Drishti Dhawan

In the words of Marco Rubio,

“The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.”

Before coming onto the dilemmatic relationship between social problems and poverty we should know the true meaning of poverty. Talking about the definition of poverty different people have different meanings of poverty or the state of being poor.

The World Bank Organization describes poverty in this way as “Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time.”

We have all know that the poor need to make better choices – working hard at jobs, get married, use contraceptives and not have more children. If they did all this, they wouldn’t be poor. But what we don’t know are the factors creating hindrances in their way of not making better and optimum choices

This is an instance of a simplistic view toward the complex social phenomenon. It is minimizing the impact of a societal issue caused by structure every level labour market and societal conditions – on individuals’ behaviour. Such claims also ignore a large body of sociological science.

If one believes that poverty is related to historical and environmental events and not just to an individual, we should be careful about blaming the poor for their fates.

Victim blaming occurs when the victim of a crime or any wrongful act is held fully or partially responsible for the harm that befell them. It is a common psychological and societal phenomenon. Victimology has shown that humans have a tendency to perceive victims at least partially responsible. This is true even in rape cases, where there is a considerable tendency to blame victims and is true particularly if the victim and perpetrator know each other.

All our lives could be improved if we considered the structural influences as root causes of social problems such as poverty and inequality. Perhaps then, we could more easily agree on solutions.

In fact, poverty and other social miseries are in large part due to social structure, which is how society functions at a every level. Some issues of society, such as racism, sexism and segregation, constantly cause disparities in education, employment and income for marginalized groups. The majority group naturally has a head start, relative to groups that deal with a wide range of societal barriers on a daily basis.