Lunch-shaming in schools has no place in the battle against child poverty
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Version 0 of 1. Being poor is about far more than lacking money or resources. To be poor is also to be shunned and stigmatised. “Lunch shaming”, where children in some school districts in the US who can’t afford a hot meal are publicly humiliated, in some cases by being made to clean canteen tables in front of other pupils to pay off their food debt, was thrust into the spotlight recently when the state of New Mexico passed a landmark law outlawing the practice. The law, spearheaded by local anti-poverty groups, is a welcome rebuttal to such callous practices. Other reported incidents of shaming include a child in Alabama whose arm was stamped with “I need lunch money”. Canteen workers have been instructed to throw out the meals of youngsters unable to pay. That children from poorer backgrounds have to deal with such degrading tactics speaks volumes about wider attitudes and a toxic political climate around poverty. And there is an unsettling resemblance in the latest US episodes to the stigma experienced by poor children in the UK. After years of bashing “the poor” as lazy or feckless, many political leaders seem to think it’s OK for the poorest children to go without having the most basic of needs met, including nutrition, but to also endure a crushing shame for being in a situation that they cannot control. Attacks on the poorest in society rest on a deeply flawed narrative that we can’t afford them yet we can still line the pockets of the rich with tax cuts, as Donald Trump plans to do in what he called last week the “biggest tax cuts in history”. It is this twisted logic that has made it possible for austerity cuts in Britain to pummel poorer families, and why 30% of children – that’s 4 million – are growing up in poverty. Prior to 2010, thanks to targeted policies, child poverty in Britain was being reduced. Anti-poverty measures have been shown to work in the US too. As a report from the Shriver Center in Illinois put it : “Poverty, like economic and social injustice more broadly, is not an inevitable or intractable force. It is something we can end through the decisions we make at the public policy level.” This is why the latest initiative from the Living New Deal, a US non-profit project that commemorates and documents one of the most successful anti-poverty drives in history, deserves attention. This month the Living New Deal has a series of events to mark the rollout of a New York map that spotlights the thousands of public works in the city, including community parks and schools, that exemplify the legacy of Franklin D Roosevelt’s extraordinary response to the Great Depression triggered by the 1929 stock market collapse. (A San Francisco map is already complete with Washington DC and LA next in line.) For more than 10 years researchers and volunteers around the US have collaborated to make visible to as wide an audience as possible the (all too often forgotten) achievements of the New Deal. The project reminds us that as well as large-scale building of roads, bridges, schools and libraries, FDR’s New Deal ushered in an unprecedented array of social programmes. These included job creation for millions of unemployed people as well as national public health and child nutrition initiatives that transformed the lives of the poorest people. The New Deal embodied an approach whose starting point was to make attacking poverty – not the people who live in it – a first principle. This makes it especially salient today. The writer and scholar Gray Brechin, a driving force behind the Living New Deal project, argues that at a time when Republicans in America and Tories in Britain behave as if there were no alternative to shrinking welfare states, and when “the dominant meme is that government just wastes money”, it is important that this ideology is exposed for the fiction that it is. In Britain, the stakes couldn’t be higher. If the austerity narrative peddled by the Tories triumphs and helps Theresa May’s party to win the snap general election, we will be consigning an entire new generation of children to the stigma of poverty. |