child poverty and human
development, encompassing the capabilities approach, the issue of poverty and human
rights, and the relationship between poverty and mortality. Section 3 considers child
poverty as a social relation: the underclass thesis; social exclusion; and participative
approaches to poverty definition and analysis. Section 4 sums up with an appraisal of
the implications of the different approaches discussed here for the examination of
child poverty.
3
1 Poverty as lack of material resources
The poverty debate begins with the definition of poverty as a lack of material
resources:
‘According to normal usage poverty is "The state of one who lacks a
usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material
possessions." This definition contains two important ideas. First, the
definition of poverty will be different at different times and in
different societies - what is "socially acceptable" in, say, India may
differ from that in the U.S.A. And second, the focus is on the ability
to purchase goods and services (money) or on their ownership
(material possessions).’ (Kanbur and Squire, 1999, p.3)
This simple conceptualisation (or ones very similar) has probably engendered a larger
literature than all other considerations of poverty and associated issues put together. In
particular, one popular image of poverty is a serious deficit in income or
consumption.1 Poverty definition and measurement using these two concepts of
resources is discussed in Section 1.1 below. Section 1.2 deals with poverty as
deprivation, which may be defined as the lack of a specific set of goods or
commodities that are considered necessary for survival, or for participation in the life
of one’s community. In both of these Sections the focus is on objective measures of
poverty.
1.1 Income and consumption poverty
The ‘traditional’ approach to poverty measurement is to derive a distribution of
resources for a sample of households or families, draw a poverty line through that
distribution, and call those whose incomes/consumption are less than the threshold
‘poor’. The choice of income or consumption as an indicator for poverty measurement
is almost a default, both in the popular imagination, and in economic and social
analysis. The use of income or consumption suggests that at face value, poverty is not
about lack of well-being, or unhappiness, or failure to attain certain statuses, or
consume certain products. It is simply about having a low level of overall income or
consumption. As Atkinson (1989) puts it, the definition of income or consumption as
the concept of resources for poverty measurement means that the analytical concern is
with Y, the level of resources, and not U(Y), the individual’s or household’s personal
sense of well-being. Although as Hagenaars rightly argues, “every poverty line can be
seen to be based on a definition of welfare” (1986, p.11), this relationship can become
somewhat detached in practice, such is the number of assumptions that need to be
made in translating a definition of income or consumption into a poverty measure. As
Orshansky eloquently puts it, “For deciding who is poor, prayers are more relevant
than calculation because poverty, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder.” (1969,
p.37) Figure 1 (adapted from Corak, 2005) highlights four classes of choices. Which
resources? What unit of analysis – household, family, individual, and (related) how to
account for differences in within units of greater than one person? And how to
equivalise? These questions are worth considering in more detail.
1 Another popular image, that of underclass, is discussed in Section 3.
4
Figure 1.1: Schematic representation of three issues in the derivation of an
economic welfare based poverty rate
Source: Adapted from Corak (2005), Figure 1.
Income or consumption?
Most of these assumptions are now well understood by economists and poverty
analysts, and are only briefly reviewed here. First, which is the better indicator of a
household’s or person’s resources: income or consumption? While the former can be
characterised as a measure of consumption potential, the latter is perhaps more closely
related to actual living. As such, it takes into account some contributions to living
standards that a measure of income does not, such as the ability to run down savings
or to borrow (Atkinson, 1989). Income, on the other hand, takes into account the
ability to save. Summing up the differences between the two measures, Atkinson
concludes:
“In considering these approaches to the indicator of poverty, we can
discern two rather different conceptions. The first is concerned with
the standard of living, and it leads in the direction of studying total
expenditure (or the consumption of specific commodities). This
approach is perhaps the natural one for those who see concern for
poverty as stemming from individual caring or compassion for
others (or utility interdependence). The second conception is that of
poverty as concerned with the right to a minimum level of resources.
On this basis, families are entitled, as citizens, to a minimum
income, the disposal of which is a matter for them. This approach
may be more appealing to those who see concern for poverty as
f ( y ) (1) Resources — f ( y )
a. definition
b. unit of analysis
c. equivalence Scale
d. sharing assumption
(2) Identification of the poor by
setting a minimum threshold — Y
a. Reference to general population
- Absolute or Relative
b. Updating over time
Fixed or Moving
(3) Aggregation to an index
β = 0 headcount ratio
β = 1 poverty gap index
β = 2 poverty gap index squared
5
based on a notion as to what constitutes a good society.” (Atkinson,
1989, p.12)
Linked to both concepts is the role of children as dependants in a household where
adults usually earn most of the income, and control most of the expenditure. While a
given level of consumption may suggest a particular standard of living for a
household, that standard of living may not necessarily be shared among all household
members, with children being particularly susceptible to favourable treatment
(especially from their mothers), or discrimination (Browning, 1992; Grogan, 2004;
Middleton, Ashworth and Braithwaite, 1997).2 Where income is used as the measure
of resources, Bradbury and Jantti (1999) point out that saving that is made from
income (for example in the form of purchase of life insurance, superannuation, or
home purchase) is likely to be of considerably more benefit to parents than their
children, and should be subtracted from any income measure that is used in the
evaluation of child well-being.
This question of how savings should be treated is part of a much larger set of choices
relating to the definition of resources (that is, apart from the overall choice of income
or consumption). Which income (for example, gross or net, including estimates of in-
kind income, or the value of home production)? Or which consumption? Often,
choices are determined by expediency – the availability of relevant data being an
acute concern (see Smeeding and Weinberg, 2001 for a fuller discussion of income
definitions).
Unit of analysis
Aside from the individual, as partially used in Gordon, Nandy et al. (2003) cited
above, and more satisfactorily used (albeit in mostly qualitative work) by Ridge
(2002), commonly used units of analysis for child well-being are the family unit
(parents plus dependent children who live with them, and sometimes also non-
dependent children who live with them), and the household. Analyses that use
consumption as the measure of resources tend towards the household as the unit of
analysis, since many resources (for example the home itself, lighting, heating) are
assumed to be shared at that level. Analyses that use income as the unit of resources
focus on both family and household. Differences can be important. Redmond (1999)
shows that in Australia over time adult children living with their parents have moved
on average from being net contributors to household income, to being net recipients.
In rich countries such as Australia, most children live in households with only their
siblings and parents. In poorer countries however, where children are more likely to
live in extended families, the unit of analysis may be a more critical issue, and has
been little explored in the child poverty literature. In both poor and rich countries, the
stability of the unit of analsyis needs greater attention in studies of poverty and
exclusion.
Equally important (and relatively unexplored) is the role of divorced and separated
parents not living with the child, the extended family and others in the community in
supporting children across households. A recent Australian study for example shows
that almost one in five children receive regular care from grandparents (Gray, Misson
2 See (1987) is critical of such a suggestion on different grounds, as will be discussed in Section 2
6
and Hayes, 2005). Studies from South Africa show the important role that the
universal pension paid to persons over retirement age plays in supporting children
(Duflo, 2000). This support may perhaps not always come in the form of transfers to
the parents of the child, but sometimes direct to the child herself in the form of meals,
clothing, payments for education, etc.
Intra-household distribution
There is now a large literature on the distribution of resources within the household
(for a review, see Browning, 1992). Much of this literature is theoretical (see Becker,
1981), and empirical evidence is still relatively scarce, perhaps because it is difficult
for researchers to enter into the ‘black box’ of the family to understand fully the
complex dynamics of distribution of goods, services and favours. Limited existing
research does point to a number of findings that are relevant to the study of child
poverty. Perhaps the most important of these is that mothers across a range of cultures
tend to share a greater part of their incomes with their children than is the case with
fathers, and appear to make greater personal sacrifices for their children (Grogan,
2004; Middleton et al., 1997). A second finding is that once family income increases
above a certain threshold, a smaller proportion is devoted to children (Henman, 2005
makes such a finding for Australia). However, as Cockburn, Dauphin et al. point out:
“The absence of empirical studies looking at the effect of
intrahousehold allocation of resources on child poverty
measurement is very surprising since many child poverty studies are
acknowledging the importance of taking intrahousehold inequality
into account.” (Cockburn, Dauphin and Razzaque, 2006, p.3)
In spite of many studies acknowledging the importance of intra-household distribution
(see for example Bradbury and Jantti, 1999; Corak, 2005), it has always seemed
somewhat marginal to debates about child poverty in both rich and developing
countries. Feminist critiques of the unitary model of the household have arguably had
a greater impact on assumptions about intra-household sharing, and these could
usefully be applied to the problem of child poverty. Hill (2005) draws on Jenkins
(1991) and Phipps and Burton (1995) to develop a number of different models of
intra-household sharing based on principles of equal sharing, and on information on
relative personal income shares in total household income. In the absence of adequate
empirical data regarding the impact on child poverty of intra-household allocations,
similar models could be applied to the analysis of child poverty in order to develop a
picture of the likely implications of different sharing arrangements on the resources
expended on individual children.
Economies of scale
As with the related concept of intra-household distribution, there is also a large child-
specific literature on assumptions about economies of scale in household
consumption. One necessary step in any analysis of household resources and
individual well-being, or in the comparison of two households of different
composition and size, is the equivalisation of those resources to attribute a portion of
household resources to each household member. This allows in effect a form of
comparison between individuals rather than between households, and formally allows
children to be considered separately from their parents. Although given equivalence
7
scales can incorporate unequal patterns of intrahousehold distribution (Cockburn et
al., 2006; Lanjouw and Ravallion, 1995), the usual assumption is that equivalence
scales reflect an equitable notion of the relative needs of individuals within the
household, and equitable consumption of ‘public goods’ within the household, for
example the dwelling itself (Nelson, 1993).
In consideration of the adequacy of resources to meet needs two problems in
particular are apparent. First, actual equivalence scales used in analysis of household
income are to a large extent arbitrary. Percival and Harding (2001) show that across a
number of recent Australian studies, the ratio of equivalence scales for a couple with
four dependent children to a couple with no children ranges form 1.25 to 1.57.
