The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Spanish children face worsening poverty amid crisis Posted: 01 Jun 2014 09:15 PM PDT But after his hours were slashed and his income halved two years ago, the family has slipped dangerously towards a life of destitution in their tiny flat in Vallecas, a working class neighbourhood in southern Madrid. The couple is facing eviction for not paying their rent for over a year and relies on food banks to feed their children. When it rains, Martin keeps her children at home instead of having them walk one hour to school because they cannot afford the bus fare. "If I don't have a snack to send with them I pretend I forgot to prepare it," the 30-year-old said as her son, aged seven, and two daughters, aged eight and 10, played in a playground near their home. "They don't say anything but it's very hard," she added, her eyes swelling with tears. "I try to make the difficult situation they are living as easy to take as possible." Six years after a massive property boom went bust, wiping out millions of jobs, Spain is facing a sharp rise in child poverty as government spending cuts and sky-high unemployment take their toll. The number of children at risk of poverty in the country has jumped by half a million since 2007, before the start of the economic crisis, to 2.5 million, according to a study by Spanish children's charity Educo. Schools are facing the brunt of the rise in child poverty. At the San Pedro and San Felices school in Burgos in northern Spain, a Catholic charter school, teachers say more children are coming to class without having showered because the water has been turned off at home due to unpaid bills, the school's director, Father Modesto Diez, said. "They lack electricity and water at home, they live in deficient housing, their basic needs are not met. They come to class badly dressed and without eating properly," he said. Tensions are rising as a result. Children's charities say the economic downturn has caused cases of child abuse to soar. A nationwide youth hotline run by the Anar Foundation on Tuesday reported a "worrying" rise in the number of calls it received last year from children suffering physical or psychological abuse at home. "We believe one of the reasons for this increase in abuse is unemployment and the economic difficulties faced by families, which heightens tensions and increases aggression in families," the group's programme director, Benjamin Ballesteros, told a news conference. Many parents cannot afford to pay for textbooks and have pulled their children out of the school's canteen service, which provides a hot lunch every day for a monthly fee of 102 euros. Over 100 children used the service last year. Only 25 are signed up this year, of which 10 are having their fees covered by Educo. On a recent visit over half the tables in the canteen were empty at lunchtime. A group of 22 pupils, aged four to 11, were clustered on five tables in a corner as they quietly finished eating a lunch of baked fish, rice, peeled pears and milk. Many children now go home at lunchtime "and eat whatever is available," Diez said as he surveyed the empty canteen. Spain's unemployment rate of almost 26%, combined with a drop in salaries and sharp government spending cuts to social programmes has led to a dramatic reversal in living standards, he said. "It's like in the 50s and 60s, when families had to make do with the income that they had, they worked long hours for low pay," he said. "We are talking about middle class people, couples where both were working because construction employed a lot of people. They had two salaries of a 1,000 euros, 1,200 euros a month. That has been reduced to no salary at all in many cases." Educo, which had focused on developing nations like El Salvador and India, said it launched its school lunch subsidy programme in Spain in September after it became aware that more and more Spanish children were surviving on a diet of just rice, potatoes and bread. "These are the 'new poor'. They are people who until now did not need aid and now they do," said Pepa Domingo, Educo's director of social programmes. "It's very distressing." – AFP, June 2, 2014. |
| The soothing role of World Cup fever Posted: 01 Jun 2014 06:07 PM PDT A growing body of scholars see football playing an under-appreciated role as keeper of society's well-being – providing a sense of identity with an almost religious role. The late Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once said that football is more important than "life and death". But Pele's "Beautiful Game" may also be providing a healthy outlet for tribalistic aggression. "It provides you with an opportunity to side with your country without being violent to another. So in that way it does replace war," said David Ranc, a French sociologist who specialises in group identity in football. "It is a non-violent way of resolving conflict... and taking sides where there is not that much at stake." Ahead of the June 12 start to the World Cup, fans are kitting themselves out with wigs, T-shirts, boas and other regalia, and rehearsing the lyrics to patriotic anthems. All is intended to put up a united national front either at home or in Brazil. Rather than mere nationalistic zeal, the behaviour may be symptomatic of a deeply entrenched desire to belong, the experts said. "Identification with a sports team can provide people with an important identity prop... a sense of belonging in what would otherwise be an isolated existence," according to Eric Dunning, a sports sociologist with the University of Leicester. "It can help to give people a sense of continuity and purpose in contexts which are highly impersonal and beset by what many experience as a bewildering pace of change." For some, this can even take on religious overtones. "The fans of a football team form a community of believers that is characterised by distinctively religious forms of behaviour," sports sociologist Gunter Gebauer of the Free University of Berlin told AFP. It is not uncommon for fans to turn their bedrooms into football shrines, and "the saints are their team's players, for whom they will make harrowing pilgrimages". Dunning added that sport may have replaced some of the functions once performed by religion. "It may in part be catering for a type of need which, for increasing numbers of people, is not met elsewhere in the increasingly secular and scientific societies of our age," he writes in his book "Sport Matters". Despite high emotions, deep hostility to rival teams and the often crushing disappointment that comes with defeat, football matches, overall, are unifying social events, the experts said. Apart, that is, from outbursts of fan violence which they argue are rare given the huge numbers who watch games around the world every day. In fact, sports like football developed at pace with civilisation and "came to embody the elimination of some forms of physical violence and the general demand that participants should exercise stricter self-control in regard to physical contact," Dunning said. Added Ranc, hooliganism is more a function of social inequality than a product of sports rivalry. "When you study violence in football, it has to do with people who are losing ground socially... people who are marginalised, ostracised, described as an underclass. It has a lot to do with the social climate." Football allows people from different social and economic spheres to meet and bond around a common passion, experts said. And one of the things that binds them is the sport's perceived ability to create heroes like Pele, Portugal star Ronaldo and Argentina's Messi, from nothing. "The stories told in sports are not pure fantasies; individuals who were previously powerless really are elevated, they really do win fame and fortune by their own strength and are thereby allowed to play a role in society that is otherwise closed off to them," said Gebauer. These factors all contribute to the sport's popularity. But there is also the speed and skill on display, the excitement it generates, the fact that football is easy to play almost anywhere, does not require specialised equipment, and has relatively simple rules. "Of course, other sports possess some of the characteristics listed here, but arguably only football has them all," according to Dunning. – AFP/Relaxnews, June 2, 2014. |
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