How Inequality Fuels Child Abuse

We struggle to understand and talk about the link between poverty and child abuse. On the one hand, we know that not every poor family abuses and neglects their children, and we don’t want to stigmatize families for their poverty. On the other hand, there is a growing body of literature on the cascading effects of poverty in the lives of families. Paul Bywaters, professor of social work at the University of Huddersfield, joins us today to discuss the relationship between poverty, inequality, and child abuse.

 How do we come alongside and stand with families in poverty who are struggling with child abuse and neglect? How do we examine our own policies and procedures to ensure that we’re being genuinely helpful and not just adding to families’ burdens? And how do we move beyond just talking about individual poverty to the growing disparity in means that is reinforcing structural inequality with implications for generations to come? Please take a listen.

 Topics in this episode:

• Origin story (00:09)
• The relationship between poverty and abuse and neglect (4:08)
• Poverty affects every aspect of your life (8:34)
• Impact on adult poverty (11:48)
• The effect of disparity (14:19)
• Standing alongside families (19:16)
• Policy solutions (25:08)
• What’s next in research (36:55)
• For more information (40:20)

Links:

Paul Bywaters, Ph.D., professor of social work, School of Human and Health Sciences, University of Huddersfield

 The Relationship Between Poverty and Child Abuse and Neglect: New Evidence, by Paul Bywaters and Guy Skinner with Aimee Cooper, Eilis Kennedy, and Afra Malik, University of Huddersfield, March 2022

 Michal Krumer-Nevo, Ph.D., YouTube video: FAQ on Poverty and Poverty Aware Practice

 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

 L. Anthony Loman, Ph.D.

 Gary Siegel, Ph.D.

 For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at NationalChildrensAlliance.org. Or visit our podcast website at OneInTenPodcast.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast.

Transcript

Season 5, Episode 13

[intro music]

[Intro]

[00:09] Teresa Huizar:
 Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, “How Inequality Fuels Child Abuse,” I speak with Paul Bywaters, professor of social work at the University of Huddersfield, about the relationship between poverty, inequality, and child abuse. 

In the U.S., we’ve struggled to understand and talk about the link between poverty and child abuse. On the one hand, we know that of course not every poor family abuses and neglects their children, and we don’t want to stigmatize families for their poverty. On the other hand, there is a growing body of literature on the cascading effects of poverty in the lives of families. Both by the lack of ready resources available to address family problems and by the additive family stress created by financial pressures that most of us can only imagine. 

How do we come alongside and stand with families in poverty who are struggling with child abuse and neglect? How do we examine our own policies and procedures to ensure that we’re being genuinely helpful and not just adding to the burden of poor families and families struggling with child abuse and neglect? And how do we move beyond just talking about individual poverty to the growing disparity in means that is reinforcing structural inequality with implications for generations to come? I know you’ll be as interested as I was in this fascinating conversation. Please take a listen.

[Intro music begins to fade out]

[1:41] Teresa Huizar:
Paul, welcome to One in Ten.

Paul Bywaters: 
Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me to do this with you. 

Teresa Huizar: 
So Paul, how did you come to examine the relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect? 

Paul Bywaters: 
I think there’s both a personal and a kind of professor’s answer to this question. And the personal one is really that ever since I was a child, I’ve had this sort of gut feeling about things not being fair.

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
And it feels like a very kind of child’s voice inside me: “It’s not fair!” It’s not fair if some people are so much wealthier than others, if some people’s lives are so much easier and more comfortable than others.

And that led me as a—in the kind of professor’s side of the answer—to study health inequalities for a long time.

Teresa Huizar: 
Hmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
Inequalities in people’s chances of living a long life or living a life free of disease and the social factors that affect people’s life chances. And from the study of health inequalities, I was looking one day at a set of data about children going into the care system in the UK, and it struck me that exactly the same places that had long life expectancy had the fewest children in care.

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm. 

Paul Bywaters: 
And the places that had the shortest life expectancy had the most children in care. And that these differences were absolutely huge. So you had maybe eight times more chance of being in care—child being in care—in the poorest parts of England than in the richest parts. And that’s just struck me as wrong.

