Getting to know the shame of poverty

[Part of the Inside:Out series marking the European Year for Development 2015]

On a balmy evening in New York city, in a community centre in the poorest part of town, people are invited to decorate the walls with graffiti. A young African-American man climbs a twelve-foot ladder and paints across the wall: “No such thing as luck, only prosperity generated through hard work.”

Professor Robert Walker of Oxford University recently told this story to a packed hall in Trinity College Dublin where people have gathered to hear from the author of The Shame of Poverty.

In his book, Walker challenges the conventional thinking around poverty. He and his team have examined the experiences of poor people in a range of countries: Norway, Uganda, Britain, India, China, South Korea and Pakistan.

Through interviewing people across the world, Walker’s research shows that the feeling of shame in poverty transcends cultural traditions, political landscapes, and material well-being.

Walker continued to give examples, stories from the hundreds of people he and his team have interviewed from the road sweeper in Pakistan who says, “I pray my children never have to do this” to the child who confesses, “I don’t tell my friends that my mother works as a maid”.

Walker’s research shows that regardless of whether people live in urban Oslo or rural Uganda, those living in poverty experience the same feelings of shame. Though they might come from different worlds, they share very similar concerns and aspirations.

They worried about things like whether they would have enough food or the right kind of food, and the cost and quality of housing. On both sides of the equator, debt represented a loss of control. People also worried about the social expectations of family – could they afford to go to that wedding and what would the family think of them?

They worried about social stigma and were often embarrassed to take friends to their home – whether it was because there was no corrugated iron in their house or because their rooms were too small. They worried too about where they would send their children to school.

People in poverty everywhere worried about their health and that of their children. On top of all of this, or perhaps because of all of this, they were concerned about their sense of self – would they ever feel good about themselves again?

As well as internal shame, they also felt subject to external shame. Many avoided relatives, and found that relatives avoided them too, assuming they would ask for resources.

They also felt the shame of constant rejection – of failed job applications and the shame of exploitation in the work they did manage to secure. There was a shared experience of the community labelling, blaming or ignoring them. Cultural reasons for blaming the poor varied – either they were seen to be lazy, or they didn’t fit into the work ethic or were drunken. In some cultures there was even public shaming, with a public vote on who the community felt should receive benefits, with assistance seen as a reward rather than a right. People also felt that there was a presumption of guilt everywhere they went – a presumption that crime or violent behaviour went hand in hand with being poor.

Walker’s talk also dealt with the “policy of shaming” as practiced by various governments and political systems around the world, and how poverty and the shaming of those in poverty is used as a political tool.

But does society in Ireland shame those who are poor? Phrases like “dole scroungers”, or “living off benefits” are sometimes used, which suggests that some believe who are poor are lazy and responsible for their own predicament. This is a simple narrative that Walker argues is simply not true. People are not born with equal resources he says, and do not live in a world that prioritises their needs.

And yet, in Walker’s story from New York, the poor man perpetuates the myth that keeps him poor: “No such thing as luck only prosperity generated through hard work’. He believes this to be true. This ideology derives from the culture that he lives in.

Economic systems can powerfully oppress people. If a society creates the illusion of meritocracy – that you get what you deserve, that the harder you work, the richer and more valuable to society you become, it suggests that the opposite is also true – that it is shameful to be poor, and that poverty is self-inflicted.

But hard work does not set you free. The hard working poor around the world are testament to that fact. And shame is a great silencer. The feelings of guilt imposed by society make it very difficult for people to speak out or to join together. They are ashamed and they are encouraged to stay silent, quietly struggling to make ends meet, struggling to break free from the cycle of poverty. Meanwhile, those who are rich are encouraged to flaunt their success and champion the system.

Walker was invited to come to Ireland by Trinity College and a group called ATD – All Together in Dignity – who are working to break this cycle of shame. They challenge the status quo and champion human rights and dignity as the antidote to shame and shaming. They and many organisations and individuals like them around Ireland and around the world, work closely with vulnerable and marginalised people.

Many of these activists are involved in a group called the October 17 Committee. These are people who see the reality of poverty every day in the communities they work and live in. Each year they organise a public event on October 17th to mark the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The event celebrates the shared quest to end poverty.

The October 17 event this year took place at the “poverty stone” beside the famine statues on the quays in Dublin, where people gathered in a circle of solidarity, beside the river Liffey, to hear testimonies from people who have experienced poverty, from the working poor, from refugees, from members of the Traveller community, from the “new poor” and from those who have experienced homelessness.

This year, the event celebrated the 17 global goals, a United Nations agreement to eradicate extreme poverty by the year 2030. Ireland should feel proud to have led negotiations to agree this global pact, along with Kenya. But now, it will be up to the citizens of every country to keep putting pressure on governments to make sure this aspiration becomes a reality.