Chapter 6: Sex and Poverty
(This is Chapter 6 of "Up and Out," a book condensing my long experience about how to best help poor people. I pledged earlier to get it up online as soon as possible, so it would be available for free to everyone trying to cope with helping the Katrina evacuees.)
(These are not things that need to be done during the first part of this emergency. Rather, this is for the time after that, when Katrina evacuees will be moving from getting immediate emergency assistance to trying to normalize their lives. That is when good programs to help them "up and out" of their situation need to kick in. The following is for that time.)
(For other chapters, look under "Categories" on the left and click on the chapter you want.)
"UP AND OUT: A GUIDE TO TRUE COMPASSION FOR THE POOR:
PART I: THE AMERICAN POVERTY TRAP
Chapter 6: Sex and Poverty
More than any other factor, the sex lives of our clients planted them firmly in the ranks of the poor and kept them there. Their sex lives led to immense and lasting distortions of their entire lives.
Once it was thought that the most basic causes, or "most reliable predictors" of poverty were: high levels of unemploymenr, racial discrimination and lack of education. Now it is well known, however, that the most reliable predictor of poverty is fatherlessness. Fatherlessness is what is most likely to make children grow up poor. And since the great majority of the poor are in fatherless families, fatherlessness is also responsible for most of the poverty in America. [1]
For poor adults, the results of sex outside marriage are horrendous. For a majority of unmarried mothers, poverty is the result. Never-married mothers are also poorer as a group than widowed or divorced mothers. [2]
For couples living together without marriage, their lives have more illness, conflict and violence than married couples. A woman is 62 times - that is 6200% - more likely to be beaten by a boyfriend than by a husband! [3] Apparently men respect wives more than they do girlfriends.
Many couples believe that having a "trial marriage," by living together before they marry, will help them have a better marriage and avoid divorce. Many regard it as marriage training.
Surprisingly, it works out just the opposite. Of such couples, 40% will break up without marrying. Those who do marry have divorce rates 50% higher than those who do not live together first. [4] Actually, living together is closer to divorce training! This is one of the factors causing America to have the highest divorce of any Western nation. [5]
For the children, the effects of the dysfunctional sex lives of their parents' is even worse. They lead to situations that are emotionally scarring and even disabling. In fact, their parents' sex lives damage the lives of their children more than any other factor. And more than any other factor, the parents' sex lives cause their children to grow up poor.
A few statistics will show the outline of the picture.
About 1.05 million children a year see their parents divorce. [6] About another 1.26 million are born to never-married mothers, having only one parent from the very beginning. [7]
About 60% of all children, by age 18, will have lived at least part of that time in a household with only one parent. [8] This is the first time in American history that such a calamity has happened. We are just beginning to have an inkling of how bad the results are.
Actually, it is even worse. Of the children who see their parents divorce, half of them will see them divorce again before they reach 18. [9] Still worse, nearly 10% of all children live with neither father nor mother. [10] Instead, they live with a granny, an auntie or a stranger.
The effects of divorce on children are devastating. Not only are they poorer than before the divorce. (Their and their mother's income drops by a third, even with child support. [11] The father's standard of living, however, goes up. [12]) The children also suffer higher rates of failure in school, school drop-outs and illiteracy, drug and alcohol abuse, delinquency, early sexual promiscuity and out-of-wedlock births, more illness and more psychological problems and treatment. [13]
They also have a high suicide rate. In fact, the teen suicide rate and the divorce rate have tracked each other, each going up 300% in the last 30 years. [14]
Children of the never-married do not have a high suicide rate, however. Instead, they have a high homicide rate! [15] Children who knew their father but lost him through divorce apparently grow up sad. But children who never knew their father apparently grow up angry.
Children of the never-married are worse-off than children of divorce in every measurable way. They suffer all the problems of the children of divorce, but more severely. [16]
Fatherless children are also more likely to be victims of violent crime. Child abuse, both physical and sexual, is a major threat in their lives. Much of it comes from the boyfriends of the mother. They perpetrate more than 50% of child abuse by non-parents. [17] They are also frequently the baby-sitters of these children.
In addition, because of their poverty, these children frequently live in high-crime areas. They suffer injury or death more often because of the violence of their neighborhoods.
Most alarming of all is the relationship between fatherlessness and violent crime. Of the most violent young criminals in prison, 70% are fatherless. [18]
We now know that fatherlessness is not only the most reliable predictor of poverty, but also of violent crime. [19] Mapping neighborhoods and city blocks by the percentage of fatherless households has been found the most reliable way to predict the location of the most violent crime in any city. [20]
Since fatherlessness is the major precursor of both poverty and violent crime, how could we have allowed it to reach such epidemic proportions in our country? How is it that we have regarded it as being an unfortunate, but somewhat trivial, matter? Why has it been almost ignored, considering the level of devastation it has wrought on the entire society? Social scientists have known about it for a long time, after all. Plenty of evidence has been available.
Most of all, why has there been so much silence about the stupefyingly obvious connection between unmarried sex, and fatherless children and families? It is almost as if it were invisible, as if we had a gene that blocked us from seeing it.