Whiteford (1985), in an examination of 59 international studies, shows that the ratio
for the same two family types ranges from 1.11 to 1.93. Second, as Nelson points out,
‘The bulk of current academic literature defines “household welfare” as the material
standard of living of the adults (or parents) in the household.” (Nelson, 1993, p.471).
Although the literature does include examples where equivalence scales in relation to
children are considered in depth (see for example Lanjouw, Lanjouw, Milanovic et
al., 2004), the problem remains that the final choice is somewhat arbitrary, and the
sensitivity of results needs to be tested against that final choice.
Poverty lines
Income poverty lines represent the crucial point at which needs and resources, and
indeed resources and outcomes – at least in theory – should meet. The poverty line
represents the threshold below which a person or household is assumed to be not
meeting their needs, or alternatively, is assumed to be on track for sub-optimal
outcomes. In studies of child poverty that focus on income and consumption, poverty
thresholds, however, appear to be somewhat removed from a clear definition of
children’s needs. In rich countries (except the US) it is common in studies of both
adult and child poverty to take a relative approach and define the poverty threshold in
relation to median (adult equivalent) income. This similar to Townsend’s (1979)
definition of relative poverty cited above, and is in effect an operationalisation of a
1984 European Union decision regarding the guiding principles for a definition of
poverty:
“The poor shall be taken to mean persons, families and groups of
persons, where resources (material, cultural and social) are so
limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life
in the Member States in which they live.” (cited in Ramprakash,
1994, p.118)
Definitions of income poverty that are related to the mean or median have a number
of advantages. First, they are easily understood by non-policy experts. Second, the
same threshold can be applied in a meaningful way in a range of different countries
(for example across all European Union member states) in a way that absolute poverty
definitions cannot. Third, the threshold changes with average incomes, so there is an
in-built expectation that everyone will share in economic growth (but also conversely
that the impact of economic decline on the poorest sections of the community can be
effectively masked).
8
However, such definitions also have a number of disadvantages that are perhaps
especially relevant for children. Here I wish to dwell on one in particular. What is the
“minimum acceptable way of life” for a child, and how does it differ from that of an
adult, or indeed among children? This question is not adequately addressed in the
literature. The strong implication in the EU definition above is that the minimum
acceptable way of life may vary between member states, but not within them – there
is one standard, across city and countryside, across regions, and across people. This is,
moreover, an objective “minimum acceptable way of life” – it must be not be merely
acceptable to the person concerned, but to society as a whole. This acceptable
minimum has been defined as 60 per cent of median household income.
In practice, the application of absolute poverty lines to children is relatively
straightforward – children are counted as poor if they live in a household where total
resources fall short of the minimum absolute threshold for a household of that
particular type and size. With relative poverty lines, the question of ‘compared to
whom?’ – a key question in the social exclusion literature (Atkinson, 1998;
Micklewright, 2002), assumes greater importance. According to the EU definition
above, the comparator should be the average for the country in which the child lives.
Bradbury and Jantti (1999) use an alternative definition of ‘whom’ – the child median
in the country where the child lives. Since this poverty line does not produce
significantly different results to those produced by the overall median, they do not
examine it further. However, it may be possible to examine the effect of comparing
children with just their age group, or other with other children who have similar
characteristics. This type of comparison may yield a different picture of relative child
poverty to one derived from the overall poverty line.
The value of these relative lines and others (such as the US absolute poverty line, and
the Henderson poverty line sometimes used in Australia) need to be tested not only
against each other, but also against a number of outcomes for children with different
characteristics. For this, we need a clearer picture of acceptable outcomes for children
across different countries and situations.
Once a poverty line is defined, choices need to be made regarding aggregation of the
poor into an index, which could be a headcount measure, or alternatively attempt to
take account of the distribution of resources below the poverty line (Alkire and Foster,
2008; Foster, Greer and Thorbecke, 1984). For each of these questions the literature is
enormous. The issues discussed above have specific relevance for the counting of
poverty among children. For example, the choice of unit of analysis (household, or
family, or individual), may reflect the analyst’s observations on how people appear to
pool resources in a given community. The equivalence scale represents the analyst’s
view on how resources of income units of different size and composition can be fairly
compared in terms of the standard of living that they achieve. The threshold below
which people are deemed to be poor, and therefore arguably different in some
important respect from the non-poor, is again a value choice, even where based on an
apparently scientifically derived minimum.
UNICEF (2005) uses the following definition of child poverty in a recent study of
relative child poverty in rich countries:
A child is to be considered poor if the income available to that child,
assuming a fair distribution of resources within the family and
9
making allowances for family size and composition, is less than half
the median income available to a child growing up in that society.
(Unicef, 2005, p.7)
The poverty line used in this report (half median equivalised household income) is
now commonly used in studies of poverty in most rich countries, especially European
Union countries. Household income is calculated as market or private income, plus
transfers, minus taxes paid on that income. Income is equivalised using the ‘square
root of household size’ scale, which assumes that a household with two people (adults
or children) needs 1.41 times the income of a single person household to achieve the
same standard of living, a household with three people needs an income equal to 1.73
times the single person household income, and a household with four people needs
twice the single person household’s income. The analysis shows child poverty is
lowest in the Nordic countries, where rates vary between 2 and 4 per cent, and highest
in New Zealand, Italy, the US and Mexico. The main conclusion of the report is that
relative poverty is low in countries such as Denmark and Sweden because public
expenditure on transfers and services in these countries is high, while public
expenditure is low in countries such as Italy and the US. The other main conclusion of
the report is that those countries that put in place policies to reduce child poverty
during the decade of the 1990s tended to achieve the best results in that respect.
1.2 Deprivation
The deprivation approach to poverty measurement attempts to look at how people
actually live, rather than their access to resources. McKay (2004), citing Ringen
(1988), places the study of deprivation somewhere more towards the direct end of
methods for measuring living standards, with income noted as being very indirect, and
consumption a little less indirect. Measuring deprivation entails obtaining information
from an individual or household on what they actually consume, what activities they
participate in, and what durables and other goods they actually own or use. In
introducing his discussion of deprivation as a means for measuring poverty,
Townsend argues that national or social conceptions of poverty (mostly income
based) tend to be “inadequate and idiosyncratic or inconsistent” (1979, p.46). This
section shows that while the concept of deprivation does overcome some of the
limitations associated with monetary resource based measures of poverty and well-
being, Orshansky’s (1969) pithy comment cited above applies as much to deprivation
as it does to poverty, albeit for different reasons. The discussion that follows considers
child deprivation, first in rich countries, and then in developing countries.
Child deprivation in rich countries
Most studies of deprivation that focus on rich countries examine relative deprivation:
people not having things or being able to participate in activities to the extent that they
are “excluded from ordinary living patterns, customs and activities.” (Townsend,
1979, p.31). In his pioneering study Townsend uses information taken from household
about their possessions, problems and activities in order to supplement the very
detailed income data that he collects from the same households. He asks respondents
(usually the ‘head’ or ‘wife’) whether they had holidays away from home, meals out,
friends visiting for meals children’s friends to the house to play, cooked breakfasts,
fresh meat, given levels of clothing and footwear per household member, ability to
pay bills, birthday parties for children, possession of a number of durables such as a
10
fridge, vacuum cleaner or television, and amenities such as sole use of bathroom and
hot water. From these he derives a list of sixty deprivation indictors (1979, Appendix
13). These are clear examples of the ‘direct measures’ referred to by Ringen (1988)
and McKay (2004). From this list of sixty indicators, Townsend chooses 12
indicators, reproduced in Table 1, that he argues are relevant to the whole population.
These indicators include some that a majority of the population appears not to have,
notably a cooked breakfast most days of the week, which only a third of the
population consumed.
Table 1: Peter Townsend’s Deprivation Index
Indictor
Per cent of
population
Correlation
with net
disposable
household
income last
year (Pearson)
Has not had a week’s holiday away from home in the last 12
months
53.6
0.1892
Has not had a relative or friend home for a meal or snack in the past
4 weeks (adults only)
33.4
0.0493
Has not been out in the last 4 weeks with a relative or friend for a
meal or snack (adults only)
45.1
0.0515
Has not had a friend to play or to tea in the last 4 weeks (children
only)
36.3
0.0643
Did not have a party last birthday (children only)
56.6
0.0660
Has not had an afternoon or evening out for entertainment in the
last two weeks
47.0
0.1088
Does not have fresh meat (including meals out) as many as four
days a week
19.3
0.1821
Has gone through one or more days in the past fortnight without a
cooked meal
7.0
0.0684
Has not had a cooked breakfast for most days of the week
67.3
0.0559
Household does not have a refrigerator
45.1
0.2419
Household does not usually have a Sunday joint (3 in 4 times)
25.9
0.1734
Household does not have sole use of 4 amenities indoors (flush
WC; sink or washbasin and cold water tap; fixed bath or shower;
gas or electric cooker)
21.4
0.1671
Source: Townsend (1979, Table 6.3).
Townsend’s index, whose main purpose is to calibrate rather than replace his income
poverty measures (Halleröd, 2006), is constructed simply as the sum of all
deprivations a household experiences, with a score of 1 given for each deprivation.
Therefore a household that experienced all 12 deprivations would be given a score of
12, while a household that did not experience any would have a score of zero. As
Townsend (1979) and others (see for example Ringen, 1988) argue, direct deprivation
measures overcome a number of problems associated with cash income or
consumption based measures of poverty: we can observe directly what households
are consuming, overcoming worries about income that is not (and perhaps cannot) be
spent, or expenditure that for some households does not appear to go as far as one
might assume. Problems of equivalisation and sharing of resources across household
members are also to some extent solved by direct measures, although this does depend
on whom in the household is asked questions such as those posed by Townsend in
11
Table 1.1 above.3 In addition, deprivation indexes can focus specifically on children,
and on possession of goods, access to services or participation in activities that are
directly relevant to children. Most studies of deprivation however focus on household
deprivation, where a responsible adult is asked about access to goods and services. In
recent years of the UK Family Resources Survey (a large annual survey of household
income and access to services), a large number of child focused questions on
deprivation have been asked of parents, including:
• Does your child have/do your children have a family holiday way from home
for at least one week a year?
