Punishing The Poor – Children Edition
December 12th, 2009 by SocProf and tagged Health, Health Care, Poverty, Public Policy, Social Inequalities, Social Institutions, Social Sanctions, Social Stigma, Sociology, Symbolic Violence
For those of you who remember my review of – and multiple posts on – Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing The Poor, this will seem a perfect illustration. As you remember, Wacquant’s thesis is that the neoliberal state, as it loses power on the economic and social fronts as a result of neoliberal policies it embraced, reasserts itself by punishing the poor, through prisonfare for men, and workfare for women. But what of the children?
Here is the answer (via Lambert over at Corrente):
So, shall we add “drugfare” after prisonfare and workfare? It’s a trifecta. Also, in addition to material punishment, the poor often have to endure a variety of indignities that are part of the symbolic violence they receive as well, such as being blamed and stigmatized for a variety of conditions deemed to be the results of their lack of self-control and a general “too much” attitude: too much sex, too much violence, and too much food…
That is in the context where children living in poverty are more likely to be on food stamps and therefore less likely to receive a healthy diet.
Of course, another important structural part of the story is the American health care system which makes it cheaper to prescribe drugs than use other forms of therapy along with the fact that a lot of doctors do not accept Medicaid patients. The options are severely limited. I would also bet that poor children are more likely to be labeled and diagnosed with psychiatric disorders and seen as disruptive. So, that works well with the idea of poor as a category of people whose behavior has to be controlled and normalized (middle class white norms, that is).
Poverty as socially constructed and engineered deviance and therefore legitimate target for various forms of social control is what it is.
Posted in Health, Health Care, Poverty, Public Policy, Social Deviance, Social Disadvantages, Social Inequalities, Social Institutions, Social Sanctions, Social Stigma, Sociology, Symbolic Violence | No Comments »
