Transcript food insecurity and hunger

Promoting the right for food security:
a community intervention and students
training project in Israel
Roni Kaufman and Ephrat Huss
Spitzer Department of Social Work,
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
2012 Joint Word Conference on social work and social
development - Stockholm 8-12 July
Background:
Changing context new challenges
• In the last decade, changes in economical and welfare
policies in Israel, generated new social problems such
as food insecurity and hunger and increased poverty
rates (for example between 1998-2008 the rate of poor
children increased by 60%, 1 out of 3!)
Our challenges and obligation:
• To actively advocate for social rights and social justice
• To train all SW students as social change agents
The Right for Food Security Project (2002 –2012)
Goals:
1. To activate the community to demand proper governmental
policies and programs to fight hunger in Israel.
2. To train students how to intervene for community and policy change
regarding the food security problem.
Major contributions :
1 Development of the BGUSW National Food Security community
action, research and students’ training Center
2 Changing public discourse. introducing alternative view, to the
philanthropic, based on scientific measurement and government
responsibility
3 Legislation of the national Hot Lunch Bill and program (2006)
4 Initiating the first Governmental National Survey of Food Security
using the international scale (2011)
Food insecurity or malnutrition?
• Unlike malnutrition food insecurity does not endanger
life
• Food insecure families skip meals; compromise on
food quality; sometimes go hungry to sleep or do not
have money to provide food to their children
• 3 levels: 1. Food secure. 2. Food insecure. 3.Food
insecurity with hunger evidence
Food Insecurity and hunger in Israel
Food
Secure
Food
Food Insecure
Insecure with Hunger
National
Sample (2011)
81%
11%
8%
USA national
sample (2010)
86%
10%
4%
The Research
The research Problem
• We found that although the students expressed structural
explanations to the problem of food insecurity, their
preference was to intervene through an individual,
psychological perspective - rather than community action
and social rights perspective
• There was a discrepancy between the cognitive structural
explanations of social problems that are taught, and their
tendency to prefer focusing on individual rather than on
community or societal levels of intervention.
The research Question
• What are the emotional barriers and how to overcome
them?
The training project
Location of training
• Two poor Negev communities that were identified as
suffering from high levels of food insecurity (more than
50%), and lack of community action
The Participants
• 15 students at BGU (generic social work program) who
intervened in the food security problem during an elective,
one-year social intervention practicum seminar, aged
23–28. All were a year away from graduation
The community project components
The program components
• Participating in a seminar on the development of the food
insecurity problem in Israel.
• Conducting a community research: collecting
information from community members and leaders
regarding scale of problem and action preferences
• Promoting a community based planning and activating
project to promote food security in the community level
Methodology
Method
• Observing students emotional and cognitive reactions to
various project activities, as described through a projective
art medium.
The metaphoric language of the arts was used to enable the
emotional and the cognitive understandings of the students
to emerge.
Research design
• Included comparing data source triangulation of
participants’ art work and written summaries and peer
analyses of the art works, in various stages: before entering
the field and during important cross roads of the activity.
Student analyses
Ex 1:(004) " Hungry people are like flowers
wilting, that cannot bloom, the color has
'left' the picture, the flowers have wilted,
they are static, not dying, and not blooming
or developing. They have no life, no color;
the situation of lack of food security creates
a situation of fading... "
Researcher Analyses
• Interestingly, the above student used an analogy as fatalistic
"bad weather" to depict their understanding of the root of food
insecurity and hunger rather than to describe it as a socially
constructed, "man made" lack of equality, according to what
they have been taught. Reflecting on her picture, the student
described hungry people as delicate and as having no
agency, prone to "wilting" under stressful circumstances, ( a
pathological conception of poverty) rather than, for example,
as struggling within an impossible set of interlocking
oppressions. The student could identify the dissonance
between what she learned and agrees with intellectually and
the paternalistic stand that she adopted toward her clients
suffering from food insecurity.
food".
Ex 2: (ooi) "I drew food insecurity as a type of hole that pulls
everything, physical, emotional, spiritual and personal, into it—a hole
that is hard to climb out of if you fall into it. When I reach homes that
are socio-economically poor, I am always offered cola and sweets, and
the children said, they didn't know they had that at home, why aren’t
they allowed to drink it? And the kids, when you meet them at school,
they all the time talk about food".
