Abstract
Measurements of poverty generally rely upon assessments made of the situation of the household. Children are currently omitted from direct measurements of poverty: their situation is assessed indirectly by taking the household as the unit of analysis (by income and/or surveys). According to these assessments, when family income or levels of deprivation are below a given poverty line, every member is considered poor. In this chapter, I argue that poverty should not only be measured using such a general assessment. A measurement of poverty should consider children as being part of the population and take into account individual differences in levels of deprivation, varying needs and interests. I will argue, first, that measurements of poverty should take universal and individual approach in order to include representative groups and to reflect intra-household distributions of deprivation that especially affect children. Second, not only should children’s individual conditions be measured, but their voices should be included in the assessment as well. Based on this idea, my ambition is to provide two philosophical arguments to justify why we should consider the situation of children in measurements of poverty (understood as epistemic and moral reasons). I suggest, finally, some recommendations for and directions towards a participative child-based measurement with storytelling.
I am especially grateful to Gottfried Schweiger and Nicolás Brando for their excellent revision and suggestions. I would also like to thank to Amneris Chaparro, Yannick Vanderborght, Helen Coyne-Wincott, Colin Rowe and Myles Hourican for their comments and readings.
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Notes
- 1.
Here I am interested in the measurement of poverty within populations (macro data at regional or country level) meaning aggregated information about who counts as poor in a given society and what scope these measures have. I focus on three of the most common measurements of poverty, rather than on child-specific measurements.
- 2.
I understand children as a group of individuals that is restricted by age, as defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, meaning any person aged 0–16, or according to state legal definitions of childhood. It is important to bear in mind that children are in various phases of development and may lack the ability to escape from vulnerability and to act independently (Kallio 2009: 5). It is also important to acknowledge that this is a rather heterogeneous group that involves a variety of particulate development stage and physical, cognitive and emotional capacities.
- 3.
By this I mean the situation of household acts as a proxy for assessing children, but it provides only a bare minimal picture of their deprivation and needs.
- 4.
I am only focused here on what unit of analysis and what kind of representation a measurement of poverty should have. I argue that children should be both identifiable as a distinct group in data sets, and also be included in measurements within the population. But I will not address the question of how the individual dataset collected should be aggregated and be balanced when trade-offs are to be made.
- 5.
For Jonathan Bradshaw and Gill Main, the inclusion of children in measurements can avoid two kinds of common errors: “non-poor children living in poor households are not counted, and therefore child poverty may be over-represented; at the same time, poor children in non-poor households are assumed not to exist” (Bradshaw and Main 2012:505).
- 6.
Children are a unique group that is different from certain disabled individual, who may lack the ability to escape from social and economic vulnerability and to act independently, but who are not a being in development. I owe this distinction to Nicolás Brando.
- 7.
Karen Murris argues that testimonial injustices currently appear at school where “teachers do not believe a child because it is a child who is speaking” (Murris 2013: 248).
- 8.
For instance, it has been observed in Brazil that poor parents in rural areas are inclined to send children to work instead of school; thus the parents’ short-term interests are in conflict with the long-term interest of their children (Rego and Pinzani 2013).
- 9.
- 10.
MST is a group of politically-organized farmworkers fighting exploitation, the seizing of land, expropriation, expulsion and social exclusion.
- 11.
According to Márcia Ramos, member of the Education Sector of the MST, children are an important part of the MST where they play an active and critical role (Brasil de fato 2017). Indeed, it is vital for the movement to integrate children in their daily struggle, as they are also the future of the agrarian land movement.
- 12.
- 13.
Jane Mansbridge et al. brought this point: “Acts of empathy, which require trying to put oneself in another’s place, usually engage the non-cognitive faculties and require non-cognitive forms of communication” (Mansbridge et al. 2010:68).
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Pitasse Fragoso, K. (2019). Children in Measurements of Poverty Within Populations: Two Problems with Current Indexes. In: Brando, N., Schweiger, G. (eds) Philosophy and Child Poverty. Philosophy and Poverty, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22452-3_3
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