As a parent and a grandparent, you know, I have a feeling about what it would mean for my child to be separated from me. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
And I thought surely people would’ve studied this. But when I looked around it, there was very little study of inequalities. So although poverty’s been a focus of interest for a long time, I’ve come at this through the root of social inequalities and unfairness. Of which poverty is obviously a huge part.

So I then undertook, with a lot of great colleagues here in the UK, a series of research projects studying the relationship between social factors and children’s chances of being in care or being subject to abuse and neglect.

[4:08] Teresa Huizar: 
Can you talk a little bit about the complexity of that relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect? Because it’s not entirely straightforward, is it? 

Paul Bywaters: 
It’s not entirely straightforward. There is very strong evidence that there’s what I call a contributory causal relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect.

But clearly child abuse and neglect are many different things there. There’s no single cause, no single causal factor of any kind. So poverty is, in a sense, one of the causal factors. That’s what the evidence tells us. But it, it’s not just one of a list. Poverty affects every aspect of people’s lives.

Poverty has a relationship with people’s mental health, has a relationship with domestic violence, has a relationship with all sorts of other factors that also may be part of the picture of abuse and neglect. Poverty is kind of in there, in all of them. So it’s a really central factor in child abuse and neglect. But it’s by no means the only factor. 

[5:17] Teresa Huizar: 
One of the things that I remember reading is that you talked about the fact that it was sort of—and I’m not sure I’m phrasing this right, but—sort of a necessary but insufficient explanation for child abuse and neglect. In other words, it was one of the things that, as you’re saying, has this strong contribution to it. But not every poor family experiences child abuse and neglect and those things, and I think it’s what makes it a little bit confusing for the general public when they think about these relationships—and frankly probably for all of us as professionals too. 

What do you think are sort of misunderstandings that in the professional realm, at least until now, we’ve had in our understanding about that relationship?

Paul Bywaters: 
I think people often do come back to that, that very intuitive thing. You know, not everybody who’s poor is going to abuse their children. Not everybody who abuses or neglects their children is poor. So, you know, it can’t be about poverty. It must be about other things. 

But it’s also the case that not everybody who smokes gets cancer. That doesn’t mean that we say, well, smoking doesn’t cause cancer, then.  We know that smoking does cause cancer. 

And when I think about this relationship, there’s two kinds of things. We’ve got this huge body of evidence, including the nearest thing that you can have in our field to randomized control trials, which show the strength of the relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect. But also we’ve got a very clear model for how that comes about. 

So like in the health field, you’ll have a biological relationship, if you like, that links smoking with cancer—the chemical and biological reactions that make that happen. We also understand, I think, now a lot about how poverty leads to child abuse and neglect. And that basically there are two main mechanisms.

There’s very direct relationship, sometimes described as the investment model. If you, the parent, just don’t have enough money to feed your child, or you’re forced to go out to work without child care because you haven’t got the money to pay for the child care. If your housing is completely inadequate because you haven’t got enough money to, to—there are these direct things that make parenting so very much more difficult. 

But then there’s also indirect factors—family stress, it’s often described as. So there is the stress of being poor and the stigma that’s associated with being poor.

And those stresses and stigmas may lead some people to have poor mental health, may lead some people to get into fights with their partner—physical or just psychological fights and difficulties. May lead people to lose social support. They might have to move out of the area to get cheaper accommodation. Or there are all sorts of kind of secondary factors.

So there’s the direct impact and then there’s the stress and the stigma and the factors that lead on from there. So we have some, we’ve got a pretty good idea now about the mechanisms that link poverty with child abuse and neglect as well as the clear evidence that there is a link.

[8:34] Teresa Huizar: 
You know, I think as you were talking Paul, one of the things I was thinking about is that often we think of these things in very siloed ways. You know, we think of substance abuse and domestic violence and other severe mental illness and all of these things as each sort of their own category of contribution to child maltreatment, really.

