Understanding Child Poverty

This perceptive book examines one of the most widespread and egregious human rights violations: child poverty. Sharon Bessell argues that to end child poverty, we must first understand children’s experiences of it, by listening to them with care and respect. Secondly, we must understand the structures and systems that cause, maintain and sometimes deepen poverty.Using a child-centred approach, the book explores the wider impacts of poverty on children as it limits opportunities and affects their relationships. Bessell introduces the ‘Material-Opportunity-Relational Framework’, a rights-based system for understanding, assessing and responding to child poverty. Later chapters analyse the field through an ecological lens, presenting the concept of the socio-ecosphere to shift focus away from individuals to the structures of inequality that fail to support those in need. This book argues that we can end child poverty, but to do so we must transform existing systems.Illuminating and forward-thinking, Understanding Child Poverty is a vital read for scholars and students of social policy, sociology, childhood and youth studies, and inequality. The book’s practical frameworks will also greatly benefit policy-makers, social workers, child poverty activists and other professionals working with children.