DisPovertyPorn: Benefits Street and the dis/ability paradox

Abstract

In this article, we offer a timely socio-cultural analysis, informed by a critical disability perspective, of UK Channel 4’s reality television series Benefits Street. Drawing on the work of Allen, Tyler, and De Benedictus and Jensen on ‘poverty porn’, we broaden their analysis to ask how dis/ability disrupts the ‘poverty porn’ narrative. We pay attention to the dis/appearance of dis/ability on Benefits Street and, in doing so, we also extend an analysis of how impairment labels function in people’s lives as socio-cultural categories that place limits on what labelled people can do and can be. We suggest that both the articulation and erasure of dis/ability are used as a form of narrative prosthesis to support the overarching story line that people on benefits are unworthy ‘scroungers’.

Setting the scene

As part of the process of disavowal and popular culture, Jensen (2013) points to the emergence of a new archetype of media representations of poor people with the rise of ‘poverty porn’ as a form of popular entertainment. Jensen defines ‘poverty porn’ as reality television programmes that seek to individualise poverty, and to blame and shame ‘the poor’ for the situations they find themselves in. At the same time, however, this shaming and blaming reveals a deep-rooted fascination with poor people. Those living in poverty become fascinating characters inhabiting plotlines of displacement.

Perhaps the most notorious example of contemporary UK poverty porn Jensen describes is Channel 4’s Benefits Street. As an exemplar of its type, Benefits Street documents the lives of the residents of James Turner Street in the city of Birmingham in the West Midlands of England in 2013 (aired in 2014 and now set to be repeated in Teesside). The relentless focus of the programme is on the failings of the individual residents who appear on the show. Yet the systemic and structural forces that create social and economic disadvantage in the residents’ lives are sidelined. Instead, the show appears to scream at the viewer: ‘these idlers have brought this on themselves’. The implication is that we are encouraged to ‘know’ these fascinating yet failing creatures.

Academic critiques of poverty porn have drawn upon the intersections of class, race and gender to develop their analysis (Allen, Tyler, and De Benedictus 2014); dis/ability is, as is so often the case, absent from the socio-cultural analysis (Mallett and Runswick-Cole 2014). Too often dis/ability occupies a medicalised category not worthy of sociological or cultural critique. When one acknowledges that dis/ability is a biopolitical construction, then one is invited to become more critical and socio-cultural in terms of analysis. On Benefits Street, dis/ability occupies a complex space within the narrative. For the purposes of the dominant storyline (people on benefits are scroungers), it is necessary for dis/ability to be made both visible and invisible: sometimes dis/ability takes ‘centre-stage’, sometimes it is simply ‘noises off’. It lurks around as a quintessential object of disavowal: to be desired and erased when necessary in order to say something particular about those living in poverty.

When dis/ability is centre-stage

Deidre Kelly, described throughout the programme as White Dee (let us recognise at the least the racialised undertones of the nomenclature here), takes centre-stage. Dee is introduced as a ‘single mum’ bringing up her children ‘on benefits’. She is also a disabled woman. Her mental health issues are frequently referred to in the course of the series; she is one of the 2.25 million people receiving ‘disability benefits’ (Office for National Statistics 2014). Despite her self-identification as a woman living with depression and a mental health service user, assessed by the state as being entitled to disability benefits, this is not enough to exclude her from the category of ‘scrounger’. Within the programme, there are repeated implicit challenges to Dee’s entitlement to her disability benefits. Her non-paid care work, as ‘the mam of the street’ or as carer for her neighbour ‘Fungi’ through his cancer scare (Allen, Tyler, and De Benedictus 2014), are not only depicted as acts of kindness, they are also offered as evidence of her capacity for paid work, and evidence that she is, in fact, a malingerer. Dee is portrayed as a woman who could work if only she wanted to. Dee’s previous conviction for fraud and representations of her as a lazy mother all serve the purposes of the narrative – the residents of James Turner Street are (all) scroungers.

In press interviews and reports following the series, Dee’s impairment status is explicitly challenged. Dee explained that: ‘I haven’t been on benefits my whole life. At the moment I am not in a place where (I can work). I suffer with depression and I am being assessed for bipolar disorder’ (Cooper 2014). Nonetheless, White Dee was publically challenged in a television interview and accused of being ‘bone idle’ (Cooper 2014). A Conservative MP accused her, in the national press, of ‘not being interested in finding a job’ (Cooper 2014). Her subsequent appearance for a fee on another reality television programme was immediately seized upon as evidence that she could work – when she wanted to. Dee’s status as mental health service user is made visible on Benefits Street because it supports the over-arching narrative; that Dee is a quintessential example of a ‘scrounger’, who uses disability falsely to claim state support.