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah. Yeah. 

Teresa Huizar: 
But what you’re describing, and I think what is really interesting, is that there’s a thread of poverty as a contribution to all of these things, and this may be the thread that really runs through all of these other elements that contribute to child maltreatment. 

Paul Bywaters: 
I think that’s exactly right.

Poverty—it’s not a standalone thing. Poverty affects every aspect of people’s daily lives. If you are severely poor, then almost every moment of your life is caught up. You know, you get up and you want to have breakfast. You’ve got to decide whether there’s enough food to feed yourself as well as your child. So maybe you decide not to have breakfast. You’ve got to make decisions about, you know, how you get to work or how you get to school. Do you walk or can you take the bus? Can you afford to pay for fuel? If you go to the shops, you know, can you afford this? Can you afford that? Every moment is taken up in these decisions, all of which have kind of financial consequences. 

And that eats away at people. It eats away at people’s relationships. It eats away at people’s self-esteem. It eats away at their mental health. And so it is connected with, with all of those things. If you are poor, you are more likely to be in poor health. If you’re in poor health, you are less likely to be able to stay in or keep high-earning employment.

So there’s kind of cycles in all of this. So poverty is exactly as you say, a thread that runs through all these other factors that may be part of the big picture and maybe the thing that we see first. So when a referral comes into a social worker, what a social worker may first think about or see is a domestic violence dispute, or maybe a parent with severe mental health affecting their ability to look after their children.

But behind that and through that and affecting the ways in which those parents may be able to respond to that will be the poverty, will be the amount of resources that families have.

This is one of the reasons why I’m interested in, not just in poverty, which I see as absolutely essential, but in inequality. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
Because when you look up at people who’ve got money, who’ve got wealth and resources behind them, you see how helpful that is when they run into problems. So if they’ve got a child with say, you know, anxiety or eating disorder or something, then you can afford therapy and treatment and care for that.

If you need child care in order to do your job, you can buy child care to do your job. If, if you, if, if you need rewards and treats and holidays to make life a bit easier to make your family go well, then you can afford those things. If you’re in poverty none of those, none of those problem-solving, um, family-enhancing, uh, possibilities is available to you in the same way.

[11:48] Teresa Huizar: 
As you were describing the sort of day-to-day experience of someone in poverty, one of the things I was thinking about is just how exhausting— 

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
—and I’m not saying that in any light way, but how truly— 

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
—just bone-tired one would be in that. And you know, how that’s often accompanied by despair.

If you feel that, you know, it’s so difficult to improve your situation and you can see what that means for your family, I think that that in and of itself can also serve as fuel, you know, for all of the things that we’re talking about, too, especially substance abuse and those kinds of things.

I’m just wondering, you know, you made an interesting connection in your paper because we think and we talk in the U.S. a lot about, and are trying to explore, and often not well, this relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect. But one of the things that your paper also talked about was kind of the converse of that, which is the impact of child abuse and neglect experienced as a child on adult poverty. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah. That’s not something I’ve done research in about so much myself, but I, you know, some awareness of the literature. So we were talking about the cyclical relationship between poverty and other, other difficulties if you’re a parent. But also there’s another cycle here, which is, if as a child, you’ve experienced abuse and neglect, then that affects your life chances. It may have affected your education as well as your health, your physical and mental health. Both of those things will have knock-on effects for your, um, chance of getting into good employment or staying in good employment. Which affects, you know, the housing that you can secure, it affects your adult relationships. 

There are lifelong consequences for this. And there can be a kind of cycle where if you’ve had those disadvantages as a child, it’s harder to make your way successfully in the world’s eyes as an adult.

Of course, that’s not to say that everybody that’s experiences abuse and neglect as a child has a dreadful adult life. That’s absolutely not the case. Many people show incredible survival skills and resilience and so on and, and, and, and manage well. But the evidence shows that there are consequences which affect many people in their, in their adult life.

