Lack of support
England is a deeply unequal country and is becoming more so. While billionaires got £150 BILLION richer in the last two years alone most of us are feeling the pain of the biggest drop in living standards ever experienced in peacetime.
Spiralling costs of housing and other essentials combined with stagnant wages, cuts to welfare and other state support and services mean more and more children and their families are struggling with dangerous and difficult living conditions.
Rights report on uk
“…great misery has also been inflicted unnecessarily, especially on the working poor, on single mothers struggling against mighty odds, on people with disabilities who are already marginalized, and on millions of children who are being locked into a cycle of poverty from which most will have great difficulty escaping.”
Professor Phillip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights
Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom (2018)
‘Everyday’ rights
Many of us don’t know this but we are fully entitled to protection from our ‘everyday’ rights – social and economic human rights – which the UK government made legally binding commitments to enact. The wellbeing and safety of children and their families is being harmed by the failure of government after government to respect their duties and obligations.
Rights report on uk
“The UK has a range of obligations, not least to secure to children an adequate standard of living, their right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, and their right to adequate housing.”
Dunja Mijatović,
Commissioner for Human Rights
Council of Europe
Report on UK (2022)
“Citizens of the UK are more likely to suffer from the effects of welfare reforms and austerity measures, imposed upon them by their own government, than they are from pandemics, terrorist attacks or environmental or climate related disasters.”
Drs Hannah King, Stephen Crossley and Roger Smith
The Sociological Review: Responsibility, resilience and symbolic power (2021)
Right to housing: vital for safety for children
Right to food: no wellbeing with an empty plate
Right to health: children are being failed
Poverty and rights
At the root of many of these human rights failures is poverty and inequality, impacting children and families in far reaching and long lasting ways.
“No social phenomenon is as comprehensive in its assault on human rights as poverty.”
Office of the High Commissioner
United Nations Human Rights
The Human Rights Dimension of Poverty (2021)
Rising inequality: families hit hard
Poverty: wages kept
low and welfare cut
Taxes etc: a matter
of human rights
Support not surveillance
Children have the right for their families to be supported. These rights and this support has been replaced instead by nightmarish family intervention programmes which replace consent with forcing families to participate.
“…many powerful institutions, industries, groups and individuals benefit from a doctrine of early intervention, but children, young people and their families do not seem to be among them.”
Professor Val Gillies, Ros Edwards and Dr Nicola Horsley
Challenging the Politics of Early Intervention: Who’s ‘saving’ Children and Why (2017)
Family intervention hell: targeting
the marginalised
“…the [Family Intervention Projects] demonstrates the nightmare place to which populist political rhetoric and ‘policy based evidence’ can deliver us.”
Human dignity
A life lived in “human dignity” is a bigger ambition than the basics of children not going hungry, of families not being homeless or having to live in places not even fit for human habitation. Children should be able to thrive, not fight to survive.
That these things cannot be taken for granted, in what is still one of the richest countries in the world, is an outrage. However, in standing up for these basics it is important not to forget that what the UK has agreed to provide is much greater, that children have rights to much more than just the bare minimum.
Public libraries, swimming pools, public leisure facilities, parks, playgrounds, youth clubs, specialist support services…all of these things make up a life of human dignity and support all children to thrive.
“States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.”