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One of the most effective advocates for children was also one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language: Charles Dickens. Physicians seeking an understanding of what poverty and exploitation look like from a child's point of view could hardly find richer sources of insight than such Dickens novels as I Oliver Twist i , I David Copperfield i , I Bleak House i and I Little Dorrit i . The educational worth of Dickens' works is undiminished by time, and it has even been suggested that works such as I Oliver Twist i could serve today as a textbook of child abuse [[10]]. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the work of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) in assessing applications for children's admission to care in the late nineteenth‐century. It is based on an archive study of records kept by the ‘Waifs and Strays’ Society in England and Wales between 1882 and 1899, in particular 270 family assessments conducted by the COS. The focus was on parental behaviour rather than children's needs, with a strong narrative of taking children away to relieve parents of a burden. The research illuminates contested assumptions about childhood in the period, with resonance for current issues in policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: During the past decade, the incomes of poor Americans have fallen or flat‐lined, housing costs have soared and public policy has failed to bridge the gap. As a result, the majority of poor renting families in America now devote at least half of their income to covering housing costs, and eviction has become a common yet consequential event in their lives. While housing is central to the lives of the urban poor, it remains marginal to the sociology of American inequality. This essay begins by charting the growing rent burden among low‐income households, and then draws on the unique contributions of Pierre Bourdieu to the study of the home to sketch an agenda for analyzing the roots and implications of the loss of affordable urban housing, a prerequisite for offering policy prescriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the influence of social welfare and tax policies on rates of chronic and transient poverty in the United States for the full population and subgroups. I use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (n = 10,210) over a recent 11-year time frame (1998-2008), with individuals categorized as poor using the Supplemental Poverty Measure. Results show that including government transfers in family resources reduces the overall transient poverty rate by more than one-sixth and the chronic poverty rate by nearly four-fifths, with a greater influence on the chronic rate in part because some individuals shift from chronic into transient poverty. Income and payroll tax liabilities have negligible influence on poverty rates net of tax credits. Medical expenses are largely associated with an increase in the transient poverty rate. Results imply that there is value to examining the effects of social policy on poverty from more than just the traditional cross-sectional perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article talks about the history of poorhouses in counties of Kansas as the centerpiece for relief for the poor locals. Topics discussed include the concept of a poor farm originating in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century legal and social traditions such as the English Poor Law of 1601, creation of workhouses for able-bodied poor in 1697, and the English law of 1788 that established almshouses for the sick, aged and women and children unable to work.

In 1909, the Mexico City Department of Public Works installed two crematory ovens in the capital's municipal cemetery, the Panteon de Dolores, in culmination of a late nineteenth-century campaign by officials that advocated cremation as a modern and hygienic form of burial for all Mexicans. In practice, all classes rejected cremation and only the very poor were cremated. This essay examines the arguments for and against cremation and the implementation and daily practice surrounding cremation in Mexico City from the 1870s-1920. The establishment of cremation was part of the Porfirian project to modernize and sanitize Mexico that targeted the poor as an obstacle to progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policy toward the poor has shifted from an initial optimism during the War on Poverty to an ever-increasing pessimism. Media discussion of poverty has shifted from arguments that focus on the structural causes of poverty or the social costs of having large numbers of poor to portrayals of the poor as cheaters and chiselers and of welfare programs doing more harm than good. As the frames have shifted, policies have followed. We demonstrate these trends with new indicators of the depth of poverty, the generosity of the government response, and media framing of the poor for the period of 1960-2008. We present a simple statistical model that explains poverty spending by the severity of the problem, gross domestic product, and media coverage. We then create a new measure of the relative generosity of U.S. government policy toward the poor and show that it is highly related to the content of newspaper stories. The portrayal of the poor as either deserving or lazy drives public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]