[14:19] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, and I think it also is a way of thinking about, you know, one of the sort of intractable—what feels intractable—issues that we often I think feel like we’re not very good at, at all addressing are intergenerational neglect cases in particular here in the U.S. I think that for us, that’s often been very fraught with lots of things tried and not feeling that we’re very successful at breaking that cycle.

But one of the things I’m thinking about as you’re talking is one of the things that we’re terrible about in the U.S. is trying anti-poverty efforts. 

Paul Bywaters: 
Mm-hmm. 

Teresa Huizar: 
And so maybe the reason that we’re not seeing better effects in our works on intergenerational neglect cases is because we’re, you know, we’re not applying the right medicine, essentially, to the problem. So it’s very thought-provoking in thinking about that.

I’m wondering, you were talking about sort of the paucity of research that exists around, um, this, you know, this dimension between. Poverty and child abuse and neglect. Why do you think there hasn’t been more, and what do you think needs to be done to encourage more, both in England where you are and, you know, around the world?

Paul Bywaters: 
The point I was actually making was about the research about inequality and child abuse and neglect. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm. Mmm. 

Paul Bywaters: 
There is more research about poverty and abuse and neglect than there is about inequality or dis—I think you tend to talk about disparities—

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes.

Paul Bywaters: 
—and disproportionality in the States.

Teresa Huizar: 
OK.

Paul Bywaters: 
  “Inequalities” maybe is more of a, more of a, a word we use in, in, in the UK. 

But, because one of the things that a focus on disparities does is that it opens up this whole field of looking at what it is that people that I was talking about just now, people who have money. Do parents who have money—how do they look after their children? How do they solve their problems? What are the opportunities that that gives them? 

So there is something about the disparity, you know, looking at disparities rather than just looking at poverty. Poverty tends to make us focus on, you know, it tends to be inevitably kind of individualizing. It says, you know: What is it about being poor that makes this poor parent a bad parent? Or, you know: What it is about this person that has made them poor?

It forces us back in—it tends to focus back into, into, into this kind of individualized way of thinking, case by case, when actually what we need to do is to say: Why do we have such an unequal society?

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
What can we, what can we do to shift poverty for everybody? Which we, uh, uh, and you know, the rising tide will lift all boats. So all families will be better off if they’re not poor. All families in poverty will be better off if they have a bit more money. They’ll probably manage a bit better, and so on. 

And that will reduce the numbers of children who are subject to abuse and neglect. There’s lots of evidence of that. I can think of in, in the last literature review we did, there were about, I think 17 or 18 studies which showed that having more money alone reduced the amount of child abuse and neglect as a single factor. So we know that that’s the case. 

So there’s something about the way in which this whole debate is framed which tends to drive us back down the route of the individual case. You know: What is it that’s different about this individual family? And that can obscure us from seeing the elephant in the room is. As I’ve sometimes described it, the elephant in the room is poverty. If you shifted the elephant, if you shifted the poverty, then you know, of course some families would manage better than others. But you would have a substantially reduced amount of abuse and neglect. 

[18:11] Teresa Huizar: 
I think you’re just making some really interesting points. Because when you look at the literature in the U.S., we’ve seen significant declines in child sexual abuse and significant declines in physical abuse over the last 40 years. But if you look at our neglect numbers, they’re almost unchanged. And so then one has to wonder: How is it that we’ve managed to through, you know, better efforts and better policy, we’ve managed to shift these things, in physical abuse and sexual abuse, and get trend lines at least going in the right direction, whereas we’ve had almost no impact at all on neglect? 

I think part of that is what you’re describing, that if we’re entirely focused on only the individual case in front of us and not looking at what’s contributing to all of those cases—or many of them—then we can miss the lever that we need to be pressing in order to make a change and shift. Your paper’s been, I think, very thought-provoking. 

[19:16]
 I want to ask you, though, a question about how we talk about these things. Because I think one of the things that we all as professionals are a little bit concerned about is that we know that there’s a lot of stigma attached to poverty, and there’s also a lot of stigma attached to child abuse and neglect. And so when we have these discussions about the ways in which poverty makes families more vulnerable to child abuse and neglect, we don’t want to, essentially, you know, layer on additional stigma or imply that every family that’s in poverty is automatically going to abuse their child. 

