Saturday, February 8, 2025

Poverty shaming a thing?

“Money means nothing” this phrase has been so beaten up it has become a hackneyed cliché, but deep down, most of us know it is the rich who can say it with a straight face.

Senior Social Work lecturer at the University of Botswana, Poloko Ntshwarang says the poor have a purple tape in their heads that constantly tells they how they are failures.

To use her own words, she says, “poor people are often ashamed of their own condition; in a prosperous society, they feel inadequate, having personally failed; they resent being dependent from state assistance or their lack of agency in social assistance programs such as workfare; they feel dehumanized by their deprivations and subjected to public contempt or even reprobation. This adds an important dimension to income poverty and other deprivations captured under various poverty indexes. Poverty is not only an economic or social condition, it affects individual psyche, self-esteem, self-confidence. Poverty is insulting poor people’s dignity. Extreme poverty is experienced as dehumanizing.”

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