Researcher analyses
• Again, hunger is described fatalistically, as a force of nature,
but the hungry people are described as using inappropriate
and ineffective coping strategies—hiding food from their
children, employing shame avoidance strategies—rather than
trying to solve the problem. Thus, adopting a "social
pathology" understanding of food insecurity, the student
reflected further on her picture, saying, " I am thinking about
this hole that " pulls everything inwards—from the hole I drew,
it seems that only people who are 'not careful' 'fall' into the
natural disaster, or hole, of hunger". Her comments deviate
from the socially constructed explanation of food insecurity
she internalized as a student on the intellectual level, reveling
a fatalistic and pathological approach to food insecurity as
something that people who are not careful, 'fall into'.
Ex 3: (002) "I drew a pan full of water being heated
on a fire. I remember a story I was told at school
about a family that didn't have food, and so they
heated a pan with water, that's the image that
entered my head, a pan with water"
Researcher analyses
In this example, the hungry person is represented as being more
concerned with the inherent shame of food insecurity than
with solving the problem. The conflict between maintaining
one's dignity and requesting help is not emphatically
understood; rather, it is described in terms of socially
pathological behavior.
The hungry people in the preceding examples are all
represented as weak and ineffective—wilting, falling into
holes, hiding food from the children, or heating water so as to
hide their hunger. Meanwhile, the hunger is a hole to fall into
or "bad weather", or it has no shape. Food insecurity was thus
not defined as a social problem, but as a problem derived
from the instability of "nature:
Ex 4: "I drew a mouth that had turned into a sharp angular cave, I thought of the contrast
between the mouth as a natural source of pleasure, contact, and fulfillment, and how
when it doesn't have food security, it becomes a sharp anxious aggressive place, the
opposite of what nature intended–—as if lack of food is against what nature intended."
Researcher analyses
The hungry person above is reduced to his
hunger—a "mouth", detached and isolated
from the rest of the body. The hunger, in
turn, weakens his character, rather than
being an external problem that he can
"heroically" overcome. This can be seen
as the pathologizing theory of poverty.
Interestingly, other students did not describe
overtly pathological, parternalistic, or
fatalistic understandings of the hungry
person's problems, but rather presented
ambivalent reactions, as in the following
example.
Student analyses
Ex: (005) " I drew the saying 'his stomach sticks to
his back from hunger' and it shows the relationship
between the hand and the mouth. The hand has to
put food in the mouth, but there is no food, and
this impossibility of the hand to 'feed' the mouth, is
intensely scary and a feeling of pain, expressed in
the red color. The red area from the gullet, and
down and round the back to the hand, signifies the
pain caused by the emptiness.
Researcher analyses
This student, in comparison with the former examples, did
personify the hungry person, enabling us to see him and to
experience his pain (as compared to shame). However, he is
still a closed circuit, and the drawing shows his (rather than
society's) inability to feed himself. While the picture describes
the hungry person's dilemma, the character seems helpless
and childish, thereby perpetuating the conception of the
hungry person as an ineffective adult. This example shows
how the interaction between cause and effect becomes
confused.
The next drawing represents a dual message, as the student
drawer struggles with opposing theories of hunger,
demonstrating the struggle between the students' emotional
and cognitive experiences of hunger.
Ex 5: (003) "I wanted to draw one thing, but in the end I drew
another instead…I drew a spiral, I wanted to draw a wall
between those with and those without hunger, but I didn't know
how, so I drew a spiral, showing how the experience spiral's
inwards, and the spiral is also the intensifying feeling of hunger
within the stomach.
• Ex 7:(006) " I tried to outline the hunger in black,
and to shout help, because it's a dangerous
situation, I wanted to stress the feeling that
whoever is outside, cannot 'hear' that shout for
help, can't understand what's happening inside, in
the whirlwind that pulls inwards, and whoever is
inside shouts but feels he can't be heard or
helped, there is total separation between the
experience of who is inside hunger, and who is
outside hunger: I have met people who experience
hunger, and if you are prepared to look, they
desperately want help and accept help, but if you
didn't dare to touch- you didn't hear it."
Researcher analyses
• This drawing, as compared to those above, does incorporate
the social context of non-hungry people, defining food
insecurity as a man-made phenomena such as a "wall" built
between different people (as compared to the images of
hunger as holes, spirals, and "bad weather" in the previous
examples). However, the student could not internalize this
social theory, and ended up drawing her inner experience of
hunger as a (fatalistic) spiral-like "force of nature" that pulls
people in. The fact that not everyone is pulled in places
indirect responsibility on the hungry person and on the erratic
forces of nature or fate rather than on society.
• This interesting dilemma between the desire to portray hunger
in a certain way and how one experientially or emotionally
understands hunger is repeated below, where there is a failed
potential at dialogue between those that experience, and
those that don't experience hunger.
