Innocenti Report Card June 2000 [antikvár]

Ending child povertyThe league tables of child poverty presented in this first Iiwocetiii Report Card are the most comprehensive estimates so far of child poverty across the industrialized world. Based on a new analysis, connnissioned by UNICEF, of the latest data from the Luxcmbourj^ Iiicoine Study of household surveys, Figure 1 shows the proportion of children living in poverty in 23 nations of the OECD. It shows that child poverty rates vary from under 3 per cent to more than 25 per cent in the world's economically advanced nations.By the middle of the century that has just ended, the world's richest nations were confident that poverty would be overcome by a combination of economic growth and welfare spending. A prediction that poverty would still afflict significant numbers of their children in the 21st century would not have been believed. Today, despite a doubling and redoubling of national incomes in most nations since 1950, a significant percentage of their children are still living in fainihes so materially poor that normal health and growth are at risk. And as the tables show, a far larger proportion remain in the twilight world of relative poverty; their physical needs may be minimally catered for, but they are painfully excluded from the activities and advantages that are considered normal by their peers.Such statistics represent the unnecessary suiFering and deprivation of millions of individual children. Tiiey also represent a failure to hold faith with the developed world's ideal of equality of opportunity. For no matter how many individual and anecdotal exceptions there may be, the fact remains that the children of the poor simply do not have the same opportunities as the children of the non-poor. Whether measured by pliysical and mental development, health and survival rates, educational achievement or job prospects, incomes or life expectancies, those who spend their childhood in poverty of income and expectation are at a marked and measurable disadvantage.Further, the statistics presented in these pages also represent a threat to the quaHty of life of all citizens in those nations with high rates of child poverty. For while it is true that many poor families make sacrifices to give their children the best possible start in life, the broader picture shows that those who grow up in poverty are more Hkely to have learning difficulties, to drop out of school, to resort to drugs, to commit crimes, to be out of work, to become pregnant at too early an age, and to live lives that perpetuate poverty and disadvantage into succeeding generations. In other words, many of the most serious problems facing today's advanced industrialized nations have roots in the denial and deprivation that mark the childhoods of so many of their future citizens.Child poverty therefore confronts the industrialized world with a test both of its ideals and of its capacity to resolve many of its most intractable social problems.It is a test that cannot easily be avoided by arguments about individual responsibility. No one would argue that being born into poverty is the fault of the child. It is merely the lottery of birth. And it is fundamental to shared concepts of progress and civilisation that an accident of birth should not be allowed to circumscribe the quality of hfe.The poverty-bar may not be written into the laws and institutions of the land; but it is written into both the statistical chances and the everyday realities of millions of children who happen to be born into the poorest strata of our societies.For the sake of both today's children and tomorrow's world, therefore, the beginning of a new century demands a new commitment to ending child poverty in the world's richest nations. This first Iiiiiocaili Report Card is intended as a contribution to the debate on how such poverty can best be defined, measured, and reduced.