Abstract
Scheff (2000, 2003) has argued that shame, while recognised as a social emotion, is frequently explored outside of the social matrix and with limited reference to its role in human behaviour. Drawing on empirical qualitative research with adults living in poverty in the UK, this article illuminates a) how the co-construction of shame (feeling shame and being shamed) is fundamental in framing how people living in poverty respond to the social demands on them; and b) how shame as a phenomenon may also take on a dynamic of its own, ultimately used by those feeling shame to distance themselves from the socially constructed and denigrated ‘Other’ (Lister, 2004). The article shifts the analysis beyond shame arising from a threat to the immediate ‘social bond’ (Lewis, 1971), instead presenting it as a social fact which not only undermines human dignity but risks the atomisation of modern society.
Introduction
Shame, along with embarrassment, pride and guilt, is widely understood as a ‘self-conscious’ rather than a basic emotion such as anger or fear. Essentially it entails a negative assessment of the self made with reference to one’s own aspirations and the perceived expectations of others, and is manifested as a sense of powerlessness and feeling small (Tangney et al., 2007). While the literature on human psychology has engaged extensively with shame as a social emotion (Gilbert, 1998; Miller, 2006; Tangney and Fischer, 1995; Tracy et al., 2007), it has arguably tended to explore its dynamics outside of the social matrix (Scheff, 2000, 2003).
This said, within the literature exploring the social dynamics of poverty, the intersection between shame and poverty has increasingly become the subject of important analysis and policy discourse (Jones and Novak, 1999; Lister, 2004; Tomlinson et al., 2008). Indeed, as early as the late 18th century, Adam Smith (1776) spoke of the essential requirements of a linen shirt and leather shoes for a man to be able to live without shame in society. The inability to procure the material goods which denote the contemporary symbols of success have continued to be recognised as having detrimental social consequences (Lister, 2004); and Sen defines shame as a universal attribute of poverty (cited in Alkire, 2002: 185).
Building on the work of Lewis (1971), Scheff (2003: 255) offers a sociological definition of shame conducive to the psychosocial analysis of poverty as follows:
Shame is the large family of emotions that includes many cognates and variants, most notably embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, and related feelings such as shyness that originate in threats to the social bond. This definition integrates self (emotional reactions) and society (the social bond).
Importantly, such a definition allows for an examination of what Scheff considers the frequent allusions to the emotion of shame even when it remains unnamed. There is, he argues, a certain ‘taboo’ surrounding the word ‘shame’ – a word in English which has strength in connotation perhaps not always matched in other languages (Walker, forthcoming). Parallels can thus be drawn with the implicit but not labelled ‘shame’ in Adler’s inferiority complex; in Cooley’s notion of self monitoring (1922) – imagining how we are assessed in the eyes of others and feeling either pride or shame; and in Goffman’s (1967) notion of ‘saving face’.
Drawing on an analysis of interviews with adults living in poverty in the UK, this article extends Scheff’s (2000, 2003) study of the impact of shame on social bonds to consider its more pervasive role in undermining social solidarity. The overriding focus here is on how shame is almost always co-constructed – combining an internal judgement of one’s own inabilities; an anticipated assessment of how one will be judged by others; and the actual verbal or symbolic gestures of others who consider, or are deemed to consider, themselves to be socially and/or morally superior to the person sensing shame.
It begins by presenting poverty as a meta arena for the emergence of shame, especially in contemporary British society where success is largely measured according to the attainment of economic goals. Access to this dominant social world is through material consumption and not having the resources for such consumption leads to social retreat and, ultimately, reduced social capital. These processes are further exacerbated by the sense of disempowerment induced by shame itself, generating feelings of inability, lack of agency or control and culminating in a sense of being controlled and dehumanised by the systems and structures which govern access to social and material resources.
The article goes on to illustrate the different arenas within which shame is co-constructed and how people living in poverty are acutely aware of its potential emergence in every social interaction (Goffman, 1963). In response, they often attempt to avoid shame at all costs, by withdrawing from social interactions which might expose their hardship and pretending that they are coping when they are not. Such strategies are hazardous since people risk having their financial inadequacies revealed and, through their withdrawal, risk fundamentally compromising their social connections.
Extending this analysis, the article then illuminates a further strategy employed to retain a level of dignity and respect by people living in poverty. This entails defining a stratified social structure within which a clear distinction is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘them’ looking up the hierarchy are those with power and influence who remain ignorant of, and insensitive to, the circumstances of ‘us’ facing hardship – indeed ‘they look down on us’. The ‘them’ looking down the hierarchy is the classified ‘Other’ (Lister, 2004), those who are less worthy and of lower status to ‘us’. Such categorisation, a protective response to the ubiquity of poverty-induced shame, it is argued, not only fragments the social bonds in the immediate milieu, but threatens social solidarity more broadly and adds further pressure towards the atomisation of modern society.
