I wouldn’t ordinarily rely on AI to provide the content for an article about poverty, but I recently decided to set it a task. I asked a popular commercial AI tool to generate an image of a stereotypically “poor looking street in the UK” A problematic prompt on many levels, I know, but it was an experiment.
I did not expect the image it generated above; a quiet street, some rather streamlined houses and, for some reason, what appears to be an independent business here on the right. I do not want to overanalyse the image, but it does not fit the mental model I have of what a stereotypically “poor looking” street in the UK might look like. Perhaps the more pressing issue is that I hold such a mental model to begin with, no doubt based on places I have navigated both personally and professionally.
I’ll not describe the image that I had expected it to generate, because doing so would probably reinforce the very assumptions I often aim to challenge. However, when I asked the AI tool to then use words to describe how it would represent a “poor-looking” British street, it offered this familiar but frustrating list of cues…
“From an AI perspective, a stereotypically “poor-looking” UK street would usually be represented through visual cues learned from media, photography and online datasets, such as rows of ageing terraced houses; peeling paint, damp-stained brickwork and poorly maintained roofs; boarded-up shops or vacant units; litter, fly-tipping and broken street furniture; neglected pavements; few trees or green spaces; older vehicles parked tightly along the road; security shutters, betting shops, takeaways and discount stores; and an overall sense that public and private spaces have received little investment”
I could point towards evidence suggesting there is some truth within parts of this picture. North Easterners know only too well that poverty and underinvestment can, of course, leave visible marks on buildings, infrastructure and public places across our region. However, I do not think it is particularly helpful to spend too long testing whether the AI produced an accurate stereotype. Instead, I wonder about the extent to which our own attempts to illustrate, show and tell stories about poverty might be similarly problematic.
‘Poverty porning’ the North East
Some readers may have come across the term poverty porn. It is an ugly and deliberately provocative phrase and, we have seen examples of it here in the North East. The earliest clearly identifiable roots of the term appear to lie in Colombia during the late 1970s. Filmmakers Ospina and Mayolo used the Spanish word ‘pornomiseria’ literally meaning “misery pornography” while making their 1970s satirical film Vampires of Poverty. Their work attacked filmmakers who turned images of street children, homelessness and inequality into commercially attractive material for overseas television audiences and film festivals.
A few years later, the journalist Jørgen Lissner criticised fundraising images of starving African children as a form of “social pornography”, arguing that they publicly exposed suffering without sufficient agency or context. He didn’t use the exact phrase poverty porn, but the principle here is that other people’s hardship was being packaged, consumed and used to manufacture a particular emotional response. In my view, this is something that isn’t only limited to the work of charities or reporters.
I often describe poverty porn as the use of images, statistics and personal stories of hardship to construct a narrative that may be undignified, overly simplistic or actively harmful to the people and communities supposedly being represented. I would like to think that no school, charity, public body, organisation or elected official would intentionally engage in it. However, during my time across education and charity sectors, I have seen examples that have made me uncomfortable:
- A school minibus tour for new teachers around the “tough estate” served by the school, pointing out the difficult corners of the community, explaining how hard life is for children there and offering observations such as, “You wouldn’t want to walk around here by yourself.”
- The media interview with a single parent in their home, asking them to describe how difficult life is locally without giving a clear explanation of the eventual story, its intended reach or the support that will be provided once the reporter and camera crew have left.
- The charity leader standing on a conference stage and sharing increasingly harrowing statistics about the community they serve, until disadvantage begins to sound like a competition in which “my area is tougher than your area”.
I have likely been guilty of aspects of this myself. I do not say that for performative self-criticism, but because it is much easier to notice harmful storytelling when we imagine it is something done only by other people. However, over time and experience I have learned that some things land better, create deeper understanding and offer more dignity than others. With that in mind, I want to pose three provocations about how NOT to represent poverty in the places that we serve, navigate and exist here in the North East.
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Describe the region as the epicentre of poverty
I primarily serve communities across the Tees Valley. There are a plethora of datasets showing that parts of the region that experience some of the highest levels of child poverty in the North East and, on some measures, across the UK. I don’t ever want to hide or brush over these hard facts, but I do want to provide nuance and caveats. There is also evidence showing that the Tees Valley has major global industries and economic growth on its doorstep, that it is an area forged by innovators and that its communities possess relationships, histories and strengths that cannot be seen in a poverty percentage. Both of these realities can exist at once.
