Poverty, Social Exclusion and Marginalization

Abstract

In later chapters, we describe some of the young people in our research as living in poverty, or as being affected by poverty in various ways that reduce their ability to participate in work or education. To people accustomed to thinking about poverty as a lack of material resources, this might seem an exaggerated way of expressing the circumstances of individuals who are neither starving nor without access to material goods that would have been luxuries less than a century ago. For many people, the traditional conception — usually referred to as absolute povert? — conjures up distressing images of beggars in the streets of Victorian England or drought, disaster and starvation in the developing world. From a similar perspective, early research into poverty, such as the work of the philanthropist Seebohm Rowntree at the end of the nineteenth century, also focused on the objective conditions in which people lived. Rowntree and his colleagues carried out door-to-door surveys examining the living conditions of thousands of working-class people and calculated the income required to secure the food, fuel and clothing necessary to maintain health (Coates 1966, pp.28-33). People who lacked the necessities of life according to these standards were regarded as being in poverty.