8-minute read

Dermot Feenan

LLB MA LLM Barrister-at-Law FRSA

.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation have invited participation from those with lived or learned experience of poverty to join a team addressing stigma and poverty. This is an important project.

In this blog, I explore the aims and rationale given by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for the project and emphasise the importance of the project for a number of reasons including with reference to both the ongoing, and regrettable, persistence of stigma around poverty and some recent research on such stigma, especially around use of food banks. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation project also promises an inclusive, egalitarian model of research participation, about which I say more towards the end of this blog.

Aims

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation team will look into the stigma of poverty; the barriers it creates, how it shapes policy design and decisions, and how this is then reflected in stigmatising services and the influence of media narratives.

The Foundation acknowledges that:

• there’s a relationship between poverty and stigma
• the effects of stigma are deeply damaging and underestimated
• intersecting discriminations must be addressed.

Persistence of stigma around poverty

The relationship between stigma and poverty is long-standing. It has been noted in books such as Professor Ruth Lister’s Poverty and Professor Robert Walker’s The Shame of Poverty.

Ongoing attention to stigma and poverty is necessary given the persistence of poverty and the normative judgements that inform stigma, including binary distinctions such as the ‘deserving’ versus the ‘undeserving’ poor.

The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated to many people that the line between a comfortable existence and poverty is fragile. The need to end stigmatisation of the so-called ‘undeserving’ poor was reiterated during the pandemic by Luis Guardia and Allison Lacko, President and Senior Policy and Research Analyst respectively at FRAC (Food Action & Research Center).

Recent research on stigma and poverty

One of many examples of ongoing research on stigma and poverty records stigmatisation of people in a low socioeconomic position who report perceptions of inferiority, being physically recognisable as a poor person, and being responsible for their own financial problems.

Shifts in political ideology also receive attention, as in Rebecca de Souza’s Feeding the Other which argues that food pantries stigmatize their clients through neoliberalism’s skewed emphasis on hard work, self-help, and economic productivity.

Some of this research draws on broader analysis of stigma, such as Erving Goffman’s classic 1963 study Stigma in which he describes stigma as “deeply discrediting”, reducing an individual “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one.”

Fifty years after Goffman’s book, Professor Arjan E.R. Bos and others noted an exponential growth in the number of publications on stigma. That growth has not stopped. Research is helping to deepen knowledge, understanding and analysis of stigma.

Professors Brenda Major and Laurie O’Brien, for instance, have explored stigmatisation mechanisms of discrimination, expectancy confirmation, and automatic stereotype activation, and indirect threats to personal and social identity. They found that such mechanisms lead to stress, which affect self-esteem, academic achievement, and health.

Moreover, such research increasingly informs policy and practice, as illustrated in campaigning around period poverty and stigma.

The relationship between poverty and stigma is one that JRF has recognised for a long time, and recent work by its Grassroots Poverty Action Group has renewed such concerns.

Stigma and food bank use

Research increasingly shows stigma around food bank use.

A literature review by Dr Georgia Middleton, Flinders University, and others in 2015 on users of food banks found consistent reports of shame, stigma and embarrassment. These reports of stigma are confirmed in subsequent studies, such as in research by Dr Kingsley Purdam and colleagues of food bank users in north-West England, and Professor Pat Caplan’s ethnographic research on food banks in west Wales and in Barnet, London, reported in 2018.

Research reveals the prominent role of the media in stigmatisation of food bank users, as noted by  Dr Kayleigh Garthwaite, University of Birmingham. She also found in her ethnographic research on food banks in a UK town that stigma was produced not from how people were treated at the food bank, but instead through what other people communicated or through how people using the food bank perceived themselves.

Dr Andrew Williams, Cardiff University, found that rules requiring people to prove they are struggling in order to get a food parcel create more stigma. He builds on his previous research with colleagues which found that some food banks operate within a set of highly restrictive, and stigmatising, welfare approaches that reinforce ideas of the deserving and undeserving welfare claimant and the dangers of ‘welfare dependency’.

As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation note, the effects of stigma are underestimated. My experience of an organisation dominated largely by middle-class, and relatively well-off, staff that issue referrals to food banks is that those effects are sometimes unknown, ignored or diminished. This must be redressed.

There is growing research on how ignorance about disadvantage is secured, managed and sustained. As I argue elsewhere, ignorance can be actively constituted or reproduced as an aspect of power.

There are, though, initiatives that aim to reduce the stigma around such food aid, including the Afon-Gwreiddiau Community Garden, Wales, delivering affordable and healthy locally grown fruit and veg to those in need, providing private and stigma-free support.

According to Church Action on Poverty the ‘Your Local Pantry’ model of food provision reduces stigma around food poverty by avoiding the model used by some food banks which hand out food to strangers only at moments of severe personal crisis and according to strict criteria.

These food pantries are run on a membership basis. Members pay a weekly subscription of a few pounds, and in return can choose around £20 to £25 a week of groceries from a wide and varied stock. Members can save nearly £1,000 a year compared to supermarket prices. Stock is supplied through the food redistribution charity FareShare and local suppliers in each area. The pantries operate as a member-led neighbourhood hub, and often seek to serve as springboard to other community initiatives, opportunities and ideas. Church Action on Poverty says that the pantries maintain people’s dignity and reduce stigma around food poverty.

Dr Ferne Edwards’ research also shows how shifting narrative and process helps. Stigma around receiving food that would otherwise be wasted has been displaced at Open Table, Melbourne, Australia, through narratives of environmental justice and local processes of care and conviviality.

This research resonates with earlier work on narrative by Ben Baumberg, Kate Bell and Declan Gaffney in 2012 which suggested that stigmatisation of benefits claimants is reduced when they are seen as ‘deserving’ recipients based on ‘need’ or ‘right’. That research also reiterated that universal or contributory benefits are less stigmatising than means-tested benefits.

