10 We Need Child Poverty! Making Sense of Public Attitudes to Poverty in the Age of Austerity

Abstract

Child poverty is about children not having enough. This is not contentious and seems not to be complicated. In advanced economies, we often first learn that ours is a world with child poverty in schools. Children are familiarised with the realities of life for those presented as less fortunate in other places (contemporary global geographies of poverty) and at other times (local histories of poverty). As adults, we are presented with imagery of children in poverty to induce charitable donations as part of international responses to natural or political disasters. Creating a sense of a comfortable ‘us’, with responsibilities to a needy ‘them’ generate resources that can be used to ameliorate problems and lay the foundations for solutions to poverty. Paradoxically, the terra firma of global poverty may inadvertently complicate the reaching of a shared understanding of poverty within advanced economies, particularly when layered with neo-Liberal thinking in times of austerity.