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Dignity, Agency, Power
Dignity: an introduction Poverty is not entertainment, it’s not noble or romantic. Poverty is … heavy. It’s heavy hearts and heavy legs. It’s sore skin and hollow eyes. It’s upset and downhearted. It’s hunger. Malnourishment. It’s always thinking about the next meal. Poverty is bailiffs, it’s food banks, it’s queues and lists, it’s never being told what you’re entitled to but always being told. Poverty is being shown up then put down. The opening lines of Tony Walsh’s poem ‘Poverty’, written over a weekend workshop with a group of people who shared and reflected on their own personal experiences of poverty, reveals something of the indignity of living in poverty in the midst of a supposedly affluent society. Poverty is not only deprivation of economic or material resources but also, according to the United Nations, fundamentally a violation of human dignity. In the UK, poverty is strongly associated with public attitudes of stigma and blaming individuals for their own poverty. Professor Ruth Lister describes this in terms of the ‘othering’ of people living in poverty. Over many decades, this attitude has been embedded not just in the welfare system, but in the way many professional agencies exercise moral judgements and highly intrusive methods of controlling the behaviour of people living in poverty. These attitudes have also been internalised by people in poverty themselves, to the extent that they describe a sense of shame, or in the words of Wayne Green, who spoke at our first National Poverty Hearing in 1996: “What is poverty? Poverty is a battle of invisibility, a lack of resources, exclusion, powerlessness … being blamed for society’s problems.” The Churches have not been immune from these attitudes, too often treating poverty as a problem to be addressed through individual behaviour change, or in more theological language ‘saving’ people from their selfinflicted poverty. This is the context in which poverty – and even many
