Meet Emily: The 15-year-old speaking out about stigma, poverty and health for Zero Discrimination Day
To mark Zero Discrimination Day, Emily Miller, aged 15, explores the experiences and challenges faced by young people living in poverty, how poverty can impact their health outcomes and how she believes we can make a start at a better future. Emily volunteers with Children North East as a Young Advisor on our Young Advisors panel, which gives a platform to young people to share their voice, perspectives and experiences to inform our work and promote inclusive social change.
Young people in poverty are born into a situation that is out of their control, then left to deal with the stigma of poverty. Even if they tried to gain some control by getting a job, that would stigmatise them even more as it would be more difficult to get a full education or have a normal childhood.
There are direct health impacts of being in poverty, which are made worse by the emotional stress caused by how others might perceive you. People on the outside look at and treat people in poverty differently. This has an impact on young people’s self-esteem. If you ask people my age, they will tell you that they do care about people’s opinions. This can make it harder for young people to access healthcare because they’re worried about being judged. They may end up without the same opportunities as people not dealing with the effects of poverty.
We need to increase understanding, which will make people more willing to help and more willing to ask for help when they need it.
We are told to eat healthily, but this can be especially difficult when someone does not have the resources or skills. For people in poverty, there is likely to be a lot of different problems to focus on. It is hard work being worried all the time and this makes it far easier to cook unhealthy frozen food instead of a fresh nutritious meal. I cooked a meal for my family, it took me over 2 hours, and left me feeling tired after school and filled up the rest of my day. I cannot imagine how I would feel if I did this after a long shift at work then had to take care of other duties as a parent. These issues are due to not having enough time and resources and lead to children not getting the right nutrition, contributing to things like childhood obesity.
Solutions are difficult to find and it can seem impossible to get everyone on board and agreeing on one plan. Before we start thinking about a solution, we need to destigmatise people in poverty and not throw blame, which only makes the problem worse. We need to increase understanding, which will make people more willing to help and more willing to ask for help when they need it.
We need to include young people’s voices in building this understanding. The perspective of a young person going through poverty is different to an adult. A young person deals with overwhelming stigma making them ashamed, due to not being able to ask for things their friends have. Many children grow up with access to the things they need and can ask for them without feeling guilty. For young people in poverty this isn’t true. They might not feel like they can ask for things they would like due to believing they already know the answer is going to be no.
It is a different world now to when my parents were younger and while lots of the same problems exist, the impacts have changed. If we base our understanding and education only on their experiences, it will not reflect today’s world and young people in poverty won’t get the help they really need.
On Zero Discrimination Day, 1 March, people around the globe celebrate the right of everyone to live a full and productive life—and live it with dignity. Zero Discrimination Day highlights how people can become informed about and promote inclusion, compassion, peace and, above all, a movement for change. Zero Discrimination Day is helping to create a global movement of solidarity to end all forms of discrimination.