• Are there enough bedrooms for every child of ten or over of a different sex to
• Does your child have/do your children have leisure equipment such as sports
equipment or a bicycle?
• Does your child/do your children have celebrations on special occasions such
as birthdays, Christmas or other religious festivals?
Parents are also asked about whether their children go swimming, whether they have a
hobby, and whether they have friends to visit. Parents of children aged under six years
are asked about their child’s participation in a toddler group, nursery school or pre-
school, and parents of children aged over six are asked about their child’s
participation in school trips. In her analysis of severe child deprivation in the UK
using FRS data, Magadi (2009) shows that about four per cent of children in the UK
are in what she calls ‘severe poverty’, a combination of very low income and
deprivation on a number of items. Among this group, nine in ten do not go on
holidays, about half do not go swimming or have a hobby, and four in ten do not go
on school trips. Magadi’s analysis therefore suggests that analysis of a combination of
income poverty and deprivation can do much to reveal severe deprivation among
children in low income households.
Information on parents’ views of necessities for their children are somewhat more
extensive in the UK 2009 Omnibus Survey, where information is also elicited on
availability of fresh fruit and vegetables, and school uniforms. Hirsch and Smith
(2010) note that what parents deem a necessity for children evolves considerably from
year to year, so that in recent years, access to a computer with internet and a mobile
phone are increasingly being seen as necessities. Bradshaw and Main (2010) propose
a list of 39 items to be asked of parents with respect to child deprivation in the 2011
Survey of Poverty and Exclusion in the UK. This list includes questions asked of
parents in the FRS and Omnibus Survey, and also questions on access to a GP or
dentist, having brand name trainers, a computer, mobile phone and satellite TV, and
clothes that children consider allow them to fit in with their peers. Bradshaw and
Main discuss at some length how questions about children’s deprivation can be
interpreted in the context of adapted preferences, for example, to what extent can
3 Townsend himself appears to ask some questions of all adults (aged 15 and over) in the household,
and others of just the informant or housewife. Everyone is asked the question about eating a cooked
breakfast (which incidentally is meant to mean bacon and egg, but not porridge or toast). On the
other hand, he only asks the housewife (times were different back then) about buying second-hand
clothing (Townsend, 1979, Appendix 10).
12
parents state with certainty that their children do not want an item that they do not
have?
The 2008 Understanding Children’s Wellbeing survey also carried out in the UK, is
one of very few surveys that ask children aged 10-15 directly about the deprivation
that they experience. Also sampled were a subset of 300 parents who were asked the
same questions as the children about deprivation. In general, differences in responses
by parents and children were significant, but small, even in the case of quite abstract
questions, for example about self-rated wealth. Bradshaw and Main conclude:
Children’s subjective perceptions of familial wealth were closely
linked to possession of deprivation items, suggesting that such items
are a promising way of measuring subjective poverty amongst
children. Since children’s reporting of objective facets of poverty
was also similar to that of adults, and deprivation items correlated
with annual income, the deprivation scale also appears to be an
adequate proxy (amongst other forms of measurement) of objective
deprivation. (Bradshaw and Main, 2010, pp.39-40)
Bradshaw and Main also show however that parents and children do often appear to
have differing views on what they want that they do not have, with parents more
likely to state that their children do not want the items in question. This leaves open
the issue of whether differences in parent and child responses are related to children’s
desire to protect their parents from their experience of poverty (Bradshaw and Main,
2010; Ridge, 2002).
Child deprivation in developing countries
Studies of child deprivation in developing countries have evolved in a different
direction to studies in rich countries, for a number of reasons. First, in a few
developing countries money is not universally used as a means of exchange. Second,
many developing countries, including those where money is mostly used as a means
of exchange, have large informal sectors, a typical example being subsistence
farming, where a household grows crops primarily in order to feed itself. Production
for home consumption can be difficult to value in money terms at market prices
(although this is often done), and it is possible as an alternative to estimate the caloric
value of food consumed by the household (even though this is also difficult to
estimate accurately). Third, policy concern in developing countries has tended to be
less with relative deprivation (this might be an appropriate descriptor, for example, of
the deprivation indicator cited above ‘Does your child have/do your children have a
family holiday way from home for at least one week a year?’), but with access to
‘basic’ goods and services – enough food and nutrition, water that is safe to drink,
adequate sewage and sanitation, access to health care and school, and so on. Note that
there is also quite a literature on ‘basic’ deprivations in rich countries. One example
(Munoz, Krebs-Smith, Ballard-Barbash et al., 1997) compares food intakes of US
children with recommended diets, and finds that the prevalent food intake pattern of
children and teenagers does not meet national nutritional recommendations.
In general however, large scale studies of deprivation in rich countries tend to take a
more relative perspective, while studies in developing countries take a more absolute
or ‘basic needs’ perspective (see for example Cornia, Stewart and Jolly, 1988).
13
Caloric intake is perhaps the most regularly used, but also frequently used are
indicators of literacy and (at an aggregate level) life expectancy (Ram, 1992). Gordon,
Nandy et al. (2003) develop a set of basic needs indicators for children including
stunting (low height for age), wasting (low weight for height), attendance at school,
and access to health care services. Their indicators are derived from the definition of
absolute poverty agreed by governments of over 100 countries at the 1995 UN
Summit for International Development in Copenhagen:
“Absolute poverty is a condition characterized by severe deprivation
of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water,
sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It
depends not only on income but also on access to social services.”
(United Nations, 1995, p.41)
This definition contains the features inherent in the basic needs approach, for example
the focus on commodities. However, it is also quite an advanced definition in that it
includes deprivation of information as one of the characteristics of poverty, and
explicitly states that income alone is unlikely to lift people out of poverty – access to
social services is also necessary. Therefore, this definition is clearly placing an onus
on governments to act. This has been followed through in living standards surveys
carried out in many developing countries, which ask respondents about children’s
schooling, and accessibility of safe water and medical services (for example, see
World Bank sponsored Living Standards Measurement Surveys).
Gordon, Nandy et al. (2003) use the UN Copenhagen Declaration definition of
absolute poverty to operationalise their study of poverty among children in developing
countries. Their development of indicators is shown on Table 1, and illustrates some
of the challenges of developing a needs based approach in practice. They use
Demographic and Health Surveys for about 60 developing countries to develop a
continuum of deprivation for all of the indicators on Table 2, ranging from ‘no
deprivation’ to ‘severe deprivation’ and therefore allow for alternative definitions of
needs levels in their analysis. They also attempt to develop measures for individual
children and indeed reject the validity of household income as a measure of child
well-being because it does not focus on the individual child. The indicators of food,
health and education deprivation are clearly individual. All other indicators however,
are closely related to household status, in part reflecting the nature of the deprivation
(all household members are arguably deprived if the home does not have access to
water or sanitation), but also the difficulty in understanding how these deprivations
are distributed within the household. For example, a household member who never
has to fetch water and who washes and drinks as much as s/he likes is presumably less
affected by water deprivation than a household member who hauls water daily. As
with food and education, the need for water (and several other requirements) is
individual. However, it is sometimes difficult to directly measure fulfilment of such
needs on an individual basis.
14
Table 2: Indicators of absolute child poverty in developing countries (Gordon,
Nandy et al. 2003)
Severe food deprivation: children whose heights and weights for their age were more
than –3 sta
ndard deviations below the median of the international reference
population, that is, severe anthropometric failure.
Severe water deprivation: children who only had access to surface water (for example,
rivers) for drinking or who lived in households where the nearest source of water was
more than 15 minutes away (indicators of severe deprivation of water quality or
quantity).
Severe deprivation of sanitation facilities: children who had no access to a toilet of
any kind in the vicinity of their dwelling, that is, no private or communal toilets or
latrines.
Severe health deprivation: children who had not been immunised against any diseases
or young children who had a recent illness involving diarrhoea and had not received
any medical advice or treatment.
Severe shelter deprivation: children in dwellings with more than five people per room
(severe overcrowding) or with no flooring material (for example, a mud floor).
Severe educational deprivation: children aged between 7 and 18 who had never been
to school and were not currently attending school (no professional education of any
kind).
Severe information deprivation: children aged between 3 and 18 with no access to
radio, television, telephone or newspapers at home.
Severe deprivation of access to basic services: children living 20km or more from any
type of school or 50km or more from any medical facility with doctors. Unfortunately,
this kind of information was only available for a few countries, so it has not been
possible to construct accurate region
al estimates of severe deprivation of access to
basic services.
Value choices
The child deprivation indexes discussed above are potentially confusing in two
particular respects. First, the actual choice of indicators can be random. To some
extent, all social science research in the positivist tradition is burdened with the
choices and biases of the researcher in terms of what the population of interest is, how
the sample is chosen, and what the sample is asked. While this is true with research
regarding ‘indirect measures’ such as aggregate income and consumption, the
problems associated with deciding what to ask are perhaps greater with ‘direct
measures’, since these by definition try to capture more precisely a household’s actual
consumption patterns and activities. In their studies, Mack and Lansley (1985), Nolan
and Whelan (1996), and Saunders and Adelman (2006) attempt to overcome the
problem of choice of direct indicators by using data which ask respondents for each
15
item and activity: (1) whether they have it; (2) whether they do not have it but do not
want it, or whether they think it is a ‘necessity’ which people should not have to do
without; and (3) whether they do not have it because they cannot not afford it. In
other words, respondents are able to get over the ‘cooked breakfast’ problem in
Townsend’s survey by indicating whether they have any interest in eating a cooked
breakfast, regardless of whether they can afford it or not. However respondents in
these surveys are still asked about items from limited lists (typically 40-100 items),
and have no direct input into the construction of these lists.
Alkire and Roche (2011) summarise five methods commonly used by analysts for
determining dimensions of material deprivation.