Methodology
Using the national Indices of Deprivation for England 2007 (Communities and Local Government, 2008), two research sites were selected within the two most deprived deciles and geographically situated in the south east of England. Within these sites, participants were accessed via a range of community-based advice and children’s centres.
In-depth interviews were held with a total of 42 adults (11 men and 31 women) between April and October 2011. All adult participants had between one and seven dependent children (average of 2.1). Participants were selected as eligible to participate in the research if they lived within the defined geographical area and fulfilled the criteria of a) having dependent children; and b) having ever been in receipt of one or more benefits (including job seekers allowance, JSA; income support, IS; employment and support allowance, ESA – previously defined as incapacity benefit IB).
The research was promoted under the title of ‘Coping with Hard Times’, deliberately avoiding any direct reference to the word ‘poverty’ so as not to alienate potential participants (see for example, Hooper et al., 2007). Interviews were inductive, allowing interviewees to lead the discussion in relation to a range of key topic areas, beginning with a broad prompt such as ‘tell me a bit about your current situation’. Using a series of subsequent open-ended questions to guide the discussion at appropriate points, participants were asked about: their current financial situation; the types of difficulties (if any) they were facing; the types of strategies they employed to mitigate economic hardship; the sources and types of support (if any) they felt they had access to; the extent to which those not facing economic hardship understood the difficulties they might be facing; how the circumstances of people on low incomes were presented in the media and in policy discourses; and what could be done to better support people facing economic hardship. Background data on demographic profiles, household composition, approximate household income, employment status and housing tenure were gathered from adults using a simple supplementary questionnaire employed at the end of each interview.
The research design received ethical approval from both departmental (Social Policy and Intervention) and inter-departmental research ethics committees at the University of Oxford. All interviews were recorded using a digital recorder, with the prior permission of research participants, and transcribed. A thematic analysis was conducted of all transcripts.
Experiences of Hardship
With a few exceptions, the terms ‘poor’ or ‘poverty’ were rarely used by participants (Flaherty, 2008). Instead allusions to current or past financial hardship were made via a range of words and analogies such as; ‘struggling’, ‘it’s really hard’, ‘nightmare’, ‘going round and round in circles’, ‘struggling to keep head above water’, ‘scuppered’, ‘stuck in a rut’, ‘scrimp, save, borrow, beg and steal’, ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ and ‘battering your head against the wall’.
At the time of interview, approximately 10 per cent of respondents were in full or part-time employment; the remainder were in receipt of one or more welfare benefits. Almost all adults interviewed described having to make tough decisions on a daily basis over whether to pay bills or provide food and clothing for children. Several spoke of having a shortage of food in the house, having to go to food banks (local church organisations offering non-perishable foods and assistance with debt management), or having to ask family or friends for food or money. Several people lived in over-crowded conditions, were temporarily homeless or were forced to occupy poor quality housing which had a detrimental impact on their own health and that of their children.
While some people had known such hardship most of their lives, others reflected on changing circumstances which meant that they had encountered poverty for the first time. Divorce, separation or bereavement left some women and men in severe economic circumstances, often with limited work opportunities conducive to their caring responsibilities. Others had faced redundancy, or had had to stop working due to illness or disability, resulting in a significant reduction in household income. Mike,
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for example, had previously spent seven years working in a local factory. After the death of his wife, he was forced to leave his job to take care of his one-year-old disabled daughter, a change which had a profound impact on his circumstances:
But once I lost my job, I just couldn’t possibly make ends meet. I was just getting deeper and deeper in debt and, in the end, I just had to stop paying them (debts), because I couldn’t do it. I’d never been in this situation and I just didn’t really grasp the sort of bare bones of it, you know … like how much you have to struggle.
These personal struggles were more generally framed by a consensus that within the present economic climate (viewed as a result of a combination of the recession and the austerity measures brought in by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government) everyone was finding things ‘tougher’ than in the previous few years. Rising food and fuel (gas and electricity) prices, increased Value Added Tax (VAT), limited work opportunities, ‘exorbitant’ bus fares and rises in the general cost of living all exacerbated daily struggles to ‘make ends meet’.
