‘When I give food to the poor …’

Abstract

In the now widely repeated words of Dom Helder Camara (1909–99), Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife in Brazil, ‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor, they call me a communist’ (see, for example, O’Shaughnessy 2009). Giving aid to the poor, especially when they are children, is, in mainstream public and media discourse, a matter simply for congratulating the donors, great and small, and not for arguing over the whys and wherefores. So the central assertion of this chapter is that contemporary media campaigns such as Children in Need and Comic Relief inevitably depoliticise child poverty by treating it simply as a regrettable fact and paying little attention to its causes. Equally, since they exclude any political analysis of the causes of child poverty, other political assumptions are being affirmed through the transaction of these projects. The chapter offers a brief discussion of some of the prevailing contemporary discourses on child poverty, noting points of continuity with ways of framing poverty in the past, while at the same time contending that they have a particularity, borne of globalised and neoliberal times. Arguably, one of the points of continuity has been the feature of celebrities in the definition and address of poverty. There has, similarly, been regular recourse to already-familiar arguments about child poverty in the UK — notably, that it is a myth, or, alternatively, that it is regrettable and the fault of self-serving politicians or of derelict and/or conniving parents.