- Deliberative participatory exercises to obtain the values and perspectives of
targe populations (Biggeri, Libanora, Mariani et al., 2006; Hirsch and Smith,
2010; Saunders, Naidoo and Griffiths, 2007)
- Using a list with legitimacy conferred by public consensus, for example the
Millennium Development Goals, or a list based on the Convention on the
Rights of the Child (Gordon et al., 2003)
- Making implicit or explicit assumptions about what people should value, for
example adapting lists proposed by Doyal and Gough (Doyal and Gough,
1991), or Nussbaum (Nussbaum, 2003)
- Convenience or convention, for example variables available in a recent survey
(Menchini and Redmond, 2009)
- Empirical evidence regarding core dimensions that are vital for child
development
More fundamentally, as Hallerod (2006) argues, it is difficult to interpret responses to
the question of whether somebody cannot afford a particular item, or whether they
think it is a necessity, because of the problem of ‘adapted preference’ (a problem that
is exacerbated where parents are asked to answer on children’s behalf - see Bradshaw
and Main, 2010). People will evaluate whether a particular item is a necessity based
on their reference group, rather than according to more ‘objective’ criteria. In an
analysis of UK data, McKay concludes that “there is only weak evidence that there is
a consensus on which goods and services people should have” (2004, p.220). Hallerod
(2006) argues that all ‘objective relative deprivation’ studies that use these
necessity/want/affordability criteria are in fact strongly subjective because of the
‘adapted preference’ problem.
The choice of indicators is an important issue for child poverty that researcher have
only recently begun to grapple with, even though many studies include specifically
child related indicators, such as having a party last birthday, or having friends to the
house to play (Nolan and Whelan, 1996; Townsend, 1979). There is room for more
serious consideration of what are the most appropriate indicators of children’s
deprivation that qualitative research on children and poverty can perhaps go some
way towards addressing (Ridge, 2002; Roker, 1998). Also important in considering
the meaning of relative deprivation and children is the question of children as agents
and dependants, and the choices they have within the household. Their (presumed)
16
lack of agency in actual consumption decisions does not preclude reflection on the
choices made for them, and feelings of deprivation that may ensue.
Multidimensional measures of deprivation
By nature, deprivation measures are multidimensional, and can be aggregated in a
number of ways. Townsend (1979) and Gordon et al. (2003) simply add up the
number of deprivations that each household (or child) experiences. They implicitly
gives each item on the list a weight of 1.0, but there is in fact no a priori reason why
all items should be weighted equally. Deprivation analysts have developed a number
of approaches to the problem of weighting different items on a deprivation list. For
example, Hallerod (2006) weights each item according to the proportion of the sample
that possesses it. Applying this technique to Townsend’s 12 items on Table 1 would
entail giving the ‘cooked breakfast’ indicator a relatively low weight of 0.327 (1-
67.3/100), while the indicator ‘Has gone through one or more days in the past
fortnight without a cooked meal’ would have a relatively higher weight of 0.93 (1-
7.0/100).
This, however, is only a partial solution, since universal possession of an item is not
the only possible criterion for determining its importance, and the type of additivity
built into this approach may be problematic. Again using Table 1 as an example,
Halleord’s approach means that a person who ‘Has not had a week’s holiday away
from home in the last 12 months’ and who ‘Did not have a party last birthday
(children only)’ (weighted score= 0.898) is worse off than a person living in a
‘Household [which] does not have sole use of 4 amenities indoors (flush WC; sink or
washbasin and cold water tap; fixed bath or shower; gas or electric cooker)’ (weighted
score=0.786), but who did have a holiday and a child’s birthday party. Such
valuations may sometimes be difficult to justify. On the other hand, the weighting is
explicit, and its robustness can be tested by introducing a set of alternative weights.
Robeyns states that many economists consider explicit weighting of elements in a
multidimensional index to be “an entirely arbitrary procedure and disapprove of the
explicit value judgments involved” (2006, p.357), and prefer to derive weights in a
more statistical way, even though she argues that there has been little discussion to
date of the plausibility of assumptions underlying these statistical methods. However,
statistical methods have helped in two areas. First, they have introduced the concept
of ‘dominance’ (Atkinson, 2003), where the approach is analogous to that taken with
Lorenz Curves in estimating which of two distributions is more unequal: in cases
where the curves cross, it cannot be unequivocally stated that one distribution is more
unequal than the other. With multidimensional deprivation measures, a number of
axioms can be derived to determine at least an ordinal multidimensional deprivation
ranking, and its robustness to changes in deprivation thresholds and other parameters
(Bourguignon and Chakravarty, 2002). Second, the technique of factor analysis (as
used in Nolan and Whelan, 1996) has allowed for a more rigorous grouping of large
numbers of indicators into ‘dimensions’ that can reveal some underlying factors
associated with deprivation.
Alkire and Foster (2011a) propose a method for measuring multidimensional poverty
that attempts to draw on the axiomatic approach, so that any improvement in a poor
person’s living standard counts towards a reduction in poverty, that any improvement
in a very poor person’s living standard is given greater weight than a transfer to a
17
person just under the poverty line, and that any transfer between two persons below
the poverty line counts as a reduction in poverty if the recipient of the transfer has a
lower income than the donor (provided the latter still has a higher living standard after
the transfer), and as an increase in poverty if the recipient has a higher income than
the donor. These axioms are satisfied by deriving two cutoffs for the determination of
who is poor – one for each dimension of poverty that is measured, one overall cutoff
to identify the poor population. Weights are applied to each dimension (depending on
the analyst’s valuation of each dimension’s relative importance), allowing ordinal,
and in some cases cardinal measurement of multidimensional poverty, what Alkire
and Foster call the ‘adjusted headcount ratio’. An analysis using this method to
measure poverty in Bangladesh by Alkire and Roche (2011) shows that the adjusted
headcount ratio produces a different picture of child poverty than can be seen from a
traditional headcount measure, highlighting in particular what they call ‘the intensity
of deprivations that batter poor children’s lives at the same time’ (2011, p.18).
18
2 Poverty and human development
While human development, which can broadly be described as a global approach to
improving living standards and human well-being, has traditionally been seen as
fulfilment of basic needs (as discussed in Section 1.2 above), the debate has now
shifted decisively towards the concept of capabilities, championed by Amartya Sen
(1999). Most of this section is devoted to describing the capabilities approach, and
discusses its relevance for the study of child poverty. More recently, human rights
have also been placed at the heart of the human development debate, and a
considerable literature has also grown around its relationship to capabilities. This
section discusses how the capabilities approach broadens issues of concern for
poverty analysts.
2.1 The Capabilities approach
Amartya Sen (1983, 1987, 1992, 1999) has been one of the prime movers in
broadening the poverty debate away from economic welfare and towards what he
terms capabilities.
“If our attention is shifted from an exclusive concentration on
income poverty to the more inclusive idea of capability deprivation,
we can better understand the poverty of human lives and freedoms
in terms of a different informational base (involving the statistics of
a kind that the income perspective tends to crowd out as a reference
point for policy analysis). The role of income and wealth –
important as it is along with other influences – has to be integrated
into a broader and fuller picture of success and deprivation.” (Sen,
1999, p.20)
Whereas economic welfare is about a stock or flow of (generally) countable resources
or commodities, capabilities are about how we can make use of possessions and other
things in order to lead a life which we have reason to value. Material welfare is
instrumentally important, but capabilities are intrinsically important. Moreover,
factors other than economic resources can influence these intrinsically important
outcomes. Because people have different skills, characteristics and attributes, and live
in different situations, they may need different levels and types of resources (both
economic and other) to achieve a given level of capability.
Capabilities are best described as the freedom a person has to choose from a set of
different possible and desirable courses of action - “the alternative combinations of
functionings that are feasible for her to achieve.” (Sen, 1999, p.75) Functioning
describes the actual choice – the observed outcome within a capability set. While the
term deprivation can be used to describe a sub-optimal outcome in any capability set,
poverty arguably describes a subset of such sub-optimal outcomes in a capabilities
space that the analyst must explicitly define. Sen himself does not attempt to define
which capability sets should be included in the poverty definition (Robeyns, 2006
describes the approach as "underspecified"), although in his writings on capabilities
and poverty, he does repeatedly return to those elements that UNDP (2000) includes
in its definition of human poverty – “the ability to be well-nourished and well-
sheltered, the capability of escaping avoidable mortality and premature morbidity, and
so forth.” (Sen, 1992, p.45).
19
Unlike approaches to poverty analysis that focus exclusively on material well-being
(where the analyst needs to inject exogenous values in order to develop a definition of
poverty), the capability approach is inherently value laden, and gives some clear
directions as to what an ‘adequate standard of living’ might be. First, it includes an
absolute minimum base. Children who die or who are malnourished or who cannot
read or write are capability deprived. Second, it suggests a normative orientation
towards outcomes.
“The capabilities of relevance are not only those that relate to
avoiding premature mortality, being in good health, being schooled
and educated, and other such basic concerns, but also various social
achievements, including – as Adam Smith (1776) emphasized –
being able to appear in public without shame and being able to take
part in the life of the community.”(Sen, 2006, p.35).
Capabilities, therefore, are not only about minimum functionings but about freedom
for a person to live the life that she values. While the role of material resources is
recognised as important in helping people achieve their capabilities, the capabilities
approach explicitly recognises that they are one among several types of input, and the
efficacy with which a person can translate these resources into capabilities (the
conversion factor) is dependent on his own inherent talents and limitations, and the
environment in which he lives. Therefore, if adequacy (or ‘non-poverty’) is
conceptualised as a situation where a person can lead a life they have reason to value,
then the size and type of material inputs to this living standard are dependent on
several factors, and can vary from person to person.
Application of the capabilities approach
Operationalisation of the capabilities approach has been fraught with difficulty, in part
because of the ‘underspecified’ nature of the concept, and in part because of the lack
of suitable data at the level of the individual that can identify the sorts of choices that
people are able to make (Robeyns, 2006). Most research that applies the capability
approach therefore focuses on functionings, with the assumption that the functioning
represents the rationally best choice available to the individual, and that those who do
not take this rational choice (such as the rich man who chooses to fast) are outliers.
This brings much empirical work which places itself in the capabilities tradition into
the orbit of ‘deprivation’ or ‘social exclusion’. Indeed, Ruggeri Laderchi, Saith et al.
(2003) make the point that practical applications of the capabilities approach tend to
identify the same needs as those used in basic needs approaches (which Sen
characterises as a ‘commodity fetish’) – for example nutrition, education and health
care.