Shame as a Co-constructed Emotion
Either integral to their descriptions of poverty, or in response to further prompting about how their stricken circumstances made them ‘feel’, allusions to shame were pervasive in people’s accounts of their lives. Yet in keeping with the analysis that shame often goes unnamed (Lynd, 1958; Scheff, 2000), is coded (Retzinger, 1995), and may in fact be ‘taboo’ (Scheff, 2003: 240), rather than verbalising ‘shame’, most participants instead used a range of words and terms synonymous with the concept. Hence, ‘awkward’, ‘embarrassed’, ‘guilty’, ‘rotten’, ‘degraded’, ‘crap’, ‘useless’, ‘worthless’, a failure’, ‘uncomfortable’, ‘funny’, and ‘dirty’, were all used to convey how people felt about themselves or were made to feel in certain social interactions.
These terms, what we might refer to as the colloquialisms of shame (expressions or ‘verbal cues’, Retzinger, 1995: 1107, which denote the emotion but do not actually name it), constituted the body of language through which people described the psychological impact of failing to meet certain goals or expectations set by themselves or society. Importantly, while the psychological literature draws a robust theoretical distinction between ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ (Lewis, 1971; Tangney et al., 2007; Tracy et al., 2007) – the former associated with a negative evaluation of the global self over which one has little or no control; the latter with an internal negative assessment of certain behaviour which is controllable or could have been avoided – research participants employed the terms largely interchangeably. The effects of a sense of failure or rejection, irrespective of the emotion described were, nonetheless, the same (Scheff, 2000, 2003). In keeping with other research, people’s narratives often revealed significant self-criticism of their abilities to cope financially, despite evidence to the contrary of their extensive efforts to carefully manage scarce resources (Batty and Flint, 2010; Flint, 2010; Hooper et al., 2007).
However, participants did make an important distinction between their own personal sense of inadequacy and a perceived negative assessment of them by others as a result of their economic and social status. The colloquialisms of shame were thus used in a slightly different way to describe how the media and those with power and status generated, or attempted to generate, feelings of failure and insignificance. The verbal and non verbal signals of others’ disapproval were variably listed as, ‘looking down on’, ‘turn their nose up’, ‘judge’, ‘think we’re all the same’, ‘don’t get to know you’, ‘treat (or look at) you like shit’, ‘prey on people like us’, ‘exploit people like us’. Some people described attracting multiple social stigmas by virtue of their circumstances, such as being a young single mother, being a recipient of benefits and living on a particular (housing) ‘estate’.
Arenas for the Construction of Shame
This symbiotic relationship between feeling shame and being shamed was prominent in participants’ narratives and illustrated with reference to many different arenas in which they felt ‘awkward’ or ‘embarrassed’ as a result of their poverty at one end of the spectrum, and ‘worthless’, ‘a failure’ and ‘crap’ at the other. Indeed, the first hints of such awkwardness emerged in the course of the interviews when participants frequently lowered their voices when talking about sensitive issues such as being out of work, being on benefits, being a single mother, or having no money. Various other bodily signals associated with feelings of shame were also intermittently observed by the researcher, including gaze aversion, head down or a slumped posture (Dickerson et al., 2004; Gilbert, 1998; Tangney et al., 2007).
Shame and the Family
Many participants reflected on how family support often made the difference between ‘keeping your head above water’ or sinking. Christine, for example, spoke of how her mother provided food for herself and two children several times a week when she didn’t have, ‘what you would call a decent meal to give them’. However, such support sometimes became the locus of shame as various participants spoke of a heightened uneasiness with having to resort to family help. This ‘awkwardness’ for Hilda, for example, stemmed from the fact that, ‘I am a mum now myself and I should not have to go to my mum all the time just for a pint of milk or a loaf of bread’; and for Tina because, ‘Obviously it was my choice to have the children, and probably not being able to afford them is a horrible feeling.’
For Greg, such feelings were tied to the expectations he had of himself as a man. His dependence on his partner for ‘the food in my belly’, he said, made him feel ‘like shit … I’m the man of this relationship. I am meant to be the man … to take care of the missus and my kids. And I don’t, and I hate feeling like I do with myself because of it.’
Iterations of ‘feeling guilty’, ‘feeling rotten’, ‘awkward’, ‘useless’, ‘letting myself down’ or ‘ashamed’ were common in relation to how participants viewed their inability to provide for children (see Hooper et al., 2007). Equally, most parents felt conscious of the level of awareness their children had about the degree of hardship that they were facing. Tina repeated with ‘guilt’, the words of her five-year-old daughter, ‘mummy when you’ve got enough pennies in your purse can I start doing ballet again?’ Similarly, Jenny described her ‘guilt’ at having emptied her son’s savings account to pay off debts when, ‘I had the bailiffs threatening’. She had, she said, pretended to him that the money was safely put away for when he was older, when in truth there was nothing left.
