Introduction

In recent years interest has grown in the concept of social harm as a form of social enquiry that can provide accurate and systematic analyses of injury in late capitalist societies (see Hillyard et al, 2004; Pemberton, 2015). A key concern of this approach has been to contextualise harm and to consider the forms of injury that have the greatest social impact. In doing so, it has sought to build a more sophisticated picture of the lived reality of injury focusing, for example, on the interrelated nature of harm, its social patterning, and how harms accumulate across the life course from the ‘cradle to the grave’. One of the principal motivations driving this work is to foreground structural harms within social science analysis, to understand the varied ways that the organisation of societies serves to injuriously compromise human flourishing.

Poverty constitutes one of the most significant forms of harm in contemporary Britain in terms of its scale and severity. According to the PSE method, one quarter of citizens in the United Kingdom are poor (see the Introduction) and are therefore likely to experience increased vulnerability to a range of injuries: reduced life expectancy (see also Thomas et al, 2010); life-limiting illnesses (Chapter 8); lower levels of educational achievement (Bradshaw, 2002) and so on. The point is, poverty as a condition deleteriously impacts physical well-being, desired forms of human flourishing, social participation and the formation of meaningful relationships, as well as providing a context in which related harms are experienced. Yet it is seldom that social science analyses consider the injuries of poverty in the round. Rather, focus tends to fall on the discrete aspects of harm. However, without a fully articulated concept of harm, the lived realities of poverty, the limits that poverty imposes on individuals, and how it shapes individuals’ responses to the circumstances in which they find themselves, can only be partially understood.

This chapter investigates poverty as both a structural outcome and a process; as a harmful state and a generative context in which related harms are experienced. Moreover, poverty is viewed as a ‘structural symptom’ of capitalist societies where the underlying organisation of these societies serves to maldistribute resources and respect in equal measure.