When we tell an audience that this ‘place’ or region has “some of the highest rates of poverty in the country”, what exactly are we trying to achieve? I would suggest that, even when we do not mean to, we might be:
- Ignoring the fact that poverty can, at times, be deeply relative and that empirically speaking it is found across every region in the UK.
- Making the North East appear harder or more complex than other communities
- Seeking significant investment by emphasising the scale of local hardship (there is a place for this in funding applications, but perhaps not public events!)
- Demonstrating that us North Easterners work in highly challenging circumstances, perhaps conveniently setting up the next slide on the impact we’re leading in the region
- Creating a kind of organisational credibility from the poverty experienced by others (look at us and the part of the North East we serve and exist in)
- Reinforcing the idea that the region itself is somehow deficient, rather than examining the systems and structures that have produced inequality
I understand some of this and do not believe it is always misinformed or malicious. There are occasions when fierce data is needed here in the North East to secure attention, investment and action. However, there is also a danger that we reinforce stereotypes, mental models and assumptions about an area until they become the only story people know about it. I am not challenging us to avoid the word poverty, nor am I suggesting that we hide the scale of inequality. In fact, I would argue that refusing to name poverty can be equally harmful, particularly when softer language allows structural injustice to disappear from view. However, a few things can help.
- Contextualise our Northern narrative: Be clear about the dataset being used, what it measures and the particular lens it gives us on some of the problems faced by a community. Poverty statistics are important, but they do not provide a complete biography of the place that we call the North East.
- Call out the caveats: Outline limitations and variations within the figures. A local authority percentage will rarely tell us how poverty is experienced differently across neighbourhoods, families or groups of children. In this feature with the Sutton Trust, for example, I attempt to explain that the Tees Valley is also an area with significant opportunity, even if some of that opportunity may be invisible, inaccessible or unequally distributed to those facing inequality.
- Attack the myth: When presenting evidence of hardship, we must be careful not to imply that the statistics are the fault of those living within the community. Instead, we should use evidence to challenge lazy rhetoric and misinformation about low-income families. For example, around two-thirds of children living in poverty in the Tees Valley are in working families, meaning that at least one adult in the household is in employment. I am therefore often quick to remind audiences that simply tackling economic inactivity is not a silver bullet for child poverty.
- What’s the point? As a general rule it is important to ask why the data is being shared by you or somebody else. Are we using the figure to deepen understanding, provoke action and challenge injustice, or are we using it to make ourselves, our organisation or our intervention appear more impressive? Those intentions may sometimes overlap, but we should at least be honest enough to examine them.
Take others on a poverty safari of the North East
I probably facilitated these tours because I had previously been a tourist on them over the trajectory of my different careers. New colleagues in schools would be loaded into a minibus and driven around the local estate while somebody who had served the area for many years narrated how difficult it was and how challenging life could be for families. I am sure it was well intentioned; the aim was usually to help colleagues understand the community they were about to serve.
However, I do not remember anybody explaining how issues such as the two-child benefit limit, insecure work, low pay, inadequate housing or failures in public transport could contribute to persistent poverty in our region. What I remember are vivid images of discarded tyres, fly-tipping, derelict ship yards and children either swearing or waving (it was not entirely clear!) at the minibus as a Deputy Headteacher drove around at speed before ticking a box to confirm that I had completed part of my induction. We had seen the community, but I am not sure we had understood it.
I am not steering people away from getting visible exposure to the places they serve. In fact, I think leaders, teachers, policymakers and charity professionals need to spend more time outside offices and conference rooms, listening to people and understanding the spaces in which policies and interventions are actually experienced. There may be some value in having conversations about an area from a passenger window. However, I am asking that we approach this with dignity and recognise the difference between learning with a community and looking at one.
One of our ongoing questions when delivering presentations through our place-based work at Tees Valley Education, offering evidence to policymakers or speaking at conferences is this…
If a child or family member from one of our schools or projects were sitting in this room, what would they think about the way we are communicating inequality and need in the places they live and exist?
There are some practical questions that can help in design and delivery too whether you are speaking about poverty, inducting staff or simply writing about the region:
- To what extent are children and families given opportunities to share stories about the places they occupy, rather than simply being asked to confirm the stories professionals have already written?