Robeyns argues however that the capabilities approach “offers the underpinnings of
multidimensional empirical analysis, and stresses to a far greater extent [than other
poverty analysis approaches] the need to integrate theory and practice, and to pay due
attention to the philosophical foundations.” (2006, p.371) This is seen in many
empirical analyses in the capabilities tradition that use well-being indicators that are
widely analysed within the poverty and deprivation traditions (see for example Di
Tomasso, 2006; Haveman and Bershadker, 2001; Klasen, 2000). These underpinnings
can be important in terms of the conclusions drawn from such research. Klasen, for
example, uses the capabilities approach in his study of income poverty and
20
deprivation in South Africa to justify a focus on outcomes experienced by the
population - a term that is rarely used in deprivation type analysis.
The difference here is perhaps that with deprivation analysis, the concern for using
non-monetary indicators is because they may better capture the state of ‘poverty’, but
of themselves they are often not of great significance – Townsend’s indicators on
Table 1 above of not eating fresh meat several times a week, or a child not having a
birthday party, are examples in this respect. While the material poverty analyst may
interpret deprivation in these indicators only in the context of a number of other
indicators that together suggest ‘poverty’ or ‘deprivation’, the capabilities analyst will
be more interested in what the indicators mean in terms of final outcomes – poor
nutrition leading to poor health, for example, or ‘shame’ a term much utilised by Sen,
often in the context of the above reference to Adam Smith.
The focus on philosophical underpinnings presents some challenges for empirical
work on children and capabilities that is meaningfully different from work in other
traditions. One application would be to draw a clear distinction between ‘resources’
(including commodities) and outcomes, and to systematically work through the
meaning of common indicators such as school attendance as a resource or instrument
(for human capital development, for social inclusion), or as an activity or status which
in itself is of intrinsic value (that is, on a par with good health, happiness, knowledge,
inclusion). Phipps (2002) takes something close to this approach in focusing on health
and psychological well-being outcomes for children in the US, Norway and Canada.
The indicators she uses may have a number of implications, but each is also arguably
of concern in itself. Di Tomasso (2006) attempts to relate four Basic Needs-type
indicators in her study of children’s well-being in India (stunting, wasting, enrolment
in school, and work status) closely to Nussbaum’s (2003) list of basic capabilities
(including bodily health; bodily integrity; emotions; senses, imagination and thought,
etc.).
Another area in which there may be scope for a capabilities approach that is clearly
differentiated from other approaches is in the development of conversion factors – the
‘market price’ for an individual, given their characteristics, talents and environmental
and other constraints, to achieve a minimally acceptable level of capability. These
appear to have generally been ignored by analysts who seek to apply the capabilities
approach (Burchardt and Zaidi, 2005; Kuklys and Robeyns, 2005). Governments
however implicitly accept that some people may need more help than others in order
to get by (this is one rationale for higher cash transfers for people with disabilities,
and also in some countries higher payments for single parents). It may be possible
using household survey datasets to develop a picture of conversion factors for
particular groups of children based on what they are observed to achieve in terms of
outcomes or functionings with different levels of resources.
Poverty and mortality
Indicators of life expectancy and mortality are sometimes included alongside other
indicators of absolute deprivation, particularly in the context of developing countries,
but also at least occasionally in rich countries (Oecd, 2009). The UNDP Human
Development Index includes life expectancy as one of its main indicators for ranking
countries, alongside GDP and literacy (for example, see United Nations Development
Programme Undp, 2000). Sen (1998) has promoted mortality as an indicator of
21
economic success and failure, and argues that information on mortality, first, is of
intrinsic importance; second, of enabling significance (being alive is necessary if we
are to lead lives we have reason to value); and third, of associative relevance, since
many other important indicators are correlated either positively or negatively with
mortality. In particular, a large literature has developed linking both life expectancy
and infant mortality to socio-economic conditions (Franz and Fitzroy, 2006; see for
example Krueger, Rogers, Hummer et al., 2003).
Mortality in the household context should be seen as a powerful indicator of
deprivation (or capability deprivation). Households that experience the death of a
child, or the premature death of an adult, are deprived, even though according to
conventional measures, that death may result in per capita income in the household
increasing and the household’s outlays on healthcare decreasing. In addition infant
mortality is often used as a key indicator of child well-being at the national level
(Unicef, 2006), and at the regional level within countries. The case for including
analysis of mortality among children and their parents in studies of child poverty is
strong. However, the means for doing this need further development.
2.2 Poverty and human rights
While the term is now universally used, there is little agreement among lawyers and
philosophers on what human rights actually are. The closest we arguably have to
agreement is what is in the UN-sponsored conventions that have been ratified by the
vast majority of nations – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, the International
covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of all forms
of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Convention on the Rights of
Persons with Disabilities, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As Beitz
(2001) points out, these treaties do not lay out any foundational principles, but simply
declare certain matters to be rights. These human rights treaties represent a coherent
and progressive body of law – coherent in the sense that all treaties subsequent to the
Universal Declaration seek to give prominence and detail to elements that are already
implicit in the Universal Declaration. There are no cases where a later treaty actually
rescinds any provision in an earlier treaty. The treaties are also progressive in that
each treaty seeks to strengthen individuals’ rights.
The treaties are somewhat ambiguous on the issue of poverty. The word ‘poverty’ is
not actually mentioned in any treaty, and the right to freedom from poverty is not
clearly stated anywhere (Alston, 2005). Nonetheless, poverty is one of the dominant
issues in contemporary human rights debates, as is shown by the linking of
Millennium Development Goals to human rights fulfilment. This is sometimes argued
from the perspective of the right to survival, or to access to education, health care and
other basic social services. It is also sometimes argued in the context of adequacy of
living standards. Article 27 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child states in full:
1. States Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of
living adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and
social development.
22
2. The parent(s) or others responsible for the child have the primary
responsibility to secure, within their abilities and financial
capacities, the conditions of living necessary for the child's
development.
3. States Parties, in accordance with national conditions and within
their means, shall take appropriate measures to assist parents and
others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in
case of need provide material assistance and support programmes,
particularly with regard to nutrition, clothing and housing.
4. States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to secure the
recovery of maintenance for the child from the parents or other
persons having financial responsibility for the child, both within the
State Party and from abroad. In particular, where the person having
financial responsibility for the child lives in a State different from
that of the child, States Parties shall promote the accession to
international agreements or the conclusion of such agreements, as
well as the making of other appropriate arrangements. (Article 27,
Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989)
Here I focus mostly on Article 27.1, although it is important to interpret this section in
the context of the whole article, and indeed the whole convention. If freedom from
poverty is to have a concrete meaning in terms of human rights, it has to be in the
context of adequate living standards. Craven (1995, p.293), writing on the
International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, notes that the lack
of clarity in the term ‘adequate standard of living’ has resulted in a right “which
appears to have little independent substance.” This is undoubtedly the case. It is other
rights (to life, survival, health education, etc.) that appear to ultimately point towards
what an adequate standard of living might entail. On the other hand, Bowers Andrews
(1999, p.7) states that “Article 27 focuses the need to move beyond traditional
emphasis on physical development to regard the child as fully human, with complex
needs, characteristics, and abilities that must be nurtured from birth onwards.”
Moreover, implicitly taking up Craven’s (1995) point, she points to an important
difference between the terminology used in Article 27 of the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, and that used in Articles 24 (on health) and 29 (on education):
“The terms “adequate” and “necessary” used in Article 27 imply the
child’s right is to minimal, not optimal, living conditions that
support holistic development. Article 29 contains bolder language,
stating that the child’s education shall be directed to the
development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and
physical abilities to their fullest potential (emphasis added).4
Likewise, Article 24 recognizes the right to the highest attainable
standard of health. As a practical matter, establishing standards for
what constitutes adequate living conditions will be determined by
various states, communities and cultures. Notions of adequacy,
need, and child development vary across nations and habitats and
4 That is, emphasis added by Bowers Andrews (1999)
23
within societal groups. In effect, the UN has issued a challenge to
nations through Article 27 that requires them to discover what
conditions are adequate and necessary for their children’s
development and to secure, to the extent possible, those conditions
for each child. The process requires scientific research, political
discourse, and value-based decisions about child development.”
(Bowers Andrews, 1999, pp.7-8)
Hodgkin and Newell (2007, p.393) offer a somewhat similar interpretation, arguing
that the child’s right to development “must be to ‘the maximum extent’ (article 6) or
to the child’s ‘fullest potential’ (article 29)”. I interpret the challenge set out by
Bowers Andrews as follows: while ‘adequate’ perhaps suggests something other than
‘opulent’ and more like ‘basic minimum’ or ‘poverty line’, the kind of development to
be achieved with this standard of living is clearly not basic (Hodgkin and Newell,
2007, pp.393-4); moreover, it cannot in any meaningful sense be an absolute standard,
but is relative to those in the society where the child lives, or to those in other
societies that the society in question desires to emulate; and it is the responsibility of
society to ensure that no child falls far below this prevailing or aspirational standard
of living.
There are a number of resources that can feed into achievement of this goal, among
which family and parental resources are one element, as Article 27.2 states. Another
important element is the resources of the state that are either directly invested in the
child, or invested through the parents – this is the focus of Article 27.3. The right,
moreover, while it refers to a minimum level of inputs, can only be judged in terms of
its adequacy according to the outcomes it achieves. We can only therefore truly know
if a child’s standard of living has been adequate through their childhood if they have
actually achieved optimal outcomes. This presents a challenge for the capabilities
approach, which cannot easily accommodate temporal and dynamic aspects of well-
being.
Detrick (1999, pp.458-9) however appears to suggest what might be described as a
weak absolutist core to this right. In her analysis of the travaux préparatoires for the
Convention on the Rights of the Child, she notes that the US delegation suggested
replacing the original proposed wording for Article 27.1 “States Parties recognize the
right of every child to a standard of living adequate to guarantee the child's physical,
mental, spiritual, moral and social development.” with the somewhat weaker
statement “States Parties recognize the right of every child to a standard of living
adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.”