Similarly, there were numerous other descriptions of the painful public exposure of straitened circumstances with respect to children. Having to watch other children on the housing estate eat ice cream and not be able to buy one for their own children, having to apply for a hardship fund to pay for a child’s school trip, or being unable to meet the demands of children for sweets when out shopping all had the same detrimental impact of instilling a sense of failure as parents.
Shame in Social Interactions
Everyday social encounters were equally spaces within which participants were prone to feelings of failure or rejection. Tony’s account of feeling ‘pretty worthless’, for example, centred on a recent incident where he had no money to buy the subsidised breakfast for himself and his four-year-old daughter at the Saturday morning fathers’ group. On that occasion, someone else in the group had bought them a bacon sandwich. While he considered this to be ‘quite a sweet’ gesture, it made him feel painfully inadequate and he concluded the anecdote with, ‘yeah, poverty stinks’.
A lack of money also frequently impacted on the ability to maintain appearances, which in turn damaged confidence and self-esteem and meant that people constantly anticipated feeling shame in social contexts (Goffman, 1963). Jessica’s embarrassment stemmed from having become ‘a second hand Rose’, everything she wore, she said, was passed down to her from friends. One of Trevor’s main anxieties was the anticipated shame of others finding him unable to keep his flat looking and smelling nice. He worried, he said, that he could no longer afford polish and constantly had to look at whether he had enough money on the electric meter before he could switch on the Hoover. For Tony, it was his inability to have a haircut which, he said, made him look and feel ‘like crap’ whenever he looked in the mirror. Sonia feared that if she put her two sons in second-hand clothes or cheap trainers and football boots they would be teased or bullied at school.
Others found that when they had fewer resources, they experienced a process of being socially ostracised. Debbie referred to the silent disapproval people had of her once she no longer had money and started to receive benefits, ‘they never say anything but it’s the way they stop asking you out and the way they don’t visit you like they used to’. Equally, there was a spatial dimension to how people felt they were perceived and viewed by others. Certain housing estates, for example, were associated with social or moral deficiencies such as places of high unemployment, high rates of young motherhood, crime or drug use. Karen commented, ‘they class these as benefits estates you know? … full of down and outs. And I’m like, “I’m no down and out and I’m living there.”’
Borrowing money was frequently cited as a means of meeting the constant pressure of social and family expectations (Hamilton, 2012). Stuart, for example had been invited, with his two daughters, to accompany a friend on a free holiday. Despite his best efforts, he had not managed to save the money for the hidden costs of the trip (travel, food and spending money) and predicted that he would have to take out a loan to manage, something he had to do at least once a year to ‘cover one thing or another’.
The consequent debt accrued to banks, social funds, credit card companies, mail order catalogues and personal loan companies generated a further source of shame. So too did being unable to keep up electricity and gas payments and having to succumb to asking neighbours or family members to store food in fridges or provide cooking facilities. More broadly, interviewees felt the generalised stigma of being in debt and felt judged as profligate or incompetent when, on the contrary, they had only been trying to meet the day-to-day demands of raising a family (Hooper et al., 2007).
Shame in Interactions with Bureaucracy
A significant factor determining participants’ likelihood of feeling or anticipating shame was whether or not they were working; indeed, interviewees described being constantly judged in relation to their work history. This finding is in keeping with our other analysis of the views held by the general public about people on low incomes (Chase and Walker, forthcoming). Unsurprisingly therefore, feeling degraded, looked down on, judged and not listened to were ubiquitous in people’s accounts of their interactions with welfare institutions. With a few exceptions, where particular benefits advisors were described as helpful and supportive, these encounters were typically depicted as frustrating and soul destroying. Being treated as a group, or ‘just a number’; having to explain circumstances over and over again to different people; having to constantly complete forms; being made to feel small or like a ‘sponger’; and not having previous employment records recognised, were repeatedly given as examples of how the process of claiming benefits became dehumanising. Sonia, for example, commented:
If you check my work record, you can see that I haven’t always claimed benefits … and I just thought ‘if you checked that, you wouldn’t make me feel so bad about sitting here’.
The media portrayal of the archetypal ‘benefit family’, with numerous children and making large demands on taxpayers’ money, was one which participants were acutely aware of. They saw this stereotype as a target for derision and criticism and often felt that they too were ‘tarred with the same brush’. Interviewees frequently commented on how the media generated clichéd portrayals of housing estate residents, associating them with criminality, dysfunction and indolence (Golding and Middleton, 1992; Lister, 2004; McKendrick et al., 2008). Mike, for example, commented, ‘there’s a stigma attached to it. You know … living on a council estate, being on benefits … it’s like the image portrayed in the media and stuff – you’re this kind of asbo-hoodie.’