- To what extent is information about an area scripted, reviewed or tested with others who live, work and serve within that very community or place?
- To what extent are we stress-testing our language for stigma, assumption and misinformation on the North East?
- Are we presenting a street, estate or neighbourhood as though its visible environment tells us everything we need to know about the people living there?
- Are we describing poverty, or are we describing what we personally imagine poverty should look like?
Datasets rarely offer us a complete or forensic understanding of inequality, but neither do photographs of neglected buildings, visual tours of estates or isolated stories of hardship. We must be careful about using these images to assert need, and equally careful about assuming need from what we think we can see or perhaps what we want to see because it helps tell the story we’ve constructed.
Northern instinct
I continue to hear ill-informed rhetoric and unsubstantiated claims about low-income families across multiple sectors, and this sometimes extending into political and policy circles. Phrases like…
- Unemployed “scroungers” are claiming benefits rather than choosing to work
- Children from low income homes lack aspiration here in the region
- Families do not value education or appreciate what schools are trying to do
- Parents will simply be handed £20,000 when the two-child limit is removed
- Poverty is the consequence of poor individual money choices in our region
- It’s tougher up in the North East than any other part of the country, so many kids and families lack hope
Evidence repeatedly tells us that these claims are simplistic, misinformed or simply wrong. Yet they persist because they are emotionally satisfying, politically useful and easy to repeat. Perhaps the greatest risk is that, once repeated often enough, an assumption begins to sound like evidence.
This piece from the Big Issue is useful for outlining some of the lazy storytelling that sits around benefits culture in the UK. Many tabloid newspapers blasted ‘BENEFITS STREET’ after the chancellor announced her autumn budget last year. This was a reference to the Channel 4 show, released a decade ago, which promoted nasty stereotypes about benefit claimants and is sometimes held as an example of ‘poverty porn’. As noted by the Big Issues, this lazy rhetoric was back after the budget announcement because the government confirmed an end to the two-child limit on benefits, which evidence tells us was the most cost-effective way to lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty (despite what some political parties would have you believe)
When talking about poverty, we need to maintain respect, dignity and care. When attempting to show poverty through images, statistics, stories or descriptions of place, this matters even more. The story we help to tell can be the difference between illustrating lived realities and reinforcing harmful myths and misconceptions. Those misconceptions rarely remain inside a conference presentation, minibus tour or funding application; they travel into boardrooms, corridors, classrooms and everyday conversations with the very people whose professional role is to understand and respond to need. I find these five questions useful when considering how to frame contextual need:
- What are the main challenges facing children and young people from low-income backgrounds in our region and in their community?
- How are these challenges experienced differently by different groups, including by ethnicity, age, gender, and disability? (amongst other factors)
- Why am I sharing this context, and what is my intention in presenting the information with others in our beyond the North East?
- Who will hear this account, and what do I expect them to think, feel or do as a result? Where do I think they might take this information?
- If a child, young person, parent or carer were sitting in the room, what might they say about the way I had described their life and community? (Even better, where possible, we should ask them in advance)
People facing poverty and hardship may stop making plans, not because they lack aspiration, but because planning can start to feel fragile or even pointless when so much of what happens next is beyond their control. In the North East, sometimes I see this insecurity repackaged by policy makers and community leaders as something supposedly wrong with people or places. A lack of aspiration, ambition or simply because young people lack what privileged folk like to sometimes frame as ‘cultural capital’. As though children in Middlesbrough, Newcastle. Gateshead or former mining communities across County Durham simply need to want more, travel further or dream bigger. I am increasingly uncomfortable with that argument because poverty can erode expectation and weaken a person’s sense that they have any real control over what comes next. That is very different from having no ambition for yourself or your family.
Poverty does not simply reduce the money coming into a household if you live in the North East. It can narrow opportunity, make planning harder and reduce the choices people feel able to make. We all have a role in making sure poverty is not pushed out of sight, particularly in a region where too many families continue to experience it. But we also have a responsibility to make sure the picture we present is clear, contextualised and dignified. That means resisting the temptation to isolate North Eastern communities to a spreadsheet, a deprivation ranking or the passenger seat of a minibus. You cannot understand a street in Byker, a family in Middlesbrough, a former pit village in County Durham or a coastal community in East Cleveland simply by driving through it and deciding what you have seen. The North East deserves better than that and the bairns who call it home are worth a hell of a lot more.