(emphasis added for clarity). This proposal was accepted, but a further US proposal to
add the phrase “in accordance with national conditions” was rejected, as several
delegations felt that it would weaken the basic principle contained in the article; the
phrase was instead added to Article 27.3 (Detrick, 1999, p.457).
Delegations to the Convention therefore appeared to agree that the word ‘guarantee’
was too strong for connecting children’s living standards with their development. I
interpret rejection of the word ‘guarantee’ to mean that states are not obliged to ensure
that all children develop in the ways stated – only that they have the policies in place,
and that they in conjunction with parents have resources in place to ensure that
underdevelopment is not a commonplace and predictable occurrence. This is
consistent with Pogge’s (2008) notion of ‘secure access’ to human rights. On the other
24
hand, delegates were unwilling to agree that adequacy in living standards should be
determined or judged solely in the context of national conditions where the child
lived. This suggests to me not only that the international community is obliged to
support the living standards of children in states where resources are inadequate in
absolute terms (this is stated in Article 4 of the Convention), but also that all states are
obliged to carefully consider how they interpret ‘adequacy’, and how they may be
able to learn from other jurisdictions in this context.
25
3 Poverty as a social relation
The idea of poverty, not as an income status, but more as a position in a social
hierarchy, is a powerful one that perhaps comes out more strongly in literature and in
the popular imagination than in academic research.5 Lister (2004) proposes two
alternative ideas of ‘the poor’ in popular imagination. The image frequently portrayed
in literature (for example that of Charles Dickens) is one where rich and poor live in
completely different communities, and where contact between these societies is
generally problematic, and only encouraged under carefully prescribed circumstances.
‘The poor’ are characterised as having their own norms, habits and customs, and that
these may pose a threat to ‘mainstream’ society. Lister’s alternative idea of the poor,
as good people just like us, only with fewer resources appears to deny the ‘two
separate communities’ thesis, it often propagates another image, of poor people as
passive and helpless. In both cases, poor people are ‘othered’ to use Lister’s (2004)
term – people who are non-poor objectify those who are poor. Underlying both
images is the idea of poverty not as a state of low income or other resources, but as a
set of economic and social characteristics that are attached to people for the long term,
and perhaps for their whole lives.
Analysis used to describe poverty as a social relation (between the poor and the rest of
society) often assumes one of the above ideas. Here, two such ideas are examined –
underclass in Section 3.1 and social exclusion in Section 3.2. The role of children in
these schemas is interesting in that by convention, they are never agents, and therefore
cannot be blamed for their circumstances, and for the most part cannot in themselves
be characterised as ‘dangerous’, only as victims (although it is worth noting that in
most countries the age of criminal responsibility is often one of the first age
thresholds that children reach on their way to adulthood – long before they acquire
other rights and responsibilities associated with adulthood). Section 3.3 deals with the
opposite of poor people as objects: participative approaches among poor people for
defining poverty and proposing solutions to it.
3.1 Underclass
The term ‘underclass’ appears to have been coined by journalists in the US in the
1970s and 1980s to describe a group of people who were stuck at the bottom of
society, living in clearly demarcated ghettoes, dependant on welfare, and with values
and behaviour that differentiated them from the rest of society (Jencks, 1992; Lister,
2004). The idea of underclass however has a longer pedigree. Alcock (1997, p.29) for
example shows that Charles Booth, in his pioneering analysis of poverty in London
“distinguished a group among the ranks of the poor whom he regarded as a
‘residuum’ of criminal or feckless characters who were a blight on the rest of the poor
and lower classes.” Alcock makes the point that this ‘residuum’ generated a great deal
of fear among the more ‘respectable’ classes because it was felt that the former did
not share the values and norms of the latter. Indeed, the idea of an ‘underclass’ takes
to extremes the notion proposed by Lister (2004) of poverty as a social relationship
5 As was noted in Section 1 above, the most common ‘popular’ definition of poverty is probably having
little or no money, but the image that goes with this definition is not that of the hard-up student,
more the person who has had it hard for a long time, will probably have it hard well into the future,
and lives a different life from those who are not poor.
26
between those who are not poor and those who are poor, where the poor lead totally
separate lives to the non-poor.
More recently some researchers have attempted to identify the characteristics of the
modern underclass. Murray (1984, 1990) focuses on welfare dependency, illegitimacy
and single parenthood, criminality and disengagement from the labour market. He
strongly argues, moreover, that the underclass is responsible for its own situation.
Mincy et al. (1990) propose three major classes of measures to identify the underclass.
The first concerns persistence – those with chronically low incomes, across a lifetime
or even across generations. The second concerns behaviour or attitudes – welfare
dependency, joblessness, teenage parenthood, crime and child abuse. The third class
of measures is related to location, where neighbourhoods “where the incidence of
nonconformity with existing social norms is high.” (Mincy et al., 1990, p.451) rather
than individuals are defined as underclass. Buckingham (1999) separately examines
the existence of an underclass in the UK according to sets of criteria relating to
individual behaviours, structural issues such as access to the labour market, and
critical approaches that deny the existence of a significant underclass. He argues that
while evidence is weak in terms of all three criteria, he concludes that an underclass
may be emerging in the UK.
Children are invariably present as passive becomings (but sometimes as active
criminals) in underclass studies. One of the major policy concerns with respect to the
‘underclass’ is that membership should not be passed from parents to children, and
that early intervention represents the best opportunity to break the cycle of poverty.
Children are also the more direct objects of analysis in some underclass studies, with
focus typically on the impact of underclass parents on child outcomes (see for
example Kliegman, 1992; Sampson and Laub, 1994). These studies tend to support
theories on the negative consequences of underclass membership for children in terms
of early development, and in terms of delinquency. By extension, they suggest that if
we are interested in the broader idea of child poverty (not just income), and the
transmission of poverty from parents to children, then we have to understand better
“the socializing influence of the family as reflected in disciplinary practices,
supervision and direct parental controls, and bonds of attachment.” (Sampson and
Laub, 1994, p.538) Findings such as this present a challenge for the definition of child
poverty, and whether it is advisable to supplement income and other material
indicators of poverty with indicators of family functioning that may be related to
children’s poverty both in the present, and as they develop into adults.
3.2 Social Exclusion
As the term suggests, social exclusion is not about command over economic resources
(although exclusion is commonly linked to a lack of resources), or about a set of
outcomes or functionings. Rather, it concerns processes in society which lead some
people to be excluded from a range of institutions, activities or environments: the
“denial or non-realization of civil, political and social rights of citizenship” (Room,
1995). As such, it is in one sense the opposite of underclass theories as proposed by
Murray (1984, 1990). However it is similar in that the excluded nonetheless tend to be
objectified in this approach (Levitas, 1999; Lister, 2004; Veit-Wilson, 1998). And just
as ‘underclass’ can incite a strong image in many people’s imagination, so too
‘exclusion’ has come to be associated not only with poverty and unemployment, but
27
also membership of ethnic minorities, and residence in outer urban public housing
estates.
The following definition of social exclusion, proposed by the UK Social Exclusion
Unit, has been commonly used by the UK government:
A shorthand term for what can happen when people or areas suffer
from a combination of linked problems such as unemployment, poor
skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime, bad health and family
breakdown. (Social Exclusion Unit, 2001, p.10)
Levitas et al. (2007) propose a more comprehensive definition:
Social exclusion is a complex and multi-dimensional process. It
involves the lack or denial of resources, rights, goods and services,
and the inability to participate in the normal relationships and
activities, available to the majority of people in a society, whether in
economic, social, cultural or political arenas. It affects both the
quality of life of individuals and the equity and cohesion of society
as a whole. (Levitas et al., 2007, p.9)
While the Social Exclusion Unit definition is ambiguous as to the causes of exclusion
(they could be in the individual, but they could also be in society), the Levitas et al.
definition suggests that the causes may lie outside the affected individual (this is the
essence of denial of rights), and may moreover have negative effects, not only on
people who are excluded, but on the non-excluded too. The implication is that it is in
everybody’s interest to eliminate social exclusion.
While there is no one agreed definition of social exclusion, Atkinson (1998) identifies
three elements that appear to be constant in debates. First, it is a relative concept.
People are excluded from a particular community or society, at a particular place and
time. Unlike with, say, material welfare approaches discussed in Section 1 (which can
but need not take a relative approach), it is not possible to judge whether a person is
excluded by looking at her circumstances in isolation. Over time, Sen has tended to
build relativity more into the capability approach (see Sen, 2006), but he still strongly
argues for the irreducible absolutist core to poverty (1983).
The second element identified by Atkinson is agency. The examination of a person’s
failure to achieve inclusion has to be concerned with identification of the actors
(including possibly the person himself) causing exclusion. Agency is arguably central
to human rights, since for every right there is a corresponding duty bearer.6 In
addition, the focus on agency of those who exclude also implies a perspective not only
on individuals, but also on groups (for example, ethnic groups) and communities –
actors and institutions that have the power to include or exclude people do not always
have a merely individual focus. It is perhaps a weakness of both approaches that focus
on material well-being, and the capability approach, that they are inherently
6 However, this does not mean that where there is no explicitly named duty bearer, there are no rights;
for example, the international community has in principle the duty of upholding the rights of
stateless persons.
28
individualistic, and that there is little space for agency (as as enabling, or as
oppression) in them.
The third element is that of dynamics. It is not only people’s current situation that is
important, but their prospects for the future. Again, this sets social exclusion apart
from the other two approaches that tend to accommodate a ‘here and now’
perspective. “While the other approaches can study causes and interconnections
between different elements of deprivation, such investigation is not part of the process
of identifying the poor. In contrast, the definition of [social exclusion] typically
includes the process of becoming poor as well as some outcomes of deprivation.”
(Ruggeri Laderchi et al., 2003, p.258). Atkinson explicitly includes in this element of
dynamics not only people’s own prospects, but those of their children, where parents’
poverty, deprivation or exclusion increases risks for children’s social exclusion.
