The development and increase in the number of people on the face of the earth have fostered an increase in the amount of food and resources that are required to satisfy the different wants and needs. With the population slowly growing from previous years, a lot of countries are facing challenges in ensuring that their own people are able to attain the necessary resources that will sustain healthy living. Amongst these resources is the provision of food and healthcare to the different families. The governments of different countries have developed strategies which aid in maintaining these families and ensuring people are not starving or unable to meet their needs. However, there is a great population of people that are unable to access food and healthcare. There has been a gradual increase in the number of children who are left unattended and abandoned due to the inability of parents to access these basic essential needs. This paper analyses child abandonment as an issue of focus, attributed to the continued rise in poverty levels all over the world, and the lack of financial aid, or access to resources by young mothers.
In the United States today, there are a lot of families that are living below the poverty line, these case has also been reported in the United Kingdom, Asia and other continents (Shaughnessy, 2014). Many people and scholars continue to blame the state and nature of the people’s circumstances to their present predicament. However, there are various factors in place that have contributed to the sharp rise in the number of children that are abandoned by their parents. For instance, with the continued rise in the cost of living for various nations due to the pressure of globalization, the number of people who are able to afford basic meals continues to decrease. In many cases, mothers, on realising they are pregnant, are abandoned by the fathers and left to fend for themselves. Most mothers are unable to hold up their families and have no real financial support that can assist them. In most scenarios, mothers are forced to take up four to five meagre paying jobs that will ensure they are able to meet their bills and attain a decent home for their children. However, where they have failed, they often seek the help of child institutions or leave the children with child support agencies that will assist in their development. This is an event observed in developed countries where such institutions are well developed and recognized (Jonson-Reid, Drake, & Zhou, 2013).
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In less developed countries where mothers are faced with extreme poverty, the children are often dumped in places categorised as either soft or hard. Where they are dumped in soft places, this is in hospitals and places considered to be places of shelter. However, there is also hard dumping, where the children are dumped in dustbins or veldts. An article posted by Venter (2004) suggested that most of these mothers who are unable to meet their financial needs have babies who seem seek and unable to cope are most likely to dump babies in dustbins and other unhygienic places hoping that they will not survive for long, this has mostly been reported in developing countries. In other cases, these mothers are unable to cater to their children due to failed marriages and hence choose to dump them. A marriage in many countries is seen as the salvation from a certain type of lifestyle, especially where the person has grown up in a low-income family (Naeem, Shaukat, & Ahmed, 2011). Where the marriage fails, in many cases due to poverty, there is a large impact on the children who end up either being dumped or very neglected by the parents (Jonson-Reid et al., 2013). It is only in few scenarios where the families work through the trials. This has often resulted in the increase of children subjected to child labour at early ages as they struggle to fend for themselves. A phenomenon that is common in Pakistan and also in third world countries (Naeem et al., 2011).
Poverty has catapulted the increase in the number of children that are dumped or neglected by their parents. In many cases, the children dumped survive and end up living on the streets in poverty, however, many other cases have reported children being discovered in sewage pipes and rivers where they had been thrown by their mothers. The continued rise in the number of mothers or parents who are unable to access proper financial resources and support systems that can assist them in raising their children continues to foster an increase in the rate of child dumping. These phenomena are not only observed in developing countries but also in developed countries where children are left in hospitals and other care centres by their parents afflicted with poverty and unable to care for them.
References
Jonson-Reid, M., Drake, B., & Zhou, P. (2013). Neglect Subtypes, Race, and Poverty: Individual, Family, and Service Characteristics. Child Maltreatment , 18 (1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077559512462452
Naeem, Z., Shaukat, F., & Ahmed, Z. (2011). Child labor in relation to poverty. International Journal of Health Sciences , 5 (2 Suppl 1), 48. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3533357/
Shaughnessy, J. M. (2014). An essay on poverty and child neglect: New interventions. Wash. & Lee J. Civ. Rts. & Soc. Just. , 21 , 5.
Venter, B. (2004). “Poverty is making young mothers dump babies” | IOL News. IOL News . Retrieved from https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/poverty-is-making-young-mothers-dump-babies-206730