The unfairness and insensitivity of these assertions was referred to by many participants who felt misunderstood and blamed for situations beyond their control. Trevor, for example, had recently had his disability living allowance (DLA) stopped following a health assessment and commented:
… it comes across in theory as scroungers on the dole, or on the DLA, you know … ‘I can’t get enough money on the dole so I’ll go on the sick’ … Again it’s a stigma … it makes you feel like scrounging … I’m not scrounging … I’m asking for what I put into the system.
Others commented on the fact that besides being dehumanising, the benefits system was becoming increasingly punitive. While participants were not in principle opposed to an evident ‘crackdown’ on ‘others’ said to be exploiting the system, they did feel that they often unfairly bore the brunt of such institutionalised shaming. Hayley had a four-year-old attending school part time and a four month-old baby. She resented, she said, the fact that she still had to attend ‘back to work’ reviews when in reality employment was not, for the foreseeable future, a viable option. Some people described being forced to participate in obligatory back to work courses which were perceived as a ‘waste of time’, serving little or no practical purpose in terms of helping them find work. The threatened sanction for not attending such courses, however, was reportedly a cut in benefits such as JSA, one which several people interviewed had experienced.
A range of other bureaucratic structures such as schools, housing providers, banks or loan companies were described as settings within which people described feeling subjected to shame. Many described being bombarded by threatening letters and phone calls from debt collectors and bailiffs and being forced to hide away to avoid the public denouement of their circumstances. Others spoke of how they anticipated and often ‘dreaded’ the disapproval they would face in their interactions with certain organisations and services. Jenny, for instance predicted a forthcoming meeting with the head teacher of her son’s primary school:
The headmistress, she’s got a little tick box and she’s like, ‘well, she lives on A (name) Road, that ticks her off as one bad parent; she’s a single mother; she doesn’t have a job. Well we can clearly see that she’s got emotional problems and she’s struggling. Son’s got behavioural problems’ … so when I go to that meeting, she’s there thinking, ‘oh my God, it’s just another one of those mothers’, and she couldn’t give two monkeys about what I’m saying.
Responses to Poverty-induced Shame
Grappling with Pride
Throughout the course of the research, participants frequently engaged with the notion of ‘pride’ in sharp juxtaposition to their allusions to shame. The need to preserve pride became a reason for not asking for help or assistance no matter how hard things became. Susie was a support worker in a children’s centre, working alongside health visitors and other professionals who were earning a lot more than her. She explained why she hid the fact from her colleagues that she was struggling financially:
Because that would make me the same person that I’m trying to help. That’s what I was there for, I was part of the support network for someone else. And if I let my guard down – how could they help me? What, go to a food bank? Have you ever been to a food bank? Your name goes down on a piece of paper. I don’t like the thought of me being on pieces of paper that I’m hard up.
Pride was also frequently expressed in relation to having a strong work ethic, having a good previous history of working, or bringing up children in particular ways – for example making sure they had access to a range of activities, learning opportunities, and were fully engaged in their education. Others spoke of the pride that came from working, even when there was no or limited financial gain. Indeed, in the absence of paid work opportunities, some people had taken up volunteer jobs in order to access what they saw as the social benefits of being in a work environment, such as the camaraderie they experienced or the kudos of being seen to be ‘making a contribution’ to society.
Yet for many, jeopardising pride to a greater or lesser extent became an inevitable part of getting by. Pride thus became something that you had to ‘swallow’, ‘lose’ or ‘bury’ in order to maintain a family or simply survive. Stuart reflected on how it felt to ask for food handouts through the church and commented, ‘It’s not a thing we like to do but … if you can’t swallow your pride, then forget it.’
Withdrawal and Pretence
Having limited resources was commonly described as a reason for consciously withdrawing from certain social situations. Not having money to buy anything to wear to a wedding or to afford a gift, not being able to buy a round of drinks in the pub, or having nothing smart to wear to go out on a date with a new partner, were variably described as obstacles to engaging socially. Many spoke of how they would like to get out more often, to relax with friends and to socialise, but avoided social situations which highlighted their limited resources. This left them feeling isolated and socially ostracised. And when times were hard, Sonia said she wondered what the point was in socialising anyway:
Sometimes there ain’t no point in socialising, ’cos what are you going to talk about? Your bills? Your debt? So, yes, that does make you withdraw I suppose … there’s nothing to talk about except that you feel a bit depressed, you haven’t got enough money to pay that bill or eat that day.
