Politicians have taken the lead in blaming poverty on the poor
Perhaps some of you are aware of the phenomenon of "slut-shaming" – whereby generally a female (why bother pretending, it's always a female) is contemptuously attacked, usually online, for anything from her dress style to what is perceived as sexually promiscuous behaviour.
A much-mimicked online example, "Hey Girls, Did You Know?", produced such observations as "Hey girls, did you know that boobs go inside your shirt?" and "That you spread Nutella, not your legs?". It burns like acid that girls and women would do this to each other, though guys do it too, sometimes filming their victim "sluts" naked or engaged in sexual activity, then passing the footage around.
On a wider level, one disquieting feature of these modern takes on slut-shaming is how quickly (indeed shamelessly) they embedded themselves into the collective psyche as borderline normal. Another disturbing aspect is that it doesn't take much imagination to draw parallels between slut-shaming and attitudes towards the poor.
How long would it take for "poor-shaming" to embed itself in the national psyche as borderline normal? Or perhaps it has already done so? The Methodists, the United Reformed Church, the Church of Scotland and the Baptist Union have joined forces to publish a study called The Lies We Tell Ourselves. It highlights myths surrounding people and poverty, including Iain Duncan Smith's much trumpeted "families out of work for three generations" line (which, it turns out, has never been backed up by data).
The report argues that the government is "deliberately misrepresenting" the poor, blaming them for their circumstances while ignoring more complex reasons, including policy deficiencies. Moreover, they feel that this scapegoating is the result of collusion between politicians, the media and the public.
This resonates with my feeling that, increasingly, the shame is being taken out of poor-shaming. It didn't seem so long ago that most people would think twice about denigrating fellow citizens who were having a hard time. These days, it appears to have been sanctioned as a new national bloodsport, regularly slipping under the PC-radar as little else manages to.
Nor is it just coming from politicians such as Duncan Smith, though he could be termed "Poor-Shamer General" for his absurd apocalyptic visions. A politician is one thing but these attitudes are spreading and hardening among ordinary people too. Indeed, poverty seems a trigger to inspire hate speech that would be quickly denounced if it related to race or gender. Only recently, there were startling amounts of venom levelled at a woman with 11 children, who needed a bigger council house. The fact that this woman had a notable number of children seemed to be a convenient hook for the more generalised abuse and resentment directed at pretty much anyone in need of council accommodation, or any help whatsoever.
Is this our new default setting – that the needy are greedy? This chimes with a slew of government policies that appear to be founded on notions of bulletproof self-reliance, making no allowances for circumstances or sheer bad luck, and which many would require huge amounts of help to put into practice, never mind sustain. Meanwhile, the more fortunate are invited to pour scorn upon anyone who fails.
How does this kind of thing escalate? That's easy. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, the poor are poor. They have no money, no voice, no representatives, and no means to establish their own public profile. Poverty is a big domino – once it falls, everything goes. In such circumstances, if a group of people are "deliberately misrepresented" then there's precious little they can do about it. The churches got it right – if anything, the truth seems so much worse that it must surely be time to put the shame back into poor-shaming. Just like slut-shamers, poor-shamers are bullies, and right now they're getting away with it.
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