Banning Bullies and Making Our Words Pop
Participatory Action Research on Framing Poverty as a Human Rights Issue
Written by GRIPP member, Diana Skelton
As GRIPP’s campaign team formed this year we returned to the need for a communications research project that frames Poverty as a Human Rights Issue. After repeatedly being told that we should look at JRF’s Talking about Poverty research, GRIPP is making the arguement for a new piece of research that centres the voices of lived experience from the start.
They say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”—but that’s not true! Bullies use words as weapons to blame and stigmatise people. Tammy, one of GRIPP’s lived-experience activists, says:
“We need to use words that don’t dehumanise and degrade. We always have to be mindful of how we talk and there’s different ways of talking…. But how do you communicate with people who just don’t hear you?”
How, indeed! One way to do this is called “framing”. That’s the general idea that no matter how crumpled and splotchy a child’s artwork might be, putting it in the right frame can make it pop! To use framing with words, we can create understanding of an issue by first learning as much as possible about how most people usually think about it. For instance, research on “Talking About Poverty” done with 20,000 people in 2017 usefully showed:
“People often switch off when they hear ‘politics as usual’ so avoid words that trigger this response. It’s better to appeal to the values that people have across political perspectives and to unite people behind the changes that can solve poverty.”
Now, as members of GRIPP, we want to run a new framing project. That “Talking About Poverty” project (critiqued here by Fran Bennett of the University of Oxford) did not include human rights issues and was not co-designed with the active and sustained participation of people with lived experience of poverty. Its goal was only to increase support for public policy solutions. We want that too of course—but would argue that if the solutions are designed from the top down, without grass-roots partnerships, they just won’t be effective enough to reach people and families stuck in the worst poverty situations. Any top-down approach ignores the intelligence of people in poverty and can also feel deeply disempowering. One expert by experience became exasperated with the examples suggested by the “Talking About Poverty” framing and said:
“You want us to talk about ‘drowning in debt’ and looking for ‘anchors’—but I don’t want to be anchored in a sea of debt!”
What we do want is to talk about poverty as a human rights issue. We’re tired of being blamed for living in a state of poverty that was actually created by political decisions. It wears us down until we end up blaming ourselves for systems, structures and policies that can only be fixed when all of us come together. Thinking about human rights helps us to push back. It shifts the power in our heads right away. We all have the same human rights. And under the UK Human Rights Act (1998), our rights must be fulfilled by every public official in the country, including staff providing public services: benefits staff, teachers, social workers and health workers, but also temporary housing services workers, benefits assessors and staff or paid carers at a charity or company providing any service arranged by the authorities. Another GRIPP member said:
“We’ve gone to see someone in council saying, ‘What you’re doing is regressing human rights’ and purposefully using those terms. And then they’re a bit like, ‘Shit, what do we need to do differently?’ You see the fear in their eyes when you say they’re abusing human rights. There’s a bit of an opening.”
(The importance of developing rights-based understandings and approaches for fighting poverty is also being recommended by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in its May 2024 report on “Poverty Stigma: A Glue that Holds Poverty in Place”.)
So we want to find out how best we can frame our campaign about poverty as a human rights issue; but most of all, we want to be the ones co-designing this research to produce new knowledge. When we wrote down our ethos, we pledged:
We will not replicate hierarchies within GRIPP; we will not centralise knowledge, resources or power within GRIPP.
We know how important it is to make sure that we co-produce everything together. Not only does using everyone’s intelligence lead to better knowledge; it can also feel transformative for each of us.
Susan, who is part of the Poverty Truth Community (one of GRIPP’s members), took part in participatory research in 2016-19. At the beginning, she was excited about doing the work; but she also really struggled with ‘how can my opinion count?’ Her confidence dipped at times and she wrestled with that idea of being seen. At the end of the project, Susan explained in a speech:
“[Participating] woke me up to what was in me: the emotional crushedness that was inside me, that I was walking about with and I wasn’t aware that that was the case. There was a lot of blame, shame, guilt. […] Because sometimes you don’t recognise what you’re living in. […] Something in me woke up and says: ‘Get up, you don’t need to be crushed.’ […] There’s been a change in my position. My awakening sparked a change. So I’m no longer crouched; I’m no longer crushed; I’m standing up.”
We believe that if the framing in our campaign is truly co-produced, this will feel transformative not only for members of GRIPP but also for the people in poverty we will reach with our future campaign. Everyone deserves to get out from under anti-poverty bullying and to know that the very act of resisting poverty in our daily lives makes us defenders of human rights!
This blog was funded by Human Rights Local, a project of the Human Rights Centre of the University of Essex (ESRC Impact Acceleration Account).