Within social situations, finding ways to conceal financial hardship or the fact that they were in receipt of benefits was a strategy commonly identified by participants. Mike, for instance, commented:
On the rare occasions that I go out, if I meet someone and I’m chatting to them and that, I don’t really say, ‘I’m on the dole’, I just parrot fashion my last job. I just say, ‘Yeah I work in the factory’. It’s a pretty faceless job anyway. So yeah, I suppose there’s probably a little bit of shame in there somewhere. It’s that you’re a bit embarrassed that you’re not working, you know.
Rosemary described how she stoically always gave the impression that everything was fine, even when she was really struggling. Both Gary and Teresa spoke of avoiding sharing information about where they lived, anticipating that certain negative assumptions would be made about them if they did. Sonia went on to describe how she disguised the fact that she was on income support:
I don’t like people knowing I am on benefits. If I didn’t know you, I’d tell you I worked. I class this as a proper job (working as a volunteer), that’s why I wear the identity badge that way (back to front) so no one sees that I’m volunteering … so it looks like I’m doing a proper job.
Loss of Agency and Control
While in practice it was difficult to disentangle the impact of financial hardship itself from the associated feelings of low self-worth on people’s sense of agency, a number of participants described how day-to-day financial struggles, and the worry and anxiety they caused, frequently led to a sense of powerlessness and a degree of physical as well as psychological disintegration. Karen said that money worries made her physically sick; Jessica attributed her hair loss and psoriasis in large part to the financial stresses she was under; and Deva felt that the same stress had been a contributing factor to his recent heart attack.
Embedded in participants’ narratives was a sense that poverty was inextricably linked to a persistent sense of failure in measuring up to social norms and expectations. Such feelings were compounded for some by an inability to command control over their lives and often complex circumstances. Tony spoke of his inability to deal with the daily economic strife he faced, commenting, ‘I don’t manage. I just get very depressed.’ And Mike, who had two weeks previously started medication for depression commented, ‘it’s like a cloud over you almost, you know … because there’s no possibility of me changing – ’cos I can’t go out to work because of her (daughter’s) medical needs.’
Several people reported how they had contemplated or attempted suicide as a result of not seeing a way out of their current circumstances (Tangney et al., 2007). Jessica reasoned that she was so troubled by her financial situation prior to accessing the help she needed that, ‘I was going to give my life up because of the debt and stuff’. Similarly, Julie, spoke of how the financial situation combined with a relationship breakdown and the strain of coping alone with two sons, one of them with learning difficulties, had led to a suicide attempt, ‘I got so depressed and couldn’t cope with the situation and money and everything else that was going on … it was just too much’.
The Emergence of the ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ Discourse
There was a strikingly common reference to ‘them’ as compared to ‘us’ in people’s narratives. Essentially, the ‘them’, in the first instance, referred to people with power and money, considered far removed from the circumstances of research participants. They had ‘no idea’ or ‘no clue’ about how much they were struggling and, it was felt, would have ‘no chance’ surviving on such limited resources. This ‘them’ and ‘us’ discourse laid the basis for a social stratification within which participants positioned themselves and others. While the ‘us’ shared an understanding of their difficulties, were ‘in the same boat’, and would help when they could, the ‘them’ would not. Deva commented, ‘Only the poor people help the poor people because they understand how difficult it is.’ And to some extent this shared connection between ‘us’ helped mitigate the impact of shame. Christine, for example, spoke of how she frequently had to ask a neighbour for help when she ran out of toilet roll half way through the week and had no money to buy more. Though embarrassing on one level, she said, she knew that she was equally likely to be asked for tea bags or a cup of sugar as the week went on and her neighbours were struggling to make ends meet.
Yet, the ‘them’ and ‘us’ categorisation was also used to distinguish the ‘us’ from another ‘them’, positioned lower down the social hierarchy from ‘us’. What emerged, therefore, was a complex process of social positioning (Dahrendorf, 1959) where others were classified as inferior to oneself according to certain comparative criteria, those who were working and those not working; those who had previously worked and those with a more chequered work history; those with one or two children and those with large families; people who were considered ‘citizens’ and others who were viewed as ‘outsiders’.
