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lied for money for drugs, stole and intimidated his family and others.
Eventually he pulled out a knife and his mother called the police
and had him arrested. His mother is distraught, awash with guilt
and fear for her son. People reassure her that she did the right
thing and others blame her for his situation. Some tell her that
prison is the best place for him, but I have had a lot of contact
with young care-leavers and prison-leavers and I doubt this.
One of the most dreadful aspects of living in poverty
is that everyone has an opinion about how you should live, regardless
of the resources you have, and you are far more likely to come to
the attention of the authorities in one form or another. Needing
to ask for help is painful enough, but to be treated with distain
and distrust by those to whom you have to turn is a raw and humiliating
experience. At a London poverty hearing, one woman described it
as ‘Being like an onion, having every layer of dignity peeled
away one by one’.
I have seen how hard people try to avoid going to
employment offices, housing providers, benefit offices and even
doctor’s surgeries, because they expect, based on previous
experience, to be spoken down to and disregarded. This is especially
true of social services. This is meant to be the first port of call
for families who are having a hard time and need help, yet it is
the service most feared by the most disadvantaged and isolated families
– exactly the ones who are most likely to need help.
This is not because all social workers are monsters
whose purpose in life is to snatch the children of the poor. Most
social workers try hard to ensure that families get the support
needed to keep their children with them, but all resources are seriously
restricted and support is time-limited and target-driven. The poorer
you are, the more likely you are to need long-term support and the
more likely you are to find yourself in the middle of a child protection
investigation.
As part of the policy team of the charity ATD Fourth
World, I go out to speak to social care professionals about the
links between poverty and the removal of children from poor families.
At one session a social worker told me, ‘We know that the
cause is poverty but we cannot take a child on grounds of poverty,
so we call it neglect so that we can rescue them from the poverty
of their parents’. This was said as a justification for the
actions that cannot be justified. Outcomes for care-leavers indicate
that these young people are far more likely than others to be unqualified;
unemployed; have a teenage pregnancy or abortion; be a sex worker:
be made homeless; be drug or alcohol addicted; and be convicted
of a crime and imprisoned. They are not rescued from poverty; it
is just delayed until they leave care, when they are often dumped
in Bed and Breakfast hotels or hard-to-let flats on the worst estates
with very little ongoing support.
This Government has a much-publicised ‘Respect’
agenda, but respect is a two-way street. Sometimes you have to give
it to get it. There is no respect in forcing people to live in places
in which councillors and politicians would not kennel their dogs.
There is no respect in closing down youth centres and advice services
needed most by people living in poverty. There is no respect in
reducing or under-funding the services used mostly by poor people.
There is no respect, when things go wrong, in punishing those who
have asked for help and been refused it. It is not enough to take
away or lock up the damaged young that we have created on our estates
– they will come back with no respect at all and we will all
be their targets.
For many people, Hackney is a vibrant, active, passionate,
diverse and fabulous place to be. For those who have seen generations
of their family live at the bottom of the pile, life is too hard
for them to see what others see. There is no respect in the widening
gap between those who have and those who it seems will never have.
Yet, have or have not, everyone deserves respect as a human being.
That is why everyone should be fighting poverty and its causes if
any of us are to feel worthy of respect.
Moraene is a 53-year-old disabled mother of
three who lives on a local Council estate in. She describes her
hobby as ‘observing’. We hope to turn this into a regular
column.
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