Ex6: "I wanted to draw Munch's Scream,
but I couldn't, and so I drew this hole that is
full of nothing. I tried to draw a shout, or a
struggle, of the hungry people, but in the
end I drew a hole in the stomach, a
physical, spiritual, and emotional hole in
the stomach..."
Researcher analyses
In the above example, again, the "gap" between
what the student wanted to draw and what she
actually drew defines the gap between the socially
critical understanding of hunger taught to her
(protesting against hunger with a scream), which
she doesn’t manage to sustain, and her emotional
experience of hunger as a "physical, spiritual, and
emotional hole in the stomach…." The motivation
and desire to draw something juxtaposed with the
inability to draw it is developed in the following
example.
•
Student analyses
•
" I tried to outline the hunger in black, and to shout help, because
it's a dangerous situation, I wanted to stress the feeling that
whoever is outside, cannot 'hear' that shout for help, can't
understand what's happening inside, in the whirlwind that
pulls inwards, and whoever is inside shouts but feels he can't
be heard or helped, there is total separation between the
experience of who is inside hunger, and who is outside
hunger: I have met people who experience hunger, and if you
are prepared to look, they desperately want help and accept
help, but if you didn't dare to touch- you didn't hear it."
Researcher analyses
The above student does provide a social explanation of hunger, in that non
hungry people cannot "hear" hungry people's shouts for help. The student
drawer focuses on the interaction between hungry and non-hungry people,
rather than between hungry people and their "bad luck"- Also, their shapes
and colors are not qualitatively different from the shapes and colors of
people outside of the circle. And yet, despite the shouts of the hungry, the
"others" cannot hear their voices, thus providing a social explanation for
hunger. However, this socially constructed understanding of the problem is
shown to lead to despair if the hungry person does not have a loud enough
voice to "be heard". Furthermore, like the drawings that precede it, this does
not include services and policy systems and other structural community and
societal elements that contribute to the evolution of the problem
•
Student analyses
Ex 8: I drew a picture of nothing, nothing is also a statement, and
nothing is equivalent to no food at all…. The second drawing,
describes a state of withering and wilting, of passivity and
drought…."
Researcher analyses
Beyond the paternalistic stand expressed toward the
hungry, "wilting" person, the blank page describes
the overall lack of agency, or despair, both of the
hungry person and of the drawer, or social worker,
who chose to draw "nothing". In other words, it
expresses the student social worker's lack of
solutions when confronted with the realities of food
insecurity. Emotionally, the student's overidentification prevents her from seeing the hungry
person's potential strengths and possible
solutions, and her own, hopeless reaction—ay
also reflect a perceived lack of effectiveness or
agency of social change strategies toward hunger.
Summary; Implications for
community supervision
The above data shows that while the students
may verbally "speak" systemic or socially
critical theories of poverty and of food
insecurity, they "draw", or experience food
insecurity through fatalistic, psychological,
and individualistic theories of poverty, or
experience and draw dissonance between
what they want to draw( what they think) and
what they end up drawing ( what they
experience).There is a gap between their
social and emotional levels .
1. The "source" of food insecurity is a
natural rather than a social phenomenon
above is interesting, as according to Parsons et al. (1994), a
social intervention must begin by addressing the reason for
the problem. But this is a fatalistic or even "neo liberal"
explanation of food Hunger is described by images of a "force
of nature" or "fate", such as a black hole, a wind, a fire, a
spiral, and a red area on a multicolored map
. Poverty and food insecurity, therefore, are viewed as inevitable
and natural, but at the same time they are endowed with
mythic "disaster" qualities. Poverty "pulls" people into it,
eventually taking over the whole person.
This stand directly opposes the socially constructed radical or
critical theories the students have been learning for two years.
. The victims of food insecurity •
are inherently weak and
ineffective
2
It emerges from the first central theme that the victims of food insecurity are
"sucked in" to the disaster, and this implies that | they are unable to resist
and thus inherently weak. We saw people "wilt", get "pulled in", go "around
and around in a spiral", or futilely and inanely attempt to hide their hunger
from outsiders out of shame rather than in an effort to solve the problem.
Similar to descriptions of addicts, hungry and poor people are understood as
inherently "weak" and thus able to be "sucked in" to the "natural disaster" of
food insecurity. To describe the hungry person as spiritually and morally
"hollow" and emotionally "rubbed out" confuses cause and effect and
explanation for food insecurity For example, the shame demonstrated by the
hungry was defined as an ineffective coping mechanism that elicited ridicule
rather than empathy.
