Verity Johnson: Blaming the reckless is lazy

I would happily permanently wear a condom on my head if it meant that everyone everywhere had access to safe, non-judgemental sexual health and support services. Photo / iStock

Only middle class people know how to have sex, right?

Everyone knows that the instructions for proper procreation are written on the back of chia seed tubs. They're called Super Foods for a reason.

I'm joking. Although, if you listened to some of the public debate sparked by the social development minister recently, you might think otherwise.

A couple of weeks ago, Anne Tolley announced the need to heavily promote contraception for women with too many children in care. It was a statement made in response to the recent surfacing of a number of terrible child neglect cases. These were tragic, terrible and inexcusable. But very quickly, the language of the debate segued into traditional stereotypes of irresponsible parents who had too many children, sponged off benefits and ... insert generic prejudice here.

And there it was again: the ugly, un-erasable idea that poor people are irresponsible. Those silly poor people, we say, if only they knew how to use condoms.

Now, I am not against promoting contraception. I would happily permanently wear a condom on my head if it meant that everyone everywhere had access to safe, non-judgemental sexual health and support services.

What I hate is the patronising, dismissive assumption of the "reckless poor". We have to have a more nuanced understanding of why there is a correlation of larger families and those designated "high risk" by the Government. (In the New Zealand General Social Survey in 2010, families with 6-plus children make up 19 per cent of the high
risk category, and only 7 per cent of the low risk category.)

Our favourite way of explaining issues to do with poverty is to blame the poor for their situation. There's even a psychological label for it. Psychologists call it Fundamental Attribution Error, where we assume that someone's negative behaviour is a result of their personal nature not external situations. (He failed a test? He's thick.) It's also entirely coincidental that when the situation happens to those who aren't poor, we are much more willing to embrace more reasonable situational explanations. (I failed. I'm not dumb - I was just feeling sick.) We also like to blindly repeat the meritocracy myth; anyone can get anywhere in New Zealand if they try hard enough! (A classic example of a nice but fundamentally misguided idea - like Marxism and black milk bottles.) This helps us reassure ourselves that the individual is to blame.

And so we keep trotting it out the "individual is to blame" response when we're explaining anything the poor do. They are unemployed because they are lazy. They live off the benefits because they're spongers. They have kids to claim benefits ... because they are spongers, because they are lazy, because they're simple, selfish people, because they're not actually people at all, because they're actually just lumps of plasticine with neck tattoos.

You can see why we like it. Not only is it an easy answer, it stops us having to examine any alternatives. And the alternatives are difficult, scary and expensive.

The alternative explanation is to look at the underlying social structures that make someone the way they are. The alternative is to say maybe the poor aren't reckless, irresponsible peasants. Maybe, just maybe, growing up in poverty is to be trapped in a system that makes decisions for you.

Now, I know I'm so middle class that everything about me, from my opinions to my organs, comes in a jam jar with a sprig of mint. I don't understand the social structures of poverty. I can't explain why poor mothers have large families. But there is a developing body of research that tackles the influence of poverty on family size. For instance, according to a 2006 Australian survey of homeless mothers, many of them saw having children as an opportunity to recreate themselves and seek a better life. Similar studies found that these mothers find having children gives them a sense of pride, enrichment, purpose and direction in life. Kids seem to be something for poor women to live for. And what about the differences in social messages we send rich and poor women? We tell one group - if you need to, then have an abortion! We tell the other - well ... we don't tell them anything. They've largely been written-off.

The point of those examples is to highlight just a few ways in which the structures of poverty could create big families or young births. We need to start thinking about these issues from this perspective. Blaming the reckless individual is just lazy. It's not going to solve anything.