Typically, for example, people who were working but still hard up saw themselves as having a strong ‘work ethic’ and a track record of previous work. This gave them a moral trump and enabled them to distance themselves from those they considered to be ‘happy’ not working or ‘not bothered about’ claiming benefits. And this same tendency of ‘Othering’ (Lister, 2004) was mirrored among those who were not working and claiming benefits. While participants desperately wanted to distance themselves from the archetypal benefit claimant portrayed through the media, they often identified others who they felt fed such stereotypes and hence became critical of others (Batty and Flint, 2010). Teresa’s assertions, for example, typify this view:
I’m not a scrounger, I’m just in a difficult situation. Why should I be looked on as a scrounger? I’m not, I’m educated and it’s just that I can’t get a job. There are those … I’m not going to lie … I do know some who are capable of working and they choose not to. Those guys make me angry … Yeah I do see where the tabloids get that from because there are people who are like that. You know, girls who will just keep having kids because they refuse to go to work. It’s not that they’re taking care of their children, they look on their children as a burden but they’re getting benefits because of the kids. So tabloids have got it half right, but we’re not all like that, not all of us.
And equally, people defended their position of being on benefits and not finding work by focusing on immigrant workers who they claimed, ‘have taken all the jobs and housing’. Aida neatly summarised this process by signalling with her hands a hierarchy of classifications (used by her synonymously with class) which she had observed:
With all these things it’s about class … they classify you that you’re on benefit, they classify you down there … if you’re working part time, you come a bit … one level up. If now I go full time, like now I want to go to university, they give me a place, I’d be there (at a higher level).
While on the one hand examples of self-deprecation abounded in participants’ narratives (Batty and Flint, 2010; Flint, 2010), on the other, there was an apparent need to salvage elements of social and moral standing by positioning themselves at a distance from the socially constructed and archetypal ‘Other’ – the uncaring benefit recipient unwilling to work for a living. This ‘projected shaming’ – shame imposed on others who do not meet an acceptable standard of attitudes and/or behaviour paralleling our own – arguably helps mitigate any shame or anticipated shame which people living in poverty are prone to experience themselves. At the same time, however, this process works against fostering social solidarity among people in shared difficult circumstances and, instead, divides the ‘us’ into multiple ‘others’.
Discussion
Emotions of pride, dignity, embarrassment, awkwardness, shame and guilt were intertwined in complex ways in people’s narratives, terms such as shame and guilt frequently used interchangeably and shame often alluded to without being named as such, signifying perhaps the ‘taboo’ of shame (Scheff, 2003). These complexities aside, a coherent thread ran through the narratives – people facing economic hardship frequently suffered interactions with others in family, social and institutional settings in which they were made to feel inferior and unworthy. The triggers for these emotions were both internal and external. They were borne out of a sense of failure in meeting self-imposed expectations such as to progress along certain work or education trajectories, provide or care for others, or remain independent of institutionalised welfare support. Equally, these emotions were socially constructed via a complex array of norms and values which dictated people’s worth largely in relation to economic goals.
Each of the participants described how events had construed to make it increasingly difficult for them to provide for themselves and their families. Some had become ill, some had acquired disabilities, others had experienced redundancy, separation or divorce, others still had taken on caring responsibilities which made working an unrealistic option for the foreseeable future. Yet despite these different trajectories, the majority of people felt an acute sense of being ‘tarred with the same brush’. They felt the intensely dehumanising effect of being treated, by the media, the general public, by politicians and by the welfare institutions they entered, as a homogenous category of people who were ‘not bothered’, ‘spongers’, ‘scroungers’ or ‘benefit bums’. Such shame and disdain were used as forms of moral tools which accentuated people’s sense of deficiency, and undermined core emotions of dignity, pride, self-esteem and confidence.
There were numerous occasions where interviewees variably described avoiding social situations which risked exposing their lack of resources; pretending that they were coping better than they were; making out they were working when they were in receipt of benefits; and not admitting to needing help because it would mean a loss of pride or face (Goffman, 1967). Such responses led to temporary withdrawal, hiding or pretence at one end of the spectrum, to attempted suicide and permanent social withdrawal at the other, ultimately demonstrating the potential of poverty-related shame to eliminate those who feel unable to measure up to the normative expectations of society.
Equally, such feelings were evoked by dominant cultural norms and values and the essentially regulative (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1977) discourses generated by contemporary British society. Participants repeatedly alluded to certain prevailing ‘truths’ which governed the attitudes and behaviour of the general public towards them. These ‘truths’ were seen to be played out within the media, public, political and policy discourses. A central tenet of such ‘truths’ saw poverty as a direct result of people not working, with welfare benefits being the main source of income. Thus poverty was reported as having become intrinsically associated with those on benefits, who were ‘work shy’, ‘scroungers’ or ‘can’t be bothered’ and who were responsible for raising families into, and hence perpetuating, poverty.