How do you find it helpful to talk about these things in a way that reduces stigma, or doesn’t add to it, or doesn’t add to sort of public misperceptions about these relationships?

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah, I think there, there’s maybe a couple of things that I want to say by way of answer to that. I think having a discussion about disparities and inequalities rather than just poverty is maybe helpful. Because if you think about disparities, then it immediately makes you think about the, you know, the wealth end as well as the poor end, if you like, the economically— 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes.

Paul Bywaters: 
—economically wealthy as well as the economically poor.

And that maybe immediately begins to shift the terms of debate. The other thing that came to mind when you were asking the question was all the work that they’ve done in Israel, particularly around something that they call the poverty-aware paradigm. This is the work of Michal Krumer-Nevo and a whole load of many other people in Israel. And this is a, this is a really important program that they’ve been conducting over eight, 10, or more years now. It’s really tried to change workers approaches and, and attitudes to families in poverty.

One of the places they’ve had to start is by reeducating social workers.

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
And really challenging social workers to think about their attitudes to poverty and to families in poverty. And to unpick all the messages that we receive all the time that are blaming and stigmatizing and shaming. And asking social workers to think about what it would mean to, in their language, stand beside families. To stand effectively on their side and to communicate to families that that’s what they’re doing. That they are on the family’s side, not another person coming to blame them or investigate them or assess them or judge them. Which is what so many families feel when they get a knock on the door from a social worker.

I’m a social worker in origin and, you know, as a profession, we have to take responsibility for our part in this, I think, and really think hard and reflect deeply on what this might mean. They also talk about that fundamental attitude of standing by families.

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm. 

Paul Bywaters: 
Part of that is communicating that you understand as a worker what the grind of daily life might be like and what it might mean. But you were talking earlier about the extreme fatigue, you know, the sleep disorders, the lack of energy, the feeling of hopelessness, the anxiety, the depression that’s associated with that.

And those micro decisions, those moment-by-moment decisions: Can I afford this? Can I afford that? How do I pay for this? How do I feed my child tonight? All of that stuff. So both communicating that you are standing by people and communicating that you really understand.

And the third bit needs to be, that you can do some—you know, that you can actually help them in a concrete and material way. Because there’s evidence internationally—of course I’m not talking about everybody’s practice, but—there’s evidence internationally that social work tends to underplay the value of material and financial help.

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm. 

Paul Bywaters: 
And so people’s parenting comes under scrutiny, but they don’t receive the help with what’s often their priority, which is: How do I get through the day? How do I pay the bill? How do I keep the light on? How do I keep the heat on? How do I stay in this house? 

And there’s that immediate disjunction between how parents are seeing the world and what the social workers are saying to them.

We need to get past that. And if you do get past that, then the resistance and the lack of engagement that social workers sometimes talk about in families disappears. Because families can see that the social worker is there to help them in ways that they recognize.

[24:15] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, and in ways they can’t do for themselves, right?

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
If there’s an actual—if your life actually improves because someone has become a part of it, it makes you more open to working collaboratively with a social worker as opposed to if you feel like it’s many requests for many more meetings but no material assistance with the things that you’re, you know, worried about, like how to pay the bills.

I mean, so much of what you’re describing is sort of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. 

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah. Yeah.

Teresa Huizar: 
You know, how does a family who doesn’t even necessarily know where their next meal is going to come from, worry about some of the things that we’re talking to them about related to their parenting— 

Paul Bywaters: 
Mmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
—or other things they’re just thinking about: “I hope,” you know, “my electricity doesn’t get turned off today, or that I have enough gas in the car to get to work before my next paycheck, or … .”

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah. 

Teresa Huizar: 
You know, these, these other kinds of things. 

[25:08]
 I’m wondering what you see as, you know, policy solutions for some of the important issues you raised. In what ways might we build a better understanding of what we know about disparities and the impacts of poverty on these cases into the kinds of interventions that we are doing with families, and also in our anti-poverty efforts, factoring in the fact that child maltreatment is something we should be thinking about?

