Gordon Brown has described child poverty as "a scar on the soul of Britain". Outline and discuss the causes and consequences of growing child poverty in the UK

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Question: Gordon Brown has described child poverty as “a scar on the soul of Britain”. Outline and discuss the causes and consequences of growing child poverty in the UK, and critically assess the prospects of New Labour’s realising its ambition to abolish child poverty within a generation.

Poverty is among the measurements of inequality in society. In the past years, the political discussion has encouraged a superior definition of inequality, going beyond a financial categorisation and denoting to a more comprehensive disposition of including the entitlement to health and education as well as equal social involvement. To illustrate, the United Nations as well as other globally recognised organisations have demanded for the eradication of prejudice in opposition to children and the abolition of the racial inequity. Both of which are apparent forms of inequity. (UNFPA 2000; UN 2001; UNICEF 2002) Similarly, the European Union has authorised the purge of social exclusion as a component of it 1999 Treaty of Amsterdam. (EU 2002) The said authorization to battle these inequities is generally interpreted, including tackling such predicaments as unemployment, diminished degrees of education, dropping out of school, training for the unemployed, low incomes, derisory housing, hefty crime ratio, contemptible  health and the collapse of the family unit. (UK Social Exclusion Unit 2001; UNICEF 2002)

Whereas social scientists have been taking into consideration the financial welfare of young individuals and have in actuality been accountable for portraying the children’s tribulations to the awareness of politicians, they have merely just commenced to gauge children’s standing utilising more composite and finely distinct approaches. (Hauser, Brown, and Prosser 1997) There have been quite a number of such complete gauges of poverty (Haveman and Mullikin 1999) and progressively more methods have been utilised instead. The Report of the Task Force on Statistics on Social Exclusion and Poverty of the European Union suggested that poverty be characterised as lower than sixty percent of the median family income of the member state, adapted for the size of the family. (Atkinson, 2000) It presents information on child poverty employing the same definition perceiving merely at family units with children. It characterises child poverty as the percentage of children lodging in family units with earnings less than half of the national median. Variations across the nation utilising this comparative gauge are broad, ranging from lower than five percent child poverty in Luxembourg, Belgium, Finland, Norway and Sweden, to higher than twenty percent in the Italian setting, US, and Mexico. Nonetheless, gauges of this kind present diminutive information regarding financial deficits in households influencing the lives of the children.  

A study of Jenkins, Schluter and Wagner (2003) acquired a perspective into the diverse welfare administrations by measure up both the dynamics of the British and German child poverty. Employing a comparative poverty definition of sixty percent of the median income of the individual countries, they discovered that a superior percentage of British youngsters encounter poverty in a single occasion compared to West German children. Moreover, British children possess more often and protracted spells of poverty than in West Germany. The occasions that bring about the children’s accession into poverty are different in both nations – being a single parent in a household and the loss of parent’s work regardless of it being full-time or part-time – nonetheless, there is no event that clarified the majority of the circumstances. Actually, the authors both established that in the two countries, shifts in the family income in the level of twenty to thirty percent clarify about two-thirds of the children’s admission into poverty in the two countries. Similarly, augmentations in family income take account for the children’s exit from poverty. These authors develop our initial awareness of poverty by investigating shifts in poverty states in due course and correlates of those shifts, placing the research on poverty in a new level. In doing so, they surmised that the impulses of welfare administrations, labour market decrees and fluctuations, and shifts in the household composition as well as the status of the labour force determine children’s encounter of income deficiency.

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Similarly, Platt (2002) takes into account the children's income deficiency through the use of welfare records from Birmingham. Similar to the method of the authors above, Platt is equipped to monitor shifts in poverty status over time, and to gauge chronic poverty in addition to deep poverty. Thus, she is capable of examining the manner in which children in diverse racial and nativity groups encounter scarcity. Underlying a great deal of the cluster variation in income shortages per child are dissimilarities in the quantity of single parent households, the standard figure and age of youngsters, and the percentage of ...

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