World Hunger and Poverty

New studies show that child abuse can lead to poverty. Victims of child abuse have an increased chance of ending up in poverty than children from non-abusive homes.

“You can come from a family that has money but if they don’t treat you well, you can end up in a lot of trouble,” said Senior Research Fellow Dr. John Frederick.

Of course, many factors in people’s lives put them at more risk of poverty. Many aspects of our society unfairly hold some people down, which in turn can make them poor. Especially when denied equal opportunity at childhood, the average person cannot catch up.

We can try to fight some of the preventable factors that hold a child back, such as being abused or being born poor. However, we can only end poverty by finding a way to provide everyone with sufficient opportunity to succeed, instead of just leaving that opportunity to those people lucky enough to not face too many obstacles such as child abuse, illness, or a poor childhood.

In my opinion, we can best provide that universal opportunity by providing universal education, which we can do in the form of student loans. The education must include food, clothes, shelter and healthcare. A person cannot get a sufficient education while hungry, homeless or sick. The education must also include job-training and job-placement services. With a high-quality education including all those services, people can get a job (or start their own business) that will pay them enough to support themselves and pay off their student loans.

Remember, to truly escape poverty, a person needs to earn enough to not only pay for their current needs, but also to pay for their student loans (which include all the costs-of-living while getting educated), to pay for their retirement, and to pay for unemployment insurance. Some nations and states may have socialized some of those needs, which means a person may not need to pay for them in such places. For example, unemployment insurance is at least partially covered by most governments.

In a recent article on BlackEnterprise.com, Alfred Edmond, Jr. wrote about how people hurt themselves financially just to give the appearance of wealth. Though the magazine addresses Black financial issues specifically, I think the advice in that article applies to all people who may struggle financially. He shows how people ring up their credit cards to look rich and live in luxury, while thus accumulating debt. Even if that doesn’t result in poverty for every person, it usually will result in a lot of financial struggling.

I think we need to find a way to get this message to the younger generations. High-schools need to include more financial classes, especially those high-schools in poorer areas. Students need to learn how to invest in their future, rather than just waste their money to temporarily look rich.

The following quote demonstrates a major way in which official poverty statistics understate the poverty epidemic:

“While in any given year 12 to 15 percent of the population is poor, over a ten-year period 40 percent experience poverty in at least one year because most poor people cycle in and out of poverty; they don’t stay poor for long periods. Poverty is something that happens to the working class, not some marginal ‘other’ on the fringes of society.” – Michael Zweig, What’s Class Got to do With It, American Society in the Twenty-first Century, 2004

Peg Tyre and Matthew Philips report on the growing problem of suburban poverty:

Once prized as a leafy haven from the social ills of urban life, the suburbs are now grappling with a new outbreak of an old problem: poverty. Currently, 38 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defines as an annual income of $20,000 or less for a family of four. But for the first time in history, more of America’s poor are living in the suburbs than the cities—1.2 million more, according to a 2005 survey. “The suburbs have reached a tipping point,” says Brookings Institution analyst Alan Berube, who compiled the data. For example, five years ago, a Hunger Network food pantry in Bedford Heights, a struggling suburb of Cleveland, served 50 families a month. Now more than 700 families depend on it for food.

Suburban poverty can also be invisible. Poor people who live in the city tend to be concentrated in subsidized housing or in neighborhoods where the rent is low, which in turn attract retail businesses that target customers with low incomes. Poor suburbanites often live in the same ZIP codes as their affluent neighbors, shop at the same stores and send their children to the same public school. And if people don’t see themselves as poor, they often don’t seek the help they need.

Read entire Newsweek article.

Sadly, the official numbers underrate the problem. For example, take a single-parent making $21,000 a year and trying to support three kids with the substandard public school systems of lower-middle-class America; the government considers them above the poverty line.

Additionally, the majority of supposedly well-off working-class families live in debt.

Anyway, suburban poverty shows once again that this massive social problems – poverty, hunger, and homelessness – affect all of us. We all need to organize and work together to put an end to these social ills.

What do you think?