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah, obviously the policies need to operate at different levels. So I don’t know the work as well personally, but I’ve read some research by Loman and Siegel. [Laughter] I don’t even know these people’s first names. I apologize to them. And this was in the States. I think many, multiple years of work with families where there was additional financial and material support provided to those families, with clearly good outcomes.

I’m more familiar with similar work, as I was saying just now, in Israel. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm-hmm. 

Paul Bywaters: 
Where there’s a very extensive evidence base and some very interesting recent papers, which have brought all the evidence about this anti-poverty work in Israel together. And what that’s shown is that—so these are social workers who have been given access to a budget, which they can spend quite straightforwardly. Money with and for families to deal with actually any aspect of their life. So it might be the immediate thing of today’s food or today’s heating bill. But it might be something much more developmental or that would help a family.

And so they’ve shown that, with budgets and with the different attitudes to poverty, that families are better off. And you feel better off. It shows that there are clearly better relationships between social workers and families, and that leads to all those other conversations that we might want to have about parenting, about relationships in families, and so on that we would want to talk about. So this is good evidence that that practice can be different. Although I have to say that at the end of the day, they said that although families were better off and so on, that they weren’t lifting them out of poverty. This wasn’t on a scale. So— 

Teresa Huizar:
Hmm.

Paul Bywaters:
So that’s, that’s where the other part of the picture comes in. Yes, we need to change practice, but it needs to be—I believe—it can only really be effective when we change the much larger structural policies in our countries, which lead to so much disparity in income and wealth.

It’s only if we really address poverty. There are two aspects to this, it occurs to me. I mean, firstly there’s things like the minimum wage and what the basic welfare benefits are—the levels of, you know, those kind of floor elements. But I’m conscious that many of the ways in which we manage a whole range of policies, certainly in the UK, can actually make things worse for families.

There are lots of sanctions associated with the benefit system. You know, you miss one interview appointment by 15 minutes and, and your benefit gets cut. We have policies where many families are—particularly migrant families—are (a) prevented from working. They’re not allowed to work. And (b) they, they’re not allowed to receive standard welfare benefits. So we have policies which actually make family a destitute.

Policies on housing. Where families may be homeless as a result of their poverty, we are placing families hundreds of miles away from the communities in which they’ve lived, in response to homelessness. So all their social support mechanisms are immediately broken. So there’s the floor things, the minimum wage, basic levels of welfare benefits that kind of set the floor for poverty. But then there’s a whole lot of other policies that interact with poverty that make poverty more insecure, more unstable, harder to plan for.

So it’s much worse if you’re poor but you don’t know how much your income’s going to be from week to week than if you’re poor but you absolutely know what you’re going to get. All of those things, we need to change practice, we need to change the big picture policies and then we need to look at the way policies can interact to make poverty even harder.

[29:41] Teresa Huizar: 
I was wondering as you were speaking about whether or not you’ve seen much research post-pandemic about the impact of some of the social supports that many governments—including our own, you know, we even had cash payments that went out to families. 

Paul Bywaters:
Mmm. Mmm.

Teresa Huizar: 
Several rounds of them, as a matter of fact. And, you know, that actually was probably our largest experiment—

Paul Bywaters:
Mm-hmm. 

Teresa Huizar: 
—in poverty reduction and direct payments in our history, I would imagine, with families of every, you know, of almost every shape and size. And it is interesting because here in the U.S. I did see one paper that had been published, just some introductory things that really—I mean, it looked like it did have some impact.

And I’m just wondering whether you were aware of other research that’s being done on the kind of additional supports that governments provided during that time, and whether in fact you did see any reduction in—well, first of all, poverty, but secondly child maltreatment? Or is it too early? 