In the early 1970s Sir Keith Joseph, the then Secretary of State for Social Services in the UK, spoke of a ‘cycle of transmitted deprivation’, poverty which was passed on from one generation to the next. This notion, insinuating a moral deficit on the part of those living in poverty, mirrored the work of sociologists such as Oscar Lewis in the USA (1969) who had coined the term, ‘culture of poverty’. From the late 1980s, similar assertions were taken up under the growing discourse in the UK, propagated by Charles Murray (2001), of the ‘underclass’– a section of society who lacked aspirations, had no work ethic nor any sense of shared responsibility to contribute to society. While, over time, the language has become tempered – the ‘hard to reach’, the ‘problem family’, and the contemporary ‘troubled’ or ‘multiple problem family’ (Hooper et al., 2007) – the underlying assumption remains; that there is a residual core of people living in poverty largely of their own making, and that they inculcate a ‘value system’ which is transferred from one generation to the next.
Throughout the research, participants repeatedly indicated how they were acutely aware of these representations of the individual, rather than structural, causes of poverty. Indeed, they appeared so powerful that, although they held no explanation for interviewees’ own circumstances, they seemed to provide an account for how the ‘them’ (those people down the social hierarchy) had ended up in poverty. Hence, the imperative for participants to distance themselves from the stereotypical welfare recipient, responsible for their own lot and inculcated so firmly in the public psyche. Indeed, almost everyone we spoke with at some point in their narrative sought to ensure that they were not perceived as ‘one of them’.
This co-construction of shame, the internal sense of inadequacy combined with the externally imposed disapproval for failing to live up to society’s expectations, appears to have potent ramifications. The dominant public, policy and media discourses described above serve ultimately to differentiate those deemed as socially deserving of support from those who are undeserving – social constructs surrounding poverty that have been sustained for centuries and certainly since the introduction of the Elizabethan poor laws. The more insidious effects of such discourses are observed, however, via the social divisions and hierarchies that begin to emerge as individuals strive to distance themselves from the socially constructed ‘undeserving’ recipient of welfare – inextricably linked in the public perception to the person in poverty.
Hence there was evidence of shame being a dynamic, cyclical process which raises important questions about its role in society. If one feels shamed, is one bound to feel the need to shame others? Almost all adult participants in the study identified other individuals or groups who they categorised as having a lower social or moral status than themselves. Young mothers who continued to have babies allegedly to access housing and benefit payments; people who claimed benefits and worked illegally; the ‘foreigners’ or ‘asylum seekers’ who usurped available work opportunities by accepting lower than average pay or had apparently easier access to housing and accommodation than ‘local’ people. Thus, to some extent others provided an alibi for one’s own circumstances and served to deflect or lessen the sense of internal shame
Conclusion
Previous research exploring the place of shame in society has highlighted the taboos surrounding it (Scheff, 2003); its ubiquitous yet unnamed presence (Lynd, 1958; Retzinger, 1995); its role alongside pride as a premier social emotion (Scheff, 2000); and its implicit recognition in concepts such as Adler’s inferiority complex and Goffman’s (1967) ‘saving face’. The shame of poverty and its injurious impact on self-esteem and sense of worth has equally been documented elsewhere (Lister, 2004) and participants in this research have clearly borne testament to it. Shame – whether felt or anticipated – epitomises the threat to any social bond between a person and their social environment. This research suggests that when the context of such interactions is poverty, and particularly in a society where consumerism is increasingly seen as the mark of success, the potential for shame is perhaps limitless.
The research further suggests, however, that shame in the context of poverty can possibly have an even more destructive impact on social solidarity. Here we have seen how the dominant portrayals of those living in poverty in the UK, and especially those who are welfare recipients, are deeply derisive. By striving to distance themselves from these humiliating and negative constructions of ‘the poor’, people appear to enter into processes of ‘othering’ through which they can vindicate themselves as valid social beings. While the power of such ‘othering’ towards people living in poverty has previously been articulated by Lister (2004), what emerges in this analysis is the strength of its ripple effect – people who sense being defined as the ‘Other’ appear to distance themselves from the label by passing it to ‘others’. Poverty-induced shame undoubtedly undermines human dignity and for that reason alone warrants further analysis. Perhaps more importantly, however, it demands our attention because of its power not only to divide communities along the lines of ‘ them’ and ‘us’ but to generate a fragmented ‘us’, hence adding further pressure towards the atomisation of modern society.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, the authors would like to express their sincere thanks to all the research participants for their support to this research and for sharing their experiences with us. We would also like to acknowledge our colleagues within the international study from which this article was drawn: Grace Bantebya, Sohail Choudhry, Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, Erika Gubrium, Jo Yongmie, Ivar Lødemel, Sony Pellissery, Leemamol Mathew, Amon Mwiine, Yan Ming. Finally, we express our sincere thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council and the Department for International Development that funded the project.