Untold Realities: “Child” Poverty Is Actually About Families


In the UK, we are currently witnessing countless members of society plunging into poverty. Statistics show that absolute poverty has seen the biggest rise in 30 years. This is linked to an influx of media coverage, much of which repeats the dire term: “child poverty”. However, as GRIPP pointed out to the United Nations in 2022, focusing only on “child poverty”, as though children were not impacted by their parents’ poverty, may create an incentive for removing children from parents in poverty, and thus from the statistics on child poverty. Dr. Simon Haworth (social work academic at the University of Birmingham) aptly points out, “Instead of talking about a ‘child at risk’ or a ‘child in need’, it’s more helpful to understand that the whole family deserves support”.

All of us want children to grow up with a sense of belonging, connection, and roots. And yet in Britain today, more children are being removed from their families and put into care than at any time since the 1980s. Children and families in poverty, especially those suffering from multiple disadvantages, are significantly more likely to be the subject of state intervention in the form of child protection investigations and care proceedings than those not living in poverty.[1] Children in the UK’s most deprived communities are over 10 times more likely to enter the care system than those from the most affluent areas. Poverty leads entire families to feel neglected by an austerity-based society rife with inequality and discrimination, and to then be doubly punished by having their children removed.

One academic explains the problem with the current approach: “Social workers say ‘I’m not helping the mother with her housing because I’m the social worker for the child’. But children live in families and have relationships. You cannot just be the social worker for the child. The harm that the system does to people is not recognising that children are not separate from the family.”[2]

Children’s social care is increasingly being used as part of a punitive welfare state linked to benefit sanctions, poor inadequate housing, and harsh responses to families living in deprived areas. Families in poverty go through painful separations more often than others, with poverty becoming the “wallpaper of practice” for social workers “being too big to tackle and too familiar to notice”.[3]

Artwork by Sophie Rhys, ATD Fourth World

Tammy Mayes, Angela Babb, and Taliah Drayak are members of GRIPP who have been running a series of study groups on poverty, social work, and the right to family life. These are some of the things they have heard in the study groups about the importance of offering early preventative support to a family as a whole:

“Our kids go through trauma when they have social work involvement or the removal of themselves or their siblings. My girls always say that the worst part was watching me break, seeing me come back broken time and again from hearings. I was trying to hide it. I wanted to be strong for them. I was so worried about how they were being affected; while they were worried about me. Nobody ever talks about how kids want to protect their parents.” – Parent

“Social workers at times hone in on poverty and individualise it and start looking at parenting capacity in terms of the social class of the individual. They don’t look at the fact that there isn’t enough money coming into that family, and they still do the best they can.” – Practitioner

“Social workers talk about being ‘the child’s social worker’ quite a lot. It sounds as though it’s to avoid helping with things that might be really helpful for a parent. For example, a parent had to go into a drug and alcohol unit and had issues with losing her furniture while she was in the unit. She wanted the social worker’s support in sorting that out so that she would have furniture when she came out of that unit, which is obviously really important in the context of being able to care for her children. But the response was, ‘I’m the children’s social worker, so I can’t help you with these practical things, that’s outside my role’. What professionals see as being most important can sometimes be a tick box. And they use that kind of language to describe their role so as to avoid helping with support for that parent.” – Social Worker

“That’s riling me up inside because the child’s social worker is passing the buck of responsibility. If you’re the child’s social worker, but you have a parent asking for a supportive role, then your job to help the child would be to contact a service and pass that parent along to those services in order for them to achieve that help that they need. It’s not a social worker’s responsibility to completely dismiss the parent; it is still your role to support that leg of that child’s life. That is a leg on the table for that child, take that leg away and your table’s wobbling.” – Parent


The upshot is that to become civilised and compassionate, and to remove the barriers to justice currently affecting families in poverty engaged in the UK’s child protection system, we need to listen to parents like Tammy, Angela, Taliah, and others with lived experience in order to fixing attention entirely on the child in isolation. Parents know their children best, and a family-centred approach can reap the expertise of all family members to develop the most suitable support system to work towards an end to poverty for all.

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Note: for readers who are struggling with these issues, there are resources for support via the Parents, Families and Allies Network. And if you’d like to receive regular updates about work on this issue, you can sign up for ATD Fourth World’s newsletter here.


Footnotes

[1]    Morris, K., Mason, W., Bywaters, P., Featherstone, B., Daniel, B., Brady, G., Bunting, L., Hooper, J., Mirza, N., Scourfield, J. and Webb, C. (2018) ‘Social work, poverty, and child welfare interventions’, Child & Family Social Work, 23(3), pp. 364-372.

[2]    This academic spoke as part of a study group on poverty, social work and the right to family life run by ATD Fourth World.

[3]    Kate Morris, Calum Webb, Paul Bywaters, Martin Elliott and Jonathan Scourfield, ‘Social work, poverty, and child welfare interventions’ (2018) 23(3) Child & Family Social Work 370 <https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.12423>


This piece is part of the Untold Realities of Poverty in the UK which is a key tool within our campaign “Poverty Is a Human Rights Issue”. The campaign aims to: