Enlarge imageBy Peter Graff
LONDON (Reuters) - Over toast and weak tea at a plastic table outside her favourite cafe, Moraene explains how she fell off society’s edge.
Like many stories of poverty in the rich world at the turn of the 21st century, hers began with a family breakdown, when she took her three children and fled a violent husband.
The man at the local housing office told her that made her "voluntarily homeless".
"I said: ’What do you want me to do? Come back with broken arms and black eyes?’ The guy said: ’Well, it would help’."
As the world prepares to mark the United Nations’ day for the eradication of poverty this month, much of the focus will be on the world’s poorest countries. But last month’s hurricanes in the United States are a reminder that some of the world’s most vulnerable poor live in its richest countries.
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Throughout the last half century the world’s wealthy countries have grown much richer. But societies have also changed in ways that social scientists say made people at the bottom of the ladder more susceptible to poverty.
After finding herself on the street, Moraene moved into an apartment in a condemned building, squatting with her family.
A later apartment on a city estate was worse. The walls were soaked through with damp and mould. Drug dealers prowled the yards. Moraene, whose surname is omitted here to protect her family’s privacy, slipped into depression and had a breakdown.
POOR IN THE RICH WORLD
Children are among the main victims of rich world poverty. According to British government figures, the more children a family has, the more likely it is to be poor. And children of poor parents are more likely to become parents of poor children.
Families now are less stable. Rising divorce rates since the 1960s have been accompanied by increases in child poverty as more women are forced to look after children on their own -- often surviving on state benefits.
Still, after decades in which child poverty rates mostly rose, there has been some good news over the past 10 years.
Britain says it has cut child poverty by a quarter since Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair took power in 1997, and is on course to meet a target to cut it in half by 2010.
Although critics argue the statistics are flawed -- they omit rising housing costs, for example -- even if adjusted for housing they still show hundreds of thousands of children have been lifted out of poverty.
Britain’s strategy has been to focus on getting parents, especially single mothers, into the workforce by increasing funds for child care and giving tax credits to working parents.
The government provides 12 1/2 hours a week of free nursery schooling for 3-year-olds and plans to expand that to 15 and then 20 hours in coming years. As of next April, the state will pay up to 300 pounds a week of child care costs for the poorest working families with two or more children.
Some experts say investing in quality child care is one of the most efficient ways to help poor families, because it both frees time for parents to work and it can improve the educational performance of children when they reach school age.
"It’s particularly important, particularly for lone parents," said Hilary Land, professor emeritus of family policy at the University of Bristol. "If it’s good quality then the children as well as the parents will be benefitting."
But despite the government’s efforts to reshape benefits to encourage parents to work, much of the social safety net still disappears as soon as people earn even a small amount.
Elaine, a 30 year-old single mother with three small children in Portsmouth on England’s southern coast, has a state-funded temporary apartment in a shelter for homeless families and receives cash benefits of 190 pounds a week.
Before her youngest was born she earned around 50 pounds a night singing and hosting karaoke in a bar. But now, she has cut back to one night a week. For every additional pound she would earn, she would lose almost as much in benefits, and would still have to find someone to look after the children in the evenings.
"I’d like to work more, but it doesn’t make sense."
LOW PAY, LESS POTENTIAL
Even in families in Britain where one or both parents work, low pay makes it hard to climb out of poverty.
"One reason why work is not always a route out of poverty is that some jobs are low-paid," said a 2004 report by the Rowntree Foundation, a social sciences charity in Britain.
The percentage of employees earning low pay -- defined in Britain as less than two thirds of the median hourly worker’s wage -- rose from 12 percent in 1977 to 21 percent in 1998. About two thirds of low-paid employees are women, it said.
Britain’s fight against poverty is a useful example because its social welfare system is more generous than America’s, but less costly than those of many other European countries.
It has free health care and a large publicly funded housing sector. Only a tiny number of people sleep rough. Unemployment, at less than 5 percent, is lower than the European average.
Still, hundreds of thousands of people live in squalid 1960s blocks that do not meet safety standards. Millions without jobs and not seeking work no longer count as unemployed.
As for Moraene, 15 years after she and her children left her husband’s house, she works as a volunteer advocate for the poor with a charity, enjoying her job despite what she says is a culture of hostility towards poor people from the state.
The charity, Fourth World, saved her life, she says, by giving her a place to stay briefly in the country to sort herself out. She finished her high school diploma and has addressed universities and a parliamentary committee.
She talks to her audiences about programmes and spending priorities. But most of all, she talks about respect. The reason she is alive and her children are grown up and fine, is because somebody treated her as a person, not as a policy problem.
"How many times do you hear Tony Blair use the phrase ’decent, hardworking families’?" she says.
"I know a lot of people who are perfectly decent, who just aren’t in a position where they can work."
