Two Hundred Thousand People in the UK Have Been Assaulted for Being on Welfare

A few headlines that don't seem pro-welfare. Photo via Facebook

Welfare recipients tend to have a pretty hard time. In 1989, 60 percent of the British population agreed that the government should spend more on welfare; in 2011, support had dropped to below 30 percent, and it looks set to continue plummeting. Is this part of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy—the lasting impact of an ideology that encouraged us all to compete and regard those at the bottom as lazy and feckless? Or is it a symptom of tabloid demonizing, and of shows like Gypsies on Benefits & Proud, which are essentially those headlines stretched out into primetime programming?

Whatever the reason, things aren’t looking good. A report published on Tuesday found that nearly a million people living on welfare have been abused because of their financial situation, with more than 200,000 claiming to have been physically attacked. Responding to the report on Twitter, one user wrote that her husband had been called a lazy cripple for being on welfare; another claimed to have been called a scrounger while out in a wheelchair.

I called Katharine Sacks-Jones, head of policy and campaigns at Crisis UK—and spokesperson for the campaign group Who Benefits?, which commissioned the report—for her take on its results.

Katharine Sacks-Jones

VICE: Were you shocked about what you found out from this survey?
Katharine Sacks-Jones: We were shocked, but we sadly weren’t surprised. We’ve heard these kinds of stories before—people facing discrimination and abuse—and we wanted to look into it further with the research. What we found was pretty horrific. Hundreds of thousands of people were telling us they’d faced discrimination—they’d faced verbal abuse and, in some cases, physical abuse as well. And it’s not even just them—people are telling us that their children are being bullied at school.

Did the respondents specifically say that they were attacked because they were collecting benefits?
Yes, that’s exactly what we asked. It wasn’t just, "Is this something that’s happened to you coincidentally?" It was asking, "Do you face any abuse as a result of being on benefits?" So, on the discrimination front, what people told us was that they struggle to access housing because landlords often won’t rent to people on welfare. You may have seen "no DSS" on the ads for housing—DSS is an old term for Department of Social Security, but some people still use that on the ads. It’s nothing to do with people not being able to pay the rent; it’s just discrimination, plain and simple.

That's presumably got to make people feel marginalized.
Lots of people talked about how it made them feel—how they were made to feel like the "dregs of society," in one woman’s words. For most people, needing support from benefits can be quite demoralizing, and to have that compounded by feeling that people are looking at you in a certain way and making judgments about you, and that slipping over into discrimination and abuse, just makes the situation worse for people.

One woman told us that she’d had to flee from an abusive partner with her children, had needed housing assistance, got it, and really welcomed the support and benefits. But she couldn’t find a landlord who would rent to her because so many people—landlords and real estate agents—turned her away simply because she was in receipt of benefits, even if she could pay the rent. One 62-year-old man suffering from a heart condition and a lung condition, who's unable to work, says he’s been verbally abused and shouted at in the street.

Yeah, I read about people being victim to that kind of thing.
Since we’ve launched the report, many people have shared similar stories via social media of being shouted at, being attacked and their children facing bullying just because they collect benefits. One of the women who shared her story on Twitter had a walking stick and said people on the bus had said, ‘You’re obviously putting it on.'

There seems to be a bit of conflicting evidence on this on both sides. One side says attitudes towards benefits claimants have softened in the last few years; the other says attitudes have become gradually more negative since the late 1980s. Which side is right?
There might have been a slight upturn in attitudes in the last survey, but if you look at trends the British Social Attitudes Survey shows people's views getting a lot tougher towards people on welfare. There was a little bit of an upturn in support for people on benefits during the last recession in the late 1990s, but this time people haven’t become more sympathetic.

What do you think has caused that?
I think it’s really complicated to identify what the cause is. There seems to be a kind of vicious circle, which is between public opinion, political dialog and the way the media portrays things. As each one of these toughens over time, they reinforce each other. It’s hard to point out causally what’s happened, but that seems to be the trend we’ve seen in recent decades.

Image via Facebook

What kind of role has the media played?
Some in the media choose to highlight some real extreme examples of welfare recipients, and that has a big impact on where the debate is going. In some of the shock TV programming, and in some news outlets, there does seem to be a trend towards presenting people on very low incomes in a very negative light—so-called "poverty porn." I think that’s a really worrying trend, and we do see that feeding through into people actually facing discrimination and abuse.

It seems you only have to open a newspaper or turn on the TV these days to see some extreme case of someone on welfare. What we never hear is the reality of over 5 million people on welfare who need the support and who are in low paid work, have lost their jobs or have become ill. They just don’t get a hearing at all. Instead, there’s this kind of continual focus on extreme cases in shows like Benefits Street—that’s all we seem to hear.

The truth of the matter—far more mundane, as it is—is that the vast majority of people who need support from benefits are just anyone who’s had a bit of bad luck and need to get back on their feet, or are people who’ve got longer term conditions and need the support in order to live with dignity. It can’t be right that we live in a society where losing your job means you’re shouted at in the street, or being ill meaning that your kids face abuse at school.

Thanks, Katharine.