When dis/ability is no more than noises off

In contrast to the focus on White Dee’s status as a mental health service user and benefit claimant, other disabled residents’ disability-related stories are redacted on Benefits Street. During the programmes, Mark Thomas and Becky Howe did not identify themselves, nor were they identified by the programme-makers, as disabled people. Yet, after the series finished, in a ‘tell-all’ article in The Daily Mail (a dreadful right-wing British newspaper), Mark’s grandparents describe the couple as having ‘learning difficulties’ (Adams 2014). This claim is supported by the revelation that Mark and Becky both attended the same school for children with special educational needs (Adams 2014). Yet, in Mark and Becky’s Benefits Street story, dis/ability is ‘noises off’. Given that Dee’s dis/ability status was made known, the omission of this information about Mark and Becky from the Benefits Street story is worthy of some consideration.

It may simply be the case that neither Mark nor Becky wished to be identified as ‘people with learning difficulties’; this would not be surprising given the stigma attached to the label of ‘learning difficulties’ in contemporary British culture (Goodley 2000). However, in contrast to Dee, it might have been that Mark and Vicky’s impairment label was not incorporated into the storyline because it did not serve as narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder 2000) to the ‘scrounger’ story.

In contemporary cultural contexts, and on Benefits Street, the label of ‘person with learning difficulties’ functions in different ways from the label of ‘person with mental health issues’. Despite numerous attempts to de-stabilise the category of learning disabilities as a highly contested and socially constructed label (Goodley 2011), ‘learning difficulties’, in the public imaginary, maintain the status of a sticky label mired in medicalised discourses. Being labelled with learning difficulties, in neoliberal Britain, can act as a label of forgiveness for those who admit their ‘handicap, social stigma, dependence, isolation and economic disadvantage’; those accepting the stigma may benefit from the politics of redistribution and welfare benefits (Stone 1994, 4 cited in Runswick-Cole 2014, 8). They are the ‘worthy’ poor. Indeed, the perceived unemployability of people with learning disabilities has been part of the way this categorised identity at least since the Mental Deficiency Act constructed ‘mental defectives’ in 1913 (Humber 2013). A century on, only 10% of disabled people with learning disabilities are in paid work; this figure has changed little over the last 20 years (Humber 2013). Mark and Becky’s characterisation as feckless, work-shy scroungers would be more difficult to sustain if their status as people labelled with learning difficulties was made visible in the television programme and if it had been claimed and accepted by Mark and Becky.

DisPovertyPorn

In our 2014 paper, developed as part of an ongoing research project ‘Big Society? Disabled People with Learning Disabilities and Civil Society’, we described what we see as dis/ability’s ‘disruptive potential’ (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2014, 1). We described the ways in which the category of dis/ability ‘enlarges, disrupts, pauses, questions and clarifies what it means to be human’ (2014, 2). Here, we also see the ways in which cultural understandings of impairment labels disrupt what it means to be a ‘scrounger’.

On Benefits Street, impairment labels are deployed in different ways and carry out different cultural work – ‘learning difficulties’ makes possible the designation of ‘the worthy poor’, and so, for the purposes of the poverty porn story, must be hidden. ‘Mental health issues’ offer no such road to forgiveness. As our analysis of poverty porn reveals, the socio-cultural construction of impairment labels, such as ‘mental health issues’ and ‘learning difficulties’, matter because these constructions have very real effects in people’s lives, as Dee and Mark and Becky’s experiences demonstrate.

Working the dis/ability complex, we notice that scrounging is clearly the remit of the non-disabled able-bodied (ability), while neediness is associated with the deficiencies associated with impairment (dis/ability) (Goodley 2011, 2014). At the same time, however, the ‘dis’ of disability demands us to think again about the dominant implicit assumption of the working individual associated with the idealised citizen. What of those who cannot work? Will they be recognised as citizens or forever cast off as deficient outsiders, living on the edges of political life? Thinking of poverty, work and identity through the prism of dis/ability permits us to enlarge our understandings of humanity.

Any analysis of ‘poverty porn’ that fails to pay attention to the disruptive presence of dis/ability is diminished in its explanatory power.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council for ‘Big Society? Disabled People with Learning Disabilities and Civil Society’ [ES/K004883/1.