All of the above conceptions clearly contradict a social critical understanding of
food insecurity and it's victims as part of the interconnected side effects of
poverty, with poor people coping as best they can within a complex reality.
. The interaction between the victims of
food insecurity and society is failing
3
Some participants' did describe, via the drawing process, the relationship
between society and the victims of food insecurity as "failed"—
"I wanted to draw, but in the end I drew...",
"I couldn't manage to draw what I wanted.“
The dissonance experienced by the students between what they "want" to
draw, or to believe, and what they actually experience, or feel, can be
understood as the distance between theory and practice or between
emotion and intellect, and is expressed as the disparity between their apriori intentions and the experience or outcome of meeting poor and
hungry people.
We saw drawings depicting how society does not "hear" the hungry people or
the hungry people cannot overcome walls or silence, and as a result,
neither society nor the victims can effectively solve the problem. Although
closest to what the students have learned, this stand was what the
students 'intended to draw, but they reverted to drawing holes and spirals,
to name a few of their images- showing that the above critical stand was
not internalized.
How do we explain the discrepancy
between theory and emotion?
A dynamic explanation for the observed theory-practice
gap could be that the intense emotional impact of an
issue such as food insecurity, and the shock of
encountering it first hand rather than through journal
articles, causes students to "regress" in terms of their
theoretical understanding.
Thus, having neglected the emotional impact of meeting
individual suffering from food insecurity, social work
students are likely to be overwhelmed, when
confronted with "live" food insecurity: This,
emotionally, leads students to indirectly "blame" the
victims or to distance themselves from the victims
using reductive theories- as is common in society.
• Another explanation could be that, through a
transferable or parallel relationship, students
may be expressing the helplessness,
confusion, and shame experienced by their
clients.
• which thrusts the students into a secondary
trauma expressed through the catastrophic
and absolute metaphors for food insecurity
they used in their drawings and
accompanying texts.
Systemic explanation
The gap between theory and practice can also be
explained through systemic and social realities:
the real absences of power, in both the cases of
the impoverished clients and of the social workers
within a diminishing welfare state, intensify each
other. The experience of powerlessness is thus
parallel, or similar, not on an emotional level but
on a real level
in that social workers have no practical solutions to
the problems they encounter other than to provide
emotional support (Krumer Nevo & Lev-Wiesel,
2006).
Cognitive explanation
A third explanation, derived from a cognitive or learning theory
perspective, is that learned social perspectives help to reduce
the complexities of a flooding reality.
Students must learn to hold different understandings of a p a
complex reality. For example, some students employed different
theories of poverty simultaneously.
For example, the hungry person was seen as exhibiting
psychological problems while the problem of hunger was viewed
as a "catastrophe"; t
he hungry person was portrayed as trying to shout, but society was
depicted as unable to "hear" him. Thus, a more complex
theoretical stand that encourages the students to subscribe to
opposing theories, rather than to see the world in black and
white, (including the use of a social critical theory exclusively)
would enable a less absolute and thus reductive stand toward
what they experience.
Solutions
• Overall, this study emphasizes the need to
include a systematic process of emotional
working through also within the community
and social levels interventions in social
work.
• The ability to hold complex stands
simultaneously, is a learned ability that
demands time for reflection and integration
However, educators tend not to directly meet
the populations, as do the students, and so
they tend to focus on social change from a
theoretical rather than from an interpersonal
perspective.
Typically, they do not directly address the
impact, at either the individual or group level,
of meeting the victims of social reality,
although this is a significant part of their
students' daily work.
Implications for social work
theory
This research has implications for breaking
the dichotomy of micro versus macro
stands of individual versus community
stands, the interesting element of social
work is the meeting place of the individual
with society, or of society with the
individual, in both directions. This mustn’t
be lost in community social work
Summary of implications
• successful social change-oriented training must sufficiently address
the emotional impact of meeting individuals who experience the social
suffering first hand, in order to enable students to not become
overwhelmed, and to apply their social systemic theories to individual
cases of suffering—a difficult conceptual shift. This will help them to
integrate the personal with the social, rather than merely internalizing
the political concepts, devoid of the people and situations
that they describe.
• The internalization of social change is gradual and complex process,
combined with the reframing of this complexity into tangible results.
Arts can be used as a powerful reflective tool within macro practice
training supervision, so as to concretize first time students field
experience. Drawing enables processes to be concretized, symbolized,
projected, distanced, and thus controlled, as well as followed up over
time, in an effective manner