Poverty ⇆ culture and explaining the riots

 By habeebee

I found a treasure chest under my bed over the weekend. Thick with dust, un-touched for almost three years I pulled out my PhD thesis hoping for jewels in the shape of a comeback to the simplistic explanations for the riots we have been subjected to.

Our political elite are locked in a futile debate. On the one hand we have David Cameron claiming that ‘this is not about poverty, this is about culture’ on the other there is the Left highlighting the importance of inequality and poverty. The truth is it’s both.

My PhD looked at the economic, demographic, social and political factors that have caused some English neighbourhoods to decline rather than others. One of my findings was as an area declines the social fabric of that neighbourhood changes. For instance, in more deprived neighbourhoods residents are more likely to say they have ‘no one to confide in’, they are ‘unhappy’ and are ‘not interested in politics.’ We know too that teenage pregnancy rates go up and school performance goes down as an area gets poorer.

Why is this? Is it because people on low incomes have a different work and family culture? As I opened and re-read the first chapter of my thesis I was engulfed by a mountain of academic evidence that makes the link between poverty and culture and social unrest. 30 years of literature, from Europe and across the Atlantic, documenting the outcomes when social housing, unemployment and poverty is concentrated in neighbourhoods – outcomes ranging from higher levels of crime to poorer health (a reading list is available on demand).

In particular, work in the 1980s in Chicago ghettos looked at the affects of concentrated areas of unemployment – the outcome of de-industrialisation (tick), an inadequate public school system (sound familiar?), the clustering of cheap housing, and racism within job market practices  (there is still evidence of this in the UK). The research found that this joblessness weakens family structure in disadvantaged neighbourhoods by increasing relationship instability (financial strains are one of the top reasons for divorce), decreasing rates of marriage (as women generally don’t opt to marry someone without a job), and thus increasing rates of children born outside wedlock. Family breakdown then results in a lack of supervision, male role models and increased stress for those single-parents bringing up their children.

Once this joblessness and family breakdown is concentrated there are other factors that magnify social problems called ‘neighbourhood effects.’ In the US there is evidence that once unemployment and high school drop-outs hit a certain level (a ‘tipping-point’) in a neighbourhood there is a mushrooming of social problems including crime. This mushrooming is related to the influence of peer groups, i.e. the way negative behaviour of the people around you can in turn strongly affect your behaviour.

Other research has shown that:

• Deprived neighbourhoods tend to lack the institutions and organisations that help improve life outcomes, such as good schools, and that young residents are less likely to visit stimulating learning environments such as parks or use community services that promote healthy development. Moreover, the stigmatisation of neighbourhoods by public institutions further inflates the low expectations and life chances of residents in repressive ways.
• Young people in deprived neighbourhoods face greater competition for scarce jobs and economic opportunities, producing more antagonism and mistrust between neighbours.
• And neighbourhood conditions affect individuals through the way they evaluate their own situation relative to others around them. This is where consumer goods and the difference between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ start to matter. If you don’t have the same or better trainers your social position is weakened.

I have to stress at this point that this is simply an attempt to explain why many of the young people involved in this month’s riots come from deprived areas and to highlight the causal links between poverty and different work and family cultures.

But the causal links are complex. My father-in-law (and Tottenham resident) told me defensively that “this isn’t about poverty otherwise the majority of poor people would have been involved.” He reminded me again about how multifaceted the issues really are, and how important it is to talk about this in a way that doesn’t stick a single label on the residents of deprived areas. It isn’t just about living in a deprived neighbourhood, but that + poverty + not doing well at school + a tough family life. And unfortunately these factors are all linked.

So, Cameron is both right and wrong because the riots are about both poverty and culture because the former influences the latter. Recent events are indeed alarming, not so much because they show a moral decline but because they highlight that poverty has resulted in vicious cycles in some of our most deprived neighbourhoods. We seemed to have surpassed the ‘tipping point.’

In re-reading this piece I can’t help but conclude that it is much tougher being a parent and keeping your children out of trouble in a deprived neighbourhood than in an affluent neighbourhood – we should remember this when we are pointing fingers.