None for You: Child Poverty, Rights, and Capabilities

• In Event: Child Poverty, Rights, and Policies: Perspectives From Five National Contexts

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes

This paper examines what it means to be a poor child in the second decade of the 21st century in the United States. How do children see their own lifeworlds that are bounded by poverty, inequality, and social and educational exclusion?

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework

Poverty is examined through various prisms—material income-based poverty, instrumentalist discourses, as well as a child rights and capability framework. Over 16.1 million children (22%) currently live in poverty and 32.4 million children (45%) live in low-income households (Wight, Chau , & Aratani, 2013) and the United States ranks last among OECD industrialized countries in overall inequality and material well-being of children (UNICEF, 2010, 2013).

In the United States, the discourse of child poverty is couched in a language of instrumentalism – and an ‘invest now, or pay later’ cost-benefit discourse (Heckman 2006, 2008;) but the inherent right of the child to well-being and a sustainable, enriching life as a human right is not discussed. Yet in international social policy debates, child poverty has been shaped by a children’s rights framework and a strong emphasis on child well-being and social exclusion. Human Capability theory (Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 1989, 1999) has led to a reframing of child poverty in terms of relational and existential dimensions, exploring how children themselves see their worlds. (Jones & Sumner, 2011; Lister, 2004).

Methods and Data Sources
The data represented in this paper comprise a selection of ethnographic narratives of impoverished children and youth in a variety of school contexts. Both ethnographic observations and open-ended interviews were conducted with over 50 ethnically diverse children and youth over a multi-year period in an attempt to explore their perceptions and lived experiences of poverty (Polakow, 1993, 2007; Redmond, 2008) The children’s voices are highlighted as exemplaric of dispossession and personal agency and explored thematically in order to develop an analysis of child poverty from young participants’ perspectives.

Results and Conclusions
The thematic findings point to children’s self awareness of exclusion and social isolation, anger and frustration due to silencing and lack of voice, and resilience in asserting agency in the face of institutional powerlessness. From a human capabilities framework, children’s basic human functioning was obstructed by poverty and tenuous shelter, as they confronted educational conditions that created searing forms of social exclusion. They were isolated from classmates, denied an equal opportunity to learn in their classrooms, and subjected to stigmatization and humiliation. Yet in the face of this, the children demonstrated remarkable agency.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance
The ways in which children cope with their daily lives of poverty and hardship, and how they assume active, rather than passive, roles in strategically marshaling resources, has been under-researched. In the poverty policy literature, children are typically constructed as passive recipients of support or stigma. How children and adolescents confront poverty and the violation of their rights is vital to document as part of a growing literature on children’s rights and capabilities.

Author

• Valerie Polakow, Eastern Michigan University