Like the capabilities approach, the social exclusion approach is inherently
multidimensional (Rogers, 1995) or pluralistic (Wolff and De-Shalit, 2007). As the
quasi-official definition of the UK government cited above suggests, disadvantage
does not tend to visit people in single variants, but in multiple forms, some of them
connected with a lack of material resources, but others stemming a range of other
situations that they find themselves in. But unlike the capabilities approach, the social
exclusion approach does not generally attempt to order different types of exclusion, or
‘risk factors for exclusion’ as the literature tends to characterise them (Levitas et al.,
2007; Social Exclusion Unit, 2001). For example, it does not as a matter of course
draw a distinction between resources and functionings (Levitas et al., 2007), but
instead sees both as potential risk factors for social exclusion. Another feature of the
literature is that while risk factors are usually clearly spelt out, actual social exclusion
is not always so clearly identified (Burchardt et al., 2002).
Unlike either of the other two approaches, some experts claim that social exclusion
contains a certain subjective element. Barry (1998) cites the following contribution
from Professor Julian LeGrand at a meeting at the London School of Economics’
Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion:
‘A (British) individual is socially excluded if (a) he/she is
geographically resident in the United Kingdom but (b) for reasons
beyond his or her control, he/she cannot participate in the normal
activities of United Kingdom citizens, and (c) he/she would like to
so participate.’ (Barry, 1998, p.4)
In a similar vein, Estivill (2003, p.13) states that exclusion is related to “the
dissatisfaction or unease felt by individuals who are faced with situations in which
they cannot achieve their objectives for themselves or their loved ones” and that
“exclusion tends to have a certain subjective content based on material facts”. This is
not to suggest that all those who feel excluded are excluded, or that all those who do
not feel excluded are not excluded. However, it seems to me that the social exclusion
approach does allow space for groups of people to declare their inclusion or
exclusion, and to investigate its causes. There is little space in more ‘objective’
approaches for such perspectives. Indeed, Sen appears to view subjective assessments
of one’s own situation with a degree of suspicion: “The defeated and the down-
trodden come to lack the courage to desire things that others more favourably treated
by society desire with easy confidence.” (Sen, 1987, p.10)
29
As with studies using the capabilities approach, studies using the social exclusion
approach have tended to position themselves to some extent in opposition to, or as an
alternative to the more conventional methods of poverty analysis that focus on
material welfare. But unlike approaches that focus on material well-being, or the
capabilities approach, which are both situated broadly within the discipline of
economics (in the sense that both are engaged in conversations with utilitarianism,
both focus on the individual, and neither offers a trenchant critique of the market as an
efficient method of allocation), the social exclusion approach would claim to be inter-
disciplinary:
A central idea is that exclusion has much to do with inequality in
many dimensions — economic, social, political, cultural. This broad
framework not only helps to identify the most important
mechanisms and dimensions of exclusion, which vary from one
situation to another, but also provides the basis for an effective
interdisciplinary approach. (Rogers, 1995, p.50)
While this interdisciplinary characteristic has considerable advantages, notably that
debates on social exclusion have blossomed across a much wider range of issues than
might have been the case had it been confined to a single discipline, it may also
contribute to its somewhat ragged and permanently unfinished feel, with basic
definitions, as well as lower order questions, subject to constant review and
refinement. For this reason perhaps, empirical applications of the social exclusion
approach do not easily cohere into a single literature in the manner of more
conventional studies of income poverty and deprivation, or studies of capability
deprivation.
Exclusion and children
As discussed above, one of the key assumptions noted by Atkinson (1998) that
underpins the concept of social exclusion (and one of the things that sets it apart from
economic welfare and capability approaches) is that actions by people and institutions
have the impact of including or excluding adults and children from what is considered
normal in a community or society. Analysis of these actions, moreover, can uncover
not only inclusion or exclusion of individuals or groups related to economic adversity,
but also on the basis of geography, mental health, ability/disability or ethnicity, or
sometimes a combination of several factors.
Micklewright (2002) draws up a list of potential actors who exclude children:
government and its agents, the labour market, schools, parents, other children, and the
children themselves. It is important to recognise that if these actors have the power to
exclude, then they may also have the power to include. Many of these actors also
engage in multiple transactions with children, some of them inclusionary, and some
less so.
Government and its agents are important agents of inclusion through redistribution of
resources towards low income families, and through provision of universal services
such as public transport, health and education. In the Australian context, Daly and
Smith (2003) note some inclusionary positives related to income support payments to
Indigenous families. However, governments can also exclude particular people,
through social policies that promote a particular welfare ethic or ideal family type (as
30
Apps 2006 argues in the case of the current Australian income tax system), or through
policies that create strong systems of social stratification (Esping-Andersen, 1990).
The labour market includes many children as workers, often from quite a young age,
but sometimes exploits them, particularly through payment of very low wages (Ridge,
2002). In their studies of children’s perceptions of poverty in the UK, both Roker
(1998) and Ridge (2002) attest to children’s real contributions to the household
economy through giving at least some of their earnings from casual work to their
parents. Micklewright (2002) argues that children can suffer from their parents’
exclusion from the labour market, and that young people are often excluded by
employer ‘short-termism’ which makes firms less willing to invest in employees long-
term. Smyth (2002) points out that ‘credential creep’ implies employers may
increasingly demand formal qualifications for even fairly basic jobs.
Schools are clearly agents of inclusion in the first instance, in that they bring children
together. However, schools can also be agents of exclusion – literally, as
Micklewright (2002) points out in the case of exclusions (sending home children for
unacceptable behaviour) and expulsions, but also because they may fail to teach some
children adequately, or because of policies that exclude children from some activities
because they do not have the means to pay for them, or because of policies that
stigmatise children who access income tested school services. One UK study shows
that expulsions and suspensions are much more common among children with low
incomes. Such children moreover, appear to have worse relations in general with their
teachers, and are less concerned about doing well at school (Ridge, 2002).
Many children also feel keenly the stigma of lack of money at school. Roker (1998)
reports on some children’s reluctance to ask for discounts available to children from
low income for school trips, and not being able to afford gear for sports classes.
Ridge (2002, pp.141-2) argues that it is not simply financial hardship that excludes
children at school, but institutional practices that exacerbate the effects of poverty on
children by stigmatising them and effectively presiding over their exclusion from
some school activities, such as trips where a parental contribution is required.
Parents, Micklewright argues, “have an enormous influence on the well-being of their
children. One implication is that parents must be a major potential agent for their
children’s exclusion.” (2002, chapter 3) He suggests that parents can exclude their
children by not bringing enough money into the household, by failing to spend their
money wisely, by failing to take an interest in their children’s education, or by failing
to take adequate interest in their children’s health, nutrition or social development (or
conversely, parents can include children by paying due attention to these aspects of
their development). His point is that parents and parenting skills are very important
for child well-being and development, and while parental failures may be inadvertent
or unintended, and greatly exacerbated (or ameliorated) by other factors, the point
remains that parents can be agents of exclusion. This argument fits well with Mayer’s
(1997) thesis that children’s life chances are not principally governed by their parents’
incomes, but by other factors relating to parenting practices and parents’
psychological well-being. This finding fits with qualitative research that tries to
understand children’s perceptions of poverty. In several such studies, family support
is one factor that strongly emerges as important for children: parents and families can
provide children with the means to cope better with poverty (Ridge, 2002; Roker,
1998; Van Der Hoek, 2005).
31
Other children come across in several qualitative studies of children and poverty as
agents of both inclusion and exclusion, not least because of the importance children
themselves place in fitting in, and in being included (Ridge, 2002; Roker, 1998; Van
Der Hoek, 2005; Weinger, 2000).7 Some evidence moreover suggests that this
exclusion can be ingrained from a very early age (Backett-Milburn, Cunningham-
Burley and Davis, 2003; Weinger, 2000).
Finally, children can also exclude themselves if they are ascribed agency. In a review
of a number of studies of children and poverty, Attree (2006) notes that children and
their parents often have few aspirations to engage more in life in the present, or to
improve their situations in the future. In addition, some studies show that children
exclude themselves from activities because they do not want to pressure their parents
into giving them money that they cannot afford, so they simply do not ask (Ridge,
2002; Van Der Hoek, 2005). In contrast, children whose parents have recently found
work and whose family incomes have increased find themselves going out more, and
engaging in more activities (Ridge, 2007). Micklewright (2002) notes some other
forms of self-exclusion (not all of which I would agree with), including wagging
school and drug addiction. Certainly, there is an element of voluntarism in children’s
decisions to miss school or take drugs. But agency in these circumstances should
perhaps be interpreted in the context of constraints (including poverty and adult
authority) that may greatly restrict freedom of action in a range of domains that are
considered more legitimate. Arguably, self-exclusion by children may follow some
form of exclusion by others more powerful.
While identification of likely agents of children’s exclusion serves the purpose of
pointing towards responsible actors, the operationalisation of agency to foster
inclusion or exclusion in survey microdata has proved difficult, since this would
involve capturing dynamic processes that cannot be easily recorded in ‘snapshot’ data.
The more usual approach in the analysis of social exclusion using survey microdata
has been to identify ‘risk factors’ or ‘drivers’ (Bradshaw, Kemp, Baldwin et al., 2004)
that might be associated with the state of social exclusion. The role of agents in the
process of exclusion tends to be overlooked. This is clear for example in the
comprehensive review of indicators of social exclusion undertaken by Levitas et al.
(2007), and the operationalisation of Levitas’ work by Oroyemi et al. (2009) to
measure social exclusion of children in the UK . The indicators reviewed are drawn
from large scale survey microdata, and in a few cases from administrative data.
Indicators (on low income, deprivation, school attendance, educational attainment,
unemployment, homelessness, physical and mental health, child protection, and so on)
describe states that may be the product of exclusionary processes – ‘moments’ of
social reproduction to use Lareau’s (2003) terminology, but do not adequately capture
the processes, or the ‘moments’, themselves.