Paul Bywaters: 
I think it’s too early. I haven’t seen much research—

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm. Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
—around the world, anywhere, which did seem like an obvious thing to be doing, didn’t it? Because as you say—

Teresa Huizar: 
  [Laughter]

Paul Bywaters: 
—we were suddenly catapulted into something very different than was expected. I mean, I remember at the time, at the height of the pandemic in the UK, there was a lot of concern. You know, people were saying all these, you know, families are—many families sort of laid off from work. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes.

Paul Bywaters: 
Being at home all the time, not having school, not having access maybe to meals through school, and so on and so on. Surely this was going to have a bad effect on children, on levels of child abuse and neglect.

But actually we saw, if anything, a bit of a fall in the numbers over time. And that of course, did coincide with the fact that we were, we increased the most common form of welfare payment, universal credit—

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
—by 25£ a week—about, I don’t know what that would be, $30 a week or something, for a year, for 18 months. We then ended it again, of course, but … so maybe, maybe the fact that we didn’t see the rise in child abuse that everybody was expecting was something to do with that—

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm.

Paul Bywaters: 
—as you say. 

[31:59] Teresa Huizar: 
I am just, I’m so curious about it because I think, you know, we’re just now in the U.S. so many of those supports—not only the cash payments that were made, but increases in child tax credits and increases in food amounts for what used to be called food stamps in the U.S.

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah. 

Teresa Huizar: 
They’re not called that anymore, but you know what I’m talking about. 

Paul Bywaters: 
Yeah. 

Teresa Huizar: 
So I—it’s this reduction of so many supports that I worry about. Because if your existence is already somewhat tenuous and you’ve had some additional supports, which helped you get your feet under you a little bit. And then it’s not just that we stopped with cash payments, but we also reduced the amount that you were getting for food. And we also took away some other things. You know, then we’ve made your life so much more tenuous all over again. And I guess my question for you—I was just sort of musing aloud there, but I think that my question for you about that is: Why do governments find it so hard to sustain things that they themselves can see provided some benefit?

You know, I just, it’s a frustration to me that we had in the U.S. this experiment. And it seemed to go reasonably well. Better than one could have expected, perhaps. And yet, as soon as we remove the declaration of emergency, you know, health emergency, then we just let all of those additional supports erode.

Now, maybe it’s different in England and I’d be happy to hear if that’s the case. But it just seems like we can’t sustain—we don’t seem to sustain these efforts that really relate to inequality or poverty reduction. 

Paul Bywaters: 
No, and the backdrop in the UK, I think, has been for the last 13 years now of what we’ve called austerity policies.

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm. 

Paul Bywaters: 
So a general cutting back of what the state does in a whole range of spheres: in health, in education, in welfare benefit spending, in housing, in transport, in all kinds of ways in which the state is responsible for policies which support all families. What I call the infrastructure for family life has been, has been cut into.

So, waiting times for mental health appointments for children have gone through the roof. The housing crisis has got worse and worse. More and more families homeless or near homeless or living in completely unsuitable conditions. Schools being cut back. In all kinds of ways. All those things which helped to sustain families have been being cut back in the UK. And, um, that, that, that’s, that’s the other part of the picture. 

And those things matter much more when you are poor, when you’re living in poverty. Because those are the bits and pieces that could sustain you.

And you don’t have the opportunity to take private alternatives. Again, if you, you know, if you’ve got money, private schooling, private health, no problem about transport, or housing. Buy it. But that’s not available. So if the state withdraws from those things, as it has been doing here and around the world really over the last 30 or 40 years. Then life for families at the bottom of the economic pile get gets harder and harder. 

And it, it is to some extent, I think there’s been a kind of a political battle over 30 or 40 years. You may not want me to get into this, but we’ve seen widening inequality through developed Western societies. We’ve seen wealth disappear into the stratosphere at the top end, but not poverty being alleviated. In fact, rather the reverse.

And that’s reflected in the public debate. So when I began the work 10, 12 years ago now on inequalities in child welfare, disparities in child welfare, the dominant voices at the time were saying, “Well, poverty’s not really a factor in child abuse and neglect.” “Level of funding doesn’t really affect the quality of children’s services.” There were a variety of messages out there, which were all, um, un-evidenced. But, so there’s a, alongside people’s compassion about poverty and people’s concern for people who are poor, there are also a lot of voices which basically are still blaming and shaming and stigmatizing.

