Monday, 20 September 2010

It's the poverty, stupid

Now, a word about the received wisdom that ethnic diversity at neighbourhood level gives rise to lack of cohesion and weakens social relations. There seems to be an assumption that directly relates diversity to perceptions of antisocial behaviour and disorder. It matters because I suspect the assumption influences many actions and decisions in a hidden way, in policy, practice and everyday behaviour.

I recently mentioned a paper by John Hipp (Social networks, 32(2), 2010, subscription required) which hints at a little more complexity: perceptions of disorder are explained by general social distance between individuals, not simply social distance based on ethnicity.

And last week the ESRC published some research on neighbourhood social heterogeneity. The researchers found 'little evidence' of a significant effect of ethnic diversity on people’s perceptions of a neighbourhood.

Among the findings:

  • Population turnover does not influence perceptions of antisocial behaviour but is associated with lower levels of social cohesion and trust.
  • Living in a low density area is strongly associated with more trusting, supportive and cohesive communities.
  • Deprivation has a negative impact on levels of cohesion, trust and informal social control. It also increases the chances of perceiving high levels of antisocial behaviour.
  • While there was some evidence to suggest that ethnic diversity is associated with reduced levels of community cohesion, trust and informal social control, the impact is much smaller than that of neighbourhood deprivation.
  • The ethnic make-up of an area, either in terms of mixing or dominance, was not significant in explaining perceptions of antisocial behaviour.
  • Those living in the most ethnically diverse areas were the least pessimistic about the national crime trend.
  • Ethnic diversity does not influence the significant associations between deprivation and negative perceptions of a local area. However the effect of ethnic diversity on levels of social cohesion and trust is dependent on the level of deprivation in the area.

So, it's the poverty, stupid. And attitudes towards people who are poor. There have been people working their backsides off in the field of poverty alleviation and wealth equalities, ready to voice this message to those who would hear it.

So one of my next posts I hope, Clegg inspired, will be about the nastiness of povertyism: I want to ask why there isn't any debate about disrimination against poor people?

20 Sep 2010 21:15:14 | Cohesion and diversity, Social exclusion

1 Comment

Subtle, rich people are more content and happy.

Posted by: alex gore | Wednesday, 22 September 2010 at 22:56

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How bad will it get before people get really angry? A man known as the deputy prime minister, which you'd have thought was a responsible job calling for intelligence, a sense of perspective and the ability to reflect in a balanced way on important issues, has been quoted as saying that it is not the role of the state "to compensate the poor for their predicament". I feel chilled. The further these people go with their superior, complacent and condescending attitudes, the nearer we get to something very confrontational and potentially violent.
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It's the povertyism, stupid I seem to recall Charles Dickens wrote in a letter, 'Oh for a world without an ism!' The extension does make for ugly language, but that's no excuse for not having a public debate about povertyism. To pick up from my last post, I think it's time to make a lot more noise about disrimination against poor people. I was far from being the only person incensed by Nick Clegg's recent remark that the welfare system should not be "a giant cheque written by the State to compensate the poor for their predicament". If I fix on that remark, it is because it is a blatant example of embedded prejudice at a high level, expressed by the wealthy and powerful towards those who are not. And there's a widespread selective deafness at work here. More than 40% of adults claim that there is ‘very little poverty’ in Britain today, an Oxfam blog post tells us. And a recent Oxfam briefing paper points out: 'People living in poverty in the UK make a vital contribution to the economy and society through unpaid caring and community work. But public attitudes prevail that people on low incomes – and particularly those on benefits – are ‘scroungers’ who are to blame for their own poverty.' The authoritative Damian Killeen describes it like this: 'Public attitude surveys... reveal a widespread resentment of people living in poverty. Better-off people may often disapprove of the fact that many poor people share the same tastes and consumerist aspirations as they do. This can extend to a denial that poverty exists and hostility towards the costs of providing people with opportunities to escape their poverty.' This plays out painfully in people's experience of judgemental attitudes in public space and in the ways they get treated by agencies. One example Killeen gives illustrates how embedded povertyism has become in our systems: 'One mother of five was offered £36 per week to meet her family’s needs after leaving her job to protect her children from an abusive father. She said she thought she was being punished by the system when she believed she was putting the interest of her children first. She kept her family together by selling the children’s toys in order to buy food.' Should we be talking about class discrimination? We've learned to identify racial discrimination at last and are supported legally in doing that. Even age discrimination has finally been recognised, if not yet brought to order. But I think we'll continue to struggle to identify class discrimination, partly because class is now so fractured and far fewer people self-classify in the established categories any more. That's why I think it's right to talk about poverty discrimination and to make more noise about it in the run-up to the coalition government's spending review (20 October). JRF's report on Understanding attitudes to tackling economic inequality, Killeen's paper mentioned above, and Oxfam's more recent Something for nothing report seem to be the starting-points. Does it matter that we don't...

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