3.3 Participative approaches
In spite of a long tradition in the social science of poverty analysis, it is only in
relatively recent times that people in living in poverty themselves have been asked by
researchers for their own perspectives on poverty and the services that aim to support
7 This however was not apparent from one Australian study of children in economic adversity, where
children reported being bullied for a number of reasons, but not their poverty. (Taylor and Fraser,
2003)
32
them (Lister, 2004; Narayan-Parker et al., 2000; Ruggeri Laderchi et al., 2003;
Williams, Popay and Oakley, 1999). Just as poor people have recently been
increasingly recognised as persons with rights, dignity and agency (Office of the High
Commissioner of Human Rights, 2004), it is only in recent times, too, that children’s
right to be heard (United Nations, 1989) has become widely accepted. In tandem with
these two developments, a growing body of academic literature has sought to
document and understand children’s perspectives on economic adversity. The
development of this literature can be seen as a positive indicator of concern for
children’s rights and well-being. These studies have shed new light on how children
perceive poverty, and how they respond to economic disadvantage.
Following the pioneering work of Narayan-Parker et al. (2000), Participative Poverty
Assessments (PPAs) are now a standard part of World Bank led poverty assessments
in developing countries. Norton et al. (2001) define PPAs as instruments “for
including poor people’s views in the analysis of poverty and the formulation of
strategies to reduce it through public policy.” (p.6). They argue that PPAs can
strengthen poverty assessment through broadening stakeholder involvement,
increasing support for anti-poverty strategies; enriching understanding of poverty; and
building relationships between policymakers and people in poor communities. There
is no prior reason why participative methods of conceptualising and understanding
poverty should fit within a ‘poverty as a relationship’ framework. However, one of the
most consistent perspectives from PPAs is that poverty is experienced as
powerlessness.
The need to understand the experience of powerlessness is a recurring theme in
research that engages with children (Christensen, 2004; Mayall, 2002). This comes
through strongly in research that engages with children and young people on living in
the context of low incomes and poverty. As Redmond (2008, p.4) observes with
respect to children’s perspectives, “it is usually not poverty per se that hurts, but the
social exclusion that accompanies it.” Atree (2006) states that “for children living in
low-income households life can be a struggle to avoid being set apart from friends and
peers.” (p.59) Children often feel left out and report being picked on because out
because they do not possess some things that other children appear to take for granted.
Several studies argue that this problem of exclusion increases in children’s perception
with age (Ridge, 2002; Roker, 1998).
Ridge (2002) draws up a comprehensive list of material possessions and capabilities
that can result in the exclusion of poor children from two domains in particular –
school and social networks. School came across strongly as a locus of exclusion,
something also apparent from the Australian longitudinal study (Taylor and Fraser,
2003; Taylor and Nelms, 2006). ‘Dress down days’, when children could wear their
own clothes to school, caused anxiety among some children who did not consider that
they had any decent or fashionable clothes, and were afraid of being teased or laughed
at by the other children. Uniforms, on the other hand, were seen as having a protective
effect – reducing differences among children, although some parents worried about
not being able to afford the ‘full’ uniform (Taylor and Fraser, 2003). Poor children
also regularly missed out on school trips that required a parental contribution. The
impact on children was two-fold: first, being excluded from the actual trip, and
second, “the people who are left behind in the school are the people who are looked
down on.” (16 year old boy in Ridge 2002, p.74).
33
Wikeley et al. (2007) show how poverty can also impact on children’s participation in
organised out of school activities. Poorer children are more reliant on school provision
of extra-curricular activities, while middle class children can take advantage of a
wider range of activities. Transportation costs tend to restrict young people’s access to
many activities (a point echoed by Ridge, 2002). Poorer children also frequently have
complex family lives that can demand significant amounts of time for maintaining
relationships, for example visiting step-parents, or caring for younger or disabled
siblings. Some children also appear to isolate themselves, avoiding social contact with
their peers; this is interpreted by Wikeley et al. (2007) as face-saving – covering
inability to participate for financial reasons with a seeming indifference. In addition,
poverty appears to negatively contribute to children’s exclusion from social networks.
Ridge cites an Irish study which reports that children who do not have the ‘right’
clothes are fearful of being bullied or rejected by their peers. Missing out on holidays
appears to be particularly difficult for some children (Van der Hoek, 2005).
A range of recent studies (many of them emanating from the Young Lives project
based at Oxford University – see www.younglives.org.uk) show that exclusion as the
main impact of poverty is as much an experience of children in developing countries
as it is of children in rich countries. In their study of children’s perspectives of
poverty in Uganda, Witter and Bukokhe (2004) emphasise what they term as “the
mental suffering [the children] experience as a result of being poor, and the
humiliation they feel.” Children report being teased by other children about being
smelly and dirty, or being forced into sex and being consequently excluded and
treated with disdain. Camfield (2010) also focuses on exclusion in her study of
children’s perspectives on poverty in Ethiopia. She concludes that
The concept of social exclusion can extend our understanding of the
factors sustaining poverty and disadvantage in childhood by
highlighting its multi-dimensionality and location in a particular
place and time. Talking in terms of social exclusion rather than
poverty denaturalises poverty and inequality by emphasising firstly
that it is something people do to others and have done to them, and
secondly that it is not inevitable. Interventions to address childhood
poverty should provide resources for social participation as well as
survival, and recognise the operation of mechanisms of power, both
directly through coercion and indirectly through shaping children’s
understandings of their lives. (Camfield, 2010, p.279)
These, arguably, are the key contributions that social exclusion approaches can make
to the understanding of child poverty – its multi-dimensionality and particularity; its
process effects in terms of shaping relationships among children, as well as between
children and adults, and (perhaps most important) its un-naturalness. However
defined, whether in terms of material possessions, capabilities, or unequal social
relations, child poverty in both rich and poor countries should not be seen as a
‘natural’ state of affairs, but as a challenge for children and adults in poorer and richer
countries alike to eliminate.
34
4 Implications for the definition and analysis of child poverty
The purpose of this concluding section is to summarise pathways towards addressing
the question raised in the introduction: what are the implications for children of the
different definitions of poverty? In considering this question, it is worth distinguishing
between concepts of poverty – what we are trying to capture in a particular definition
of poverty – and poverty indicators, the measures we use to operationalise those
concepts. While indicators should, as a matter of best practice, capture the essence of
the concept they are designed to measure (Atkinson, Cantillon, Marlier et al., 2002),
they often fail to live up to this expectation. Here, we put questions of actual
operationalisation aside, and focus on the relevance and usefulness of different
concepts of poverty in the analysis of child well-being.
Does the definition matter?
There are a number of senses in which the definition might matter. It might matter
because different definitions produce radically different overall poverty estimates, or
differences in the characteristics of who is described as poor. But it also matters in
terms of process and dynamics, where responsibility is placed for reducing poverty, in
particular the extent to which people themselves, or society, are responsible for
poverty and its consequences. In their review of existing evidence for differences
between poverty approaches, Ruggeri Laderchi, Saith et al. (2003) show that material
welfare and capabilities approaches can produce significant differences in poverty
estimates. But this in itself is not surprising: a change in the income poverty line or in
the equivalence scale can have the same impact on poverty assessments. In the final
analysis, the level of poverty that one might wish to ascribe to a particular population
is a political matter, brought on by judicious political choices in the construction of
the poverty line and other value judgments. Equally important perhaps is how poverty
defined in different ways changes over time. UNICEF (2005) shows that in Ireland,
while absolute deprivation among households with children declined notably over the
1990s, relative child poverty hardly changed at all: massive economic growth ‘lifted
all boats’, but was also accompanied by a significant increase in inequality. If trends
over time with constant definitions can vary within the material welfare tradition,
there is reason to suspect that trends in the three different approaches examined in this
chapter may also vary.
The main reason why the definition matters, however, is because it also suggests
where policy emphasis should lie in tackling poverty. The radically different
philosophical underpinnings of the three approaches discussed in this chapter point to
different policy solutions. This is now clear in several European countries with a shift
in policy emphasis from ‘material poverty’ to ‘exclusion’, and in some countries (both
rich and developing) with a greater emphasis on capabilities and power relations
between poor people and the rest of society.
Implications for children
A number of issues have been flagged in this chapter that are important for the
applications of the different definitions to children. These issues can be seen as setting
out parameters for the empirical examination of child poverty in ways that could be
followed through in subsequent chapters.
35
Within the material welfare approach, there is now a large literature on the impact of
issues such as equivalence scales, intra-household sharing etc on measurement of
income poverty among children. Less explored within the material welfare approach
is the issue of deprivation and children – which types of deprivation are particularly
important for children in the present, and for their future development (Qvortrup,
1994); and how the sorts of deprivation indicators commonly collected in surveys can
be meaningful for children. Results from qualitative research on children and poverty
may go some way towards clarifying this issue. However, examination of deprivation
and children in the household context will need to take account of children’s position
in the household as (usually) dependant, so any feelings of deprivation could as much
reflect a sense of powerlessness, or some other type of deficit, as it may poverty.
Within the human development and capabilities approach, a number of critical issues
emerge. First, the capabilities approach (unlike approaches that focus on material
welfare) suggests a clear distinction between resources on the one hand, and
functionings or outcomes on the other. This is useful for poverty analysis, as it
suggests the need to build a picture of what is intrinsically important for children, and
to use this as the basis for defining minimum functionings. Also important is the link
between resources and functionings, and how conversion factors change for different
groups of children. One approach to linking capabilities to material well-being would
be to define a means of calculating conversion factors for given groups of children.
In terms of poverty as a relation, underclass appears to be a difficult subject to
incorporate into a study of child poverty, except in terms of the impact of having
underclass parents. This suggests perhaps the incorporation of some indicators of
family functioning into a poverty definition, in order to capture some essence of the
‘difference’ between poor and non-poor. However, as is the case with all
conceptualisation and analysis of poverty, the value-laden character of such an
analysis would need to be made explicit. The social exclusion approach is perhaps
more promising in that it offers the possibility of identifying agents of exclusion –
those who have power, and those who experience other people’s power (for good or
ill). A definition of poverty in terms of social exclusion suggests the construction of a
set of indicators that measure the extent to which children are helped or hindered by
agents of exclusion, be they schools, peers, the labour market, parents, or themselves.
It further suggests an understanding of poverty in terms of its social effects, ranging
from reduced possibilities for participation to active discrimination and exclusion.
36
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