Again, I think, you know, part of this work that I’m concerned to do and that you’ve referred to is a focus on how we talk about these issues, as well as what we do in concrete terms. Because there are these other voices, these other ways of describing families, that are undermining.

[36:55] Teresa Huizar: 
I just want to say that I’ve really appreciated the fact that in our conversation you’ve also focused on the piece of it that’s around structural inequality and disparity.

Because I think that, as you’re pointing out, that’s when we talk about those things, we, in a certain way, automatically move away from blaming poor individuals for their own state— 

Paul Bywaters: 
Mm-hmm. 

Teresa Huizar: 
—when we’re starting to talk about these common threads and how a structure can contribute to that.

I’m wondering though, what’s next for you in your own research? Either what you’re researching now around these issues, or an area that you’d like to explore about it in the future.

Paul Bywaters:
We haven’t really talked much about, in the jargon “intersectionality.” So how—

Teresa Huizar: 
Mm, mm-hmm.

Paul Bywaters:
—poverty doesn’t fall equal on all, on all people.

Teresa Huizar: 
That’s right.

Paul Bywaters:
So … this is another hour’s conversation, isn’t it? This is—

Teresa Huizar: 
[Laughter] Yes.

Paul Bywaters:
This is not a quick and simple issue. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes.

Paul Bywaters:
In nothing that we’ve talked about, can you assume that these issues fall equally on people of all kinds and in all places.

Teresa Huizar: 
Yes, that’s right. 

Paul Bywaters:
So we have to think about this in everything that we do and in everything we say. It has to be reflected in policies, and it has to be reflected in research, and it has to be reflected in practice. This complexity, which I think it’s crucial that we hold onto, and don’t oversimplify any of these issues is, is part of what, you know, needs to drive the research agenda as we go ahead. 

I have two feelings about it. I mean, there is a sense in which we know plenty enough already. We know that if we reduce poverty, we would reduce child abuse and neglect. And we should just get on and do that.

But there’s another sense in which we don’t understand all the nuances and all the individual differences and all the factors at work. And so we do need to understand this more, and we need to keep a focus on these disparities. And, you know, you have to say that’s against the background in which we, we simply can’t be complacent. That what we do, what we are doing as social workers, what we do as child care workers is necessarily helpful to people.

We have the scandals of how we’ve treated, Native Americans in your case, Indigenous peoples around the world. 

Teresa Huizar: 
Mmm. Mm-hmm.

Paul Bywaters:
We have—they have the examples of sexual abuse in the care system. We have the examples in the UK of sending children in care to the other side of the world without telling their parents that we were doing it, with child migrants. There is a history. We can’t assume that what we do, because we’re well-meaning, is good for the children. So we need, you know, constantly to question ourselves and to question, through research, what the relationship is between our intentions and the outcomes for children.

[39:41] Teresa Huizar: 
I was thinking about as you were talking, just how true that is, that we can’t assume that because we want to do good we are actually doing good. 

Is there anything else I should have asked you about today, Paul, and didn’t? Or anything else that you want to ensure that we talk about before you go? 

Paul Bywaters: 
I think we’ve covered a lot of the ground. [Laughter] I’ve made some notes, but I think [laughter] I think we’ve covered lots of stuff, so I’m okay. No, thank you. 

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[40:06] Teresa Huizar: 
Well, thank you so much, Paul, for joining us. We so appreciate it. And it was a very thought-provoking conversation. Thank you.

Paul Bywaters: 
I’m really grateful for the chance to do this and, I really enjoyed our conversation as well.

Thank you very much.

[Outro]

[40:20] Teresa Huizar:
Thank you for listening to One in Ten. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. And we’d love it if you would take a moment and rate it wherever you listen. For more information about this episode or any of our others, please visit our podcast website at OneInTenPodcast.org.

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