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Social Exclusion What exactly does 'social exclusion' mean? It seems to have been absorbed into our vocabulary without any clear definition ever having been given, and now nobody wants to admit that they would be hard- pushed to explain it. As far as ARCH can see, it is simply the latest term for describing those problematic 'lower orders' who need to have their lives regulated and organised by somebody else. More seriously, 'social exclusion' is the term used by those working to improve the lives of those in developing countries, to measure the hardship that poverty causes in places where it is endemic. Some people can live in poverty, but have support structures that prevent them from becoming 'socially excluded'; others are isolated, and so the effects of their poverty are far greater. The underlying poverty, though, is taken as given. So why are we using a term that takes poverty for granted when we live in one of the World's wealthiest countries? Why are we allowing so many children to grow up in poverty? Terms like 'social exclusion' subtly shift the responsibility for poverty on to the individual, so that it is seen as a personal rather than a political problem. The implication is that anyone who is poor must work hard to 'include' themselves; the unspoken corollary is that anyone who remains poor obviously hasn't made enough effort. The economist Ethan Capstein calls this 'the founding myth of capitalism'. The UN Human Rights Commission's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education visited the UK in 1999 and had this to say: "The Special Rapporteur suggests that a review should be undertaken of the notion of social exclusion from the human rights perspective, inspired by the advantage that would ensue from a focus on governmental human rights obligations. "The cumulation of different grounds of discrimination, reinforced by class, requires unravelling the causes and contributing factors at the structural rather than at only the individual level. "The Special Rapporteur feels that concepts such as "ethnic minority" (which merges race, colour, ethnicity, provenance, religion, language and social origin) or "social exclusion" (which combines an unpredictable set of phenomena within an unclear conceptual framework) hide more than they reveal." |