Poverty stigma - a glue that holds poverty in place

Summary

Sociologist Imogen Tyler and Sarah Campbell report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation from a team of ten with lived and learnt knowledge of poverty. Stigma, they find, is “manufactured by the powerful”, designed into welfare systems, and “helps make poverty palatable”. Their remedy: “Stigma lives and breathes through our values, its power shrivels when we practice alternative values.”

Rationale

“Work does not equal worth”, one team member insists. We name the same disposition where a campaign “sees productivity as the sole determinant of value”; here it runs through welfare.