The policy briefing summarises the key messages from our initial desk review of existing research looking specifically at the causes of poverty stigma, its impact, and what works to tackle it.
Our Poverty and Social Exclusion review (2022) revealed that tackling stigma is a key priority for people with first-hand experience of poverty. In 2023, we began a programme of work to explore how public services can be supported to understand and address poverty stigma. This has involved reviewing existing research and having conversations with policymakers, practitioners and lived experience experts through a series of workshops. Learning from the workshop series is summarised in a separate report.
The policy briefing summarises the key messages from our initial desk review of existing research looking specifically at the causes of poverty stigma, its impact, and what works to tackle it. It highlights evidence showing that poverty stigma is associated with poor mental health, social isolation, and reduced take-up of benefits and other support services. We briefly discuss the key findings from the briefing below.
Key findings
- Poverty stigma is complex and multi-dimensional, taking place at multiple levels of society, from the interpersonal to the structural.
- For people living in poverty, the stigmatisation of poverty in society can result in feelings of shame, guilt, otherness and inferiority, leading to poor mental health. It can also limit people’s social participation and access to vital services and support.
- Poverty stigma is associated with four aspects of poor mental health: poor self-esteem, social isolation, shame and embarrassment, and mental ill health.
- We identify four key mechanisms through which poverty stigma is generated:
- Stigmatising policy design;
- Support seeking process and services that are bureaucratic, judgmental and/or dehumanising;
- Media and political narratives which stereotype, denigrate and differentiate low-income people, groups or places;
- Wider structural social attitudes and bias.
- Evidence on ‘what works’ to tackle poverty stigma is still emerging but suggests that approaches such as involving people with lived experience in service design, delivery and evaluation, cash transfers and basic income type approaches, media and research campaigns to tackle damaging narratives and discourses, changing the stigmatising language used in support programmes, and cultural competence training may be promising and are worth exploring further.