Further work on stigma and poverty

The initiatives around access to food that I have mentioned are just some of many interventions that have been taken (and could also be taken elsewhere) to redress stigma around poverty. There are, of course, numerous others, including, through broader political economic analyses, changes in law, fiscal policy reforms, and transformation of social security.

Law and human rights

The potential of existing legal remedies in relation to stigma – such as in ‘stigma damages’, which aim to compensate for harm to reputation in employment law – could usefully be explored further. Proposals for addressing stigma through anti-discrimination law, such as Professor Iyiola Solanke’s proposed anti-stigma principle, could also be examined further.

Further work might be done on the importance of a human rights approach to alleviating poverty and stigma, including with reference to the developing law on respect for dignity.

In my recent experience of discussions in England with gatekeepers around food banks, there is no or very little knowledge of human rights, still less concepts such as dignity. This may reflect a troublingly low level or knowledge or ignorance about human rights generally in the population.

Research by IPSOS in 2018 found that 43% of the population of Britain knows nothing or not very much about human rights and this compares unfavourably with most other countries surveyed.

Yet, numerous human rights instruments, organisations and initiatives emphasise the importance of human rights in relation to poverty.

The United Nations dedicates a Special Rapporteur role to extreme poverty and human rights. In 2019, the Special Rapporteur’s report on the UK concluded, in part, that from 2010 the Government chose – despite large-scale poverty within a booming economy with very high levels of employment – to reduce benefits by every means available, including through stigmatisation.

Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, spoke in 2013 of the misperception of poor people as lazy, irresponsible, dishonest and, fundamentally, undeserving of aid. Sepúlveda Carmona argued that this stigmatisation causes social exclusion and reduced agency. She urged a rights-based approach that respects human dignity, autonomy and freedom to make choices as a way to combat such stigma. This approach is largely missing from current government or public discourse on poverty, and too many academics lack the ability or willingness to communicate these messages clearly and effectively to audiences directly impacted by poverty.

Conceptual rigour and need for robust data

The potential of human rights in addressing stigma and poverty also depends on how stigma is understood, which also requires precise and comprehensive information and data about the effects of stigma.

Acquiring precise and comprehensive information and data requires sound analytical skill that can assess and, where necessary, explore and explicate the relationship between stigma and concepts such as blame, shame, embarrassment, and humiliation. Such analytical skill can help also in examining related sociological concepts such as othering (Lister, 2017), and more dated but perhaps still productive concepts such as deviancy (see, for example, Althammer, 2014). Such analysis can also enable assessment of the sources and degrees of influence of such concepts, including overt and subtle processes, and through the internalizing of stigma. Moreover, how do these concepts fit, if at all, with other concepts such as stereotyping, scapegoating, and demonisation?

Detailed analysis of stigma: what, why, who, where, and how?

Much of the research on stigma tends to examine the discrete use of a food bank but further in-depth research can also examine wider range of issues, such as the micro-processes within food banks that can reinforce, avoid or alleviate stigma. How do food banks address, for instance, client choice, special dietary needs, and returns?

In their research of food bank clients in The Netherlands, Dr Hilje van der Horst and colleagues found that shame emerged in relation to, amongst other things, the content of the food package and the interaction with volunteers at food banks.

Further research could also usefully address the views of trustees and directors of food banks and how stigma may vary locally. Professor Pat Caplan’s ethnographic research found that notions of shame were particularly manifested in west Wales.

How does stigma operate across, within and upon distinct groups, including with reference to legally protected characteristics such as age, ethnicity, and disability and non-legally protected characteristics such as social class or socioeconomic status?

There is a growing literature on the stigmatisation of groups defined by intersecting identities, such as the single female parent on benefits – as Professor Ruth Sidel, among others, noted of the ‘welfare mother’ narrative in the USA in the 1990s.

Stigmatisation extends to other groups not covered necessarily, or at all, in equality laws such as people in care, certain groups of migrants, or those with distinctive body morphology.

Much can also be learned from the adverse effects of stigmatisation in other globally important phenomena, as in the failure to adequately address the public health crisis of HIV+ transmission and AIDS due to the widespread homophobia towards gay and bisexual men in the 1980s and 1990s.

Inclusive model of research participation

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation project is also welcome in significant part because:

• the invitation to participate includes those with lived experience of stigma and poverty, and
• it is generous and empowering – offering payment, connections, horizon-expanding, a reference, coaching and mentoring/shadowing to help transition into leadership roles.

The inclusion of people with ‘lived experience’ – not just ‘learned experience’ – allows validation and respect for the knowledge of people who have direct experience of poverty and/or stigma.

The approach by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation also helps remove a distinction that can reinforce the effects of stigma; that is, that only those with ‘learned experience’ – or formal learning and qualifications – can meaningfully address the issue of stigma and poverty; alienating further those in poverty who are typically excluded by virtue of that poverty.

The Foundation also assists materially those with lived experience of poverty. It offers £5,000 to each participant – a generous sum. The Foundation also offers a reference to those who participate. The importance of getting  a reference when your poverty is linked to current or previous unemployment cannot be underestimated. Almost all employers require references from current or recent employers. Good references are vital to those of us who have experienced breaks in employment, so the promise of a reference from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is not only hugely generous but helps counteract the lack of appreciation among some employers of the importance of providing a useful reference.

(Consistent with my approach to ethical knowledge production and dissemination, I don’t cite in this blog any research, certainly on a matter as important as poverty and stigma, by authors in publicly funded universities which is published only behind paywalls in for-profit journals.)

.

© Dermot Feenan 2022