In 2000, the number of children in America who were born without a father reached an all-time high of 33% of all births. [21] (Since 1960 it rose from 2.5% to over 25% among whites, and from 23% to 69% among blacks.) [22]
We have not yet grasped that, as this increased number of fatherless children reach their teens, we can also expect increases in violent crime. If nothing changes much, that increase in crime could last all their lives, and ours.
How is it that we have kept overlooking somehow the connection between fatherless and violent crime? Or the connection between fatherlessness and poverty? After observing our free-wheeling life style, a visitor from another planet could be excused for thinking that what we are doing is trying frantically to produce more poverty and more violent crime!
Until this society improves, however, is there anything that can be done, on an individual basis, to change the unmarried-sex lifestyle of so many poor mothers, and poverty and damage it causes to them and their children?
The church-based or faith-based charities with good "up and out" programs are their best bet. That is because they address, not only work-related issues, but also lifestyle problems and dysfunctions. And they typically do better with such problems than other groups.
To be of real help, such programs need to address the problem of unmarried sex directly. Courses need to be taught about the hazards of unmarried sex, the importance of leaving that lifestyle, and ways to do so successfully.
Models would be abstinence courses taught in schools. Also relational courses for dating couples taught by some churches and charities. Making the decision to wait for marriage before having sex again, having mentoring and coaching as that happens, and training for a successful marriage should be the goals.
But meanwhile, our society continues to hold out the picture of purely casual, unmarried sex without making commitments, as the glamorous and desirable norm. We all are impacted and shaped, more every year, by the ever-rising flood of such material, coming from all sides. Whether it is from the print or broadcast media, cable, satellite, movies, DVDs, music, the internet or the wildly-proliferating sex industry which seeps into all these, we are soaked in it. No one is unaffected.
The principal teachers of our chlldren are not our schools. After all, just the time spent watchinig TV alone, in their first 18 years, is double the total time they spend in school! [23] Children are prone to copy what they see more than what they are taught. What they see on screen, the music they hear, and the titillating fashions around them, become their models.
What they see on every side tells them that unmarried sex is what is most normal, most attractive, and the best. But the disasterous down-side is almost never shown.
If the poor are truly victims of society, it is mostly because that society has accepted and glamorized unmarried sex. After all, unmarried sex and the resulting fatherlessness is the greatest cause of their poverty. And the poor are the least equipped among us to resist the daily hammering of hundreds of appealing presentations of the lure of unmarried sex.
It was never anyone's intention to make the poor even poorer. That, however, is what has happened. What is needed now is some hard thinking about how we got to this point, and what we should do about it. But that is for the next chapter.
_________
[1] U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, "Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1998." Cited in William C. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, 1999, p. 60.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Calculated by Michael J. McManus in Marriage Savers, 1995, p. 40, using the U.S. Government Department of Justice study, "Female Victims of Violent Crime."
[4] Professor Larry Bumpass, Center for Democracy and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin, National Survey of Families and Households, Working Papers #2 and #5, 1989. Cited in McManus op. cit., p. 40.
[5] Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), and "Divorce Rate by Nation, 1960 and 1990", National Center for Health Statistics. Cited in Bennett, op. cit., pp. 69-70,
[6] "Number of Children Experiencing Divorce Per Year, 1960-95." National Center for Health Statistics. Cited in Bennett, op. cit., p. 72.
[7] "Out-of-Wedlock Births Per Year, 1960-97." National Center for Health Statistics. Cited in Bennett, op. cit., p. 53.
[8] Census Bureau Report, "Marital Status and Living Arrangements, March 1992." Cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 23.
[9] Census Bureau Report, "Marital Status and Living Arrangements, March 1992." Cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 31.
[10] "Kids Count Data Book", Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Center for the Study of Social Policy. Cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 42.
[11] March 1991 Census study of the period from 1983 to 1986. Cited in McManua, op. cit., p. 34.
[12] Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Survey Research Center, University of Michigan. Cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 34.
[13] David Popenoe, Life Without Father, (New York, Free Press, 1996). Cited in Bennett, op. cit., pp. 58, 60. Also article by Zinmeister in The American Enterprise, March/April 1990. Cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 34.
[14] National Commission on Children: also, Dr. David B. Larson and Susan Larson, "Divorce: A Hazard to Your Health", Physician Magazine, 1991. Cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 47.
[15] Ibid.
[16] McManus, op. cit., p. 41. Bennett, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
[17] Leslie Margolin, "Child Abuse By Mother's Boyfriends", University of Iowa. Cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 46.
[18] Popenoe, op. cit. Cited in Bennett, op. cit., p. 58.
[19] Michael R. Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime, (Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 103. Cited in David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America, Basic Books, 1995, p. 31.
[20] Elaine Ciulla Kamark and William A. Galston, "Putting Children First: A Progressive Policy for the 1990s" (Washington D.C., Progressive Policy Institute, September 1990), p. 14. Cited in Blankenhorn, op. cit., p. 31.
[21] Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune, February 7, 2001, citing former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
[22] "Out-of-Wedlock Births as a Percentage of All Births", Center for National Health Statistics, cited in Bennett, op. cit., p. 48.
[23] Neilson data, cited in McManus, op. cit., p. 82.
