Are Britain’s children really the most deprived in Europe?
Albi Furlan assesses the findings of the report condemning the state of child welfare in Britain
UNICEF has released a report based on research between 1979 and 1999 to assess the quality of life for children in the top 21 developed countries in the world. The UK came 21st.
The report - named ‘An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries’ - was signed by professor Jonathan Bradshaw, head of University of York’s Social Science Department.
The research divides rankings into six major categories: material well-being, health and safety, educational well-being, family and peer relationships, behaviours and risks and subjective well-being. Drawing an average from these categories, Britain comes last, beneath the US (20th), Hungary (19th) and Austria (18th).
At the top of the chart come the Scandinavian countries - Denmark in 3rd place, Sweden in 2nd and the Netherlands taking the gold medal. Since its publication, Children’s groups have turned on the government, demanding action be taken immediately.
The government has claimed that the data is not up-to-date, with the most recent statistics taken eight years ago.
Whether or not the figures are valid now, the findings suggest that British children are the worst behaved, most at risk, and have the worst family relationships in the developed world. Currently, sixteen percent of young people aged 11 to 15 are living in single parent families, and about 15% are in stepfamilies. 13% smoke a cigarette once a week, and 31% report being drunk more than twice. Drug consumption is also high: 35% of young people have smoked cannabis at least once in the past year.
The UK also has high rates of teenage obesity, and almost 40% of under 15s having had sexual intercourse at least once (70% with a condom). That Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies is no new discovery. Most worryingly, children in the UK also came second-to-last in the ‘subjective well-being category’; that is, how well-off, healthy and happy they felt themselves to be.
On the up side, the English youth have decent rates of vaccination, health care and a high percentage eat breakfast. The number of families without an employed parent is low, under 8%. The laziest young people, according to the report, were the French.
The claim of the Labour government that the findings are out of date are based on the premise that, since data stops at 1999, it does not take into consideration eight years of welfare polices. “There are now 700,000 fewer children living in relative poverty than in 1998-99, and we have halved the number of children living in absolute poverty” according to a spokeswoman, who stressed that the problem of child poverty is a central concern for the government.
These claims have not stemmed criticism from academics and child support groups, who claim that eight years is not a significant enough period of time to turn around twenty years of what Professor Bradshaw terms “the relative neglect of children, mainly by the Thatcher government, which trebled poverty rates and grossly increased inequalities.”
The government has also neglected to mention how many children have been left in poverty, even if 700,000 have been removed from it. Whatever the government claims about the validity of the findings, this report certainly provides food for thought. The concept the children of Britain, a country of abounding prosperity, could the most deprived in the world is a sobering one indeed.
Laura
We, at End Child Poverty, thought that the report gave significant wake up call for us all about the place of children in our society. Do you want the Government to invest more money in this country’s children? Visit www.endchildpoverty.org.uk and join our many supporters in sending a message to the Government to urge them to do just that.