By Keetie Roelen
“You need a new vacuum cleaner? Can you prove that your current one is really broken?”
This was the response Hanny received from the welfare office in the Dutch city of Tilburg when she asked them for support with replacing her broken appliance. More precisely, it was the response following her second request, after her first appeal was met with the suggestion that she could use a broom to sweep her floors.
The Dutch fragmented welfare system has a myriad of schemes to help with all sorts of different needs, from schoolbooks to bus passes, all with their own eligibility criteria and application processes. Accessing a voucher to replace the faulty vacuum cleaner required Hanny to first convince the welfare officer of the appliance’s necessity before then providing physical proof of its malfunctioning. She had no other option than to drag the broken machine all the way to the municipal office on her bicycle (this is the Netherlands after all!) to plug it in and convince the officer in question that she was telling the truth.
The humiliation didn’t stop there. Hanny was then forced to haul the vacuum cleaner back home with her so she could dispose of it in landfill. A new one was to be collected from the electronics store using a letter that brandished a large logo of the city’s welfare services, preventing any second-guessing among shop assistants and customers behind her in the queue that this was a handout.
In the last three decades, poverty rates have fallen dramatically. In 1994, four in 10 people around the world found themselves in extreme poverty. In 2024, this had dropped to one in 10.
Notwithstanding this impressive achievement, poverty reduction has largely stagnated and remains stuck around the 10 percent mark globally. In some countries, including high-income countries such as the US and UK, poverty has increased. In the US, child poverty nearly tripled between 2021 and 2024, from five to 13 percent. In the UK, child poverty grew by roughly 10 percent in the last 15 years, and one in three children now live in relative poverty.
While poverty rates and the contexts in which they play out are different across country contexts, there is one common denominator in the existence of poverty and the stagnating fight against it: a lack of empathy.
Distrust and suspicion instead of support and compassion
Across the world, many welfare and anti-poverty policies are premised on distrust and suspicion. Instead of offering supportive and compassionate pathways towards improved lives and livelihoods, they have become a means for policing and punishing the poor. Like in Hanny’s case, living in poverty and accessing basic support void of empathy leads to humiliation and shame.
In Zambia, villagers have been presented with their own excrements to shame them away from open defecation, even if there are no alternatives. In the US, the practice of ‘lunch shaming’ involves schools throwing children’s food in the trash or physically marking their arms with the word ‘lunch’ to compel parents to pay up for their children’s lunches. In the Netherlands, the use of algorithms and a lack of checks and balances led to thousands of families being wrongfully accused of benefit fraud, causing their financial ruin and emotional despair.
Recent research we conducted in urban Bangladesh points to territorial stigma, manifesting in discrimination and exclusion routinely experienced by residents of low-income neighbourhoods. When asked about their place of residence, children were denied enrolment in schools in more affluent neighbourhoods. In seeking to apply for identification documents, residents were met with pejorative treatment or received poor services. And those in search of a job were keen to conceal where they lived for fear of being denied employment. These experiences interact with highly politicised, strongly targeted and largely inadequate social protection support.
Not only unfair, but also inefficient
A lack of sufficient and supportive schemes doesn’t merely undermine dignity: it has even proven ineffective in tackling poverty.
Chronic financial insecurity reduces cognitive bandwidth, making it harder to take well-considered decisions. Forcing people to jump through endless hoops to receive support only adds to these cognitive constraints. The stigma and shame associated with having to beg for the basics combined with insidious messaging that people in poverty only have themselves to blame, create insurmountable barriers to proactive participation in school, work, or community. And the way in which people’s voices are systematically overlooked and ignored constitutes an epistemic injustice that leads to policies that don’t respond to what people really need or lift the obstacles they face.
If we want to tackle poverty in a dignified, effective, and lasting manner, I argue in my book The Empathy Fix that we need policies that are rooted in empathy.
Alternatives exist, with evidence pointing to the promise of doing things differently.
Proof for the potential of cash transfers is now widely available, while acknowledging that they are not a silver bullet. Across low- and middle-income countries, cash transfers have been found to improve access to schooling and health services, and even to save lives. Widely held assumptions about reduced labour market participation or misuse of money have been dispelled.
Family-focused area-based interventions offer the unique opportunity to invest in early childhood, support parents, and create a sense of community. Despite having been rolled back considerably, Sure Start in England continues to be praised as a programme that succeeded to support children’s development and foster community integration in the nation’s most deprived areas. An evaluation of a recent cash-plus intervention in Bangladesh that offered neighbourhood-wide support also points to the potential of universally provided community mobilisation, case work and cash benefits.
The common denominator across these interventions? They are premised on empathy.
Rather than imposing top-down solutions and punishing people if they fail to adhere, these policies rely on its beneficiaries to identify their own needs, set priorities, and shape the services that are supposed to serve them. Instead of assuming the worst, they are underpinned by a sense of trust and solidarity.
If we want to move the needle on stagnating poverty rates, we need anti-poverty policies that break rather than reinforce the cycle of blame and shame. For this, we need empathy.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes
Image: Dan Meyers on Unsplash
Keetie Roelen is is a Senior Research Fellow in Poverty and Social Protection and Co-Deputy Director at the Centre for the Study of Global Development (CSGD) in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) at the Open University, UK. She is an Honorary Associate of IDS, Affiliated Researcher of the Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP) at University of Bergen, Norway and Advisory Council member of the Partnership of Economic Inclusion (PEI) at the World Bank.
Jur, thank you very much for your thoughtful comments to my piece.
In response to your point about the examples not being anti-poverty policies, this is well taken. They could be seen as examples of ‘softening’ poverty, or helping people cope with poverty, rather than tackle it. That said, the avoidance of shame and humiliation could be seen (i) as changing the situation of poverty when looking at it from a multidimensional point of view (see Bray et al, 2022) and (ii) a prerequisite for being able to move out of poverty (see Roelen 2020).
In response to Paul Bloom’s objections to empathy, I agree that there are challenging aspects to empathy – such as those outlined by Paul Bloom in his book, as well as issues around in- and out-group dynamics. However, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I suggest to engage with these challenges to ensure we can harness the much-needed benefits of empathy.
I discuss both these issues at length in my book The Empathy Fix, if of interest.
Thanks for your rejoinder and the good points you make, Keetie!
Quite apt!
In all, it’s important to break national and global power asymmetries that considers poor people as objects to be saved based on charities and donations, while keeping and maintaining liberal welfare systems (with little or no decommodification, high stigma and expanding social stratification) that continues to heighten several forms of inequalities.
While agreeing completely with Dr. Roelen that many of the examples she gives of how people in need are treated are truly horrible, I would like to comment on her conclusion: “If we want to move the needle on stagnating poverty rates, we need anti-poverty policies that break rather than reinforce the cycle of blame and shame.” It seems to me that the policies and attitudes she describes are not examples of anti-poverty policies. Anti-poverty policies are policies that aim to eradicate poverty, instead of treating the poor with courtesy and empathy but without getting them out of poverty. No matter how the vacuum cleaner replacement is handled, or whether US kids get ‘lunch’ stamped on their arms or not, it changes nothing about Hanny’s or those kids’ situation. They remain poor.
In his ‘Against Empathy’ (2016), Paul Bloom argues that empathy is precisely what we do not need in order to truly eradicate poverty, since empathy tends to make us focus on near-by, individual examples of poverty (the beggar at the door of the supermarket) without looking at the bigger picture and the structural causes of poverty and acting accordingly. I wonder what Dr. Roelen thinks of Bloom’s ideas.