Children growing up in poverty and exclusion are likely to become entangled in a ‘cycle’ thus passing it from generation to generation. Entailing inequality of access to resources and opportunities, and often linked to discrimination, child poverty is a denial of children’s rights. It has severe long-term consequences, restraining children from achieving their full potential, adversely affecting their health, inhibiting their personal development, education and general well-being.
Tackling child poverty and breaking the transmission of poverty and exclusion from one generation to the next features high on the European Union’s political agenda. Child poverty is recognised as a multi-dimensional problem which requires urgent integrated actions across a wide range of social, economic and cultural policies.
Inspired by the priority given to the issue by the March 2006 European Council, many Member States have taken it to heart.
• In the 2006-2008 National Reports on Strategies for Social Protection and Social Inclusion, governments pledge to develop a strategic, integrated and long-term approach to preventing and addressing poverty and social exclusion among children.
• The independent social inclusion experts submitted in 2007 reports on the situation in their respective countries and a synthesis report was produced.
• The Social Protection Committee has also approved in January 2008, on request of the European Council, a report on "Child Poverty and Well-Being" , identifying the predominant factors affecting child poverty in each country. This report underpinned the key policy messages on social inclusion of the 2008 Joint Report on Social Protection and Social Inclusion adopted jointly by the Commission and the Council.
• Several European projects on mutual learning, peer reviews, Round Tables and Presidency events have addressed various aspects of the issue. The European Union also gives support to the operating costs of European networks devoted to the fight against child poverty such as Eurochild and EAPN.
Addressing child poverty is crucial to the achievement of greater social cohesion and sustainable social and economic development in Europe. To this end, the European Union continues its efforts on mainstreaming child poverty in national and European Union policy making, strengthening the indicators for measuring and evaluating the progress, taking into account the voices of the affected children, and raising public awareness on the issue.
Over the past years child poverty has become an increasingly important part of the EU Social Inclusion Process and is now one of its key issues. At the Lisbon Council meeting in 2000 children were mentioned as a specific target group. Then, in the Common Objectives agreed at the Nice European Council later the same year, “to move towards the elimination of social exclusion among children and give them every opportunity for social integration” was included in the objective on helping the most vulnerable. Child poverty has featured as a priority concern in many National Action Plans on poverty and social exclusion (NAPs/inclusion) ever since even though the actual coverage has been rather uneven and piecemeal and in many cases lacking a comprehensive and multi-dimensional approach.
The issue of child poverty has also been a key theme from the outset of the Community action programme on poverty and social exclusion and was covered under many of the different activities supported under the programme. Within this context, a first transnational thematic study was commissioned in 2002 which examined the policies to tackle child poverty in six Member States and the United States.
Compared with their better-off peers, children growing up in poverty suffer from more health and behavioural problems and lower self esteem, obtain less education, and have fewer prospects of a successful future. Those are some of the conclusions of the above mentioned study by Dr. Petra Hoelscher, now a Social Policy Officer at
UNICEF in Geneva.
The study compared poverty rates and policies in six Member States (France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and the United States and made several key recommendations that are being integrated in a number of National Action Plans on Social Inclusion (NAPs).
“A few years ago only some member states, notably the UK, were beginning to focus on specific children’s issues, but there was very little information available on policy experiences to reduce child poverty,” says Dr Hoelscher. “So when this study came out there was a lot of interest in it. Member States used it as a reference for developing their National Action Plans.”
The study showed that the financial situation of parents’, the different aspects of children's living conditions such as health, education, accommodation, mobility, access to services have a strong effect on children. Growing up in poverty affects children’s cognitive development and their ability to succeed in their adult life, and this leads to the so-called “inter-generational transmission of poverty”.
However, children cope better and develop more healthily in surroundings where measure are taken to increase their families’ financial resources through bringing parents into work that pays and through cash transfers, policies aim to reduce the families’ expenses by subsidising childcare, making decent housing affordable and ensuring quality healthcare and policies focus on prevention and on the well-being of children by ensuring an inclusive education, strengthening family and social relations and developing child protection services. Countries with high level of social expenditure on families and children have considerably lower poverty rates than those countries with lower expenditures on social protection. Cash transfers and social protection thus have a significant impact on the extent of child poverty.
The report emphasised that reducing child poverty requires an explicit and integrated strategy encompassing of child, family and women-friendly policies that:
• Make children and families in general, and child poverty in particular, a political priority.
• Secure and increase the financial resources of families.
• Enhance the child development and well-being.
• Include the most vulnerable.
“There have been some quite significant developments regarding child poverty over the last three years since the report was published (in 2004),” says Dr Hoelscher. “The European Commission has been increasingly placing priority on child poverty through the Social Inclusion Process. There were also milestones made at the Luxembourg Presidency Conference on Taking Forward the EU Social Inclusion Process in 2005, calling for child mainstreaming across all policy areas and for better indicators to measure child well-being.
The EU Social Protection Social Inclusion Process > Good Practice Article
Following this, the European Union has set up a special task force to develop indicators for child well being and will publish a report on it in September. Dr Hoelscher adds that the March 2006 Conclusions of the European Council of Ministers called on member states to rapidly and significantly reduce child poverty. According to her, “A prerequisite for the eradication of child poverty is that it is acknowledged as a problem and made a political priority and that the rights of children are recognised. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) sets a framework for the development, implementation and monitoring of
child-related policies.”
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