Louise Casey’s report, Listening to Troubled Families, does what it says in the title: it reports the concerns of issues of a number of families with problems. She’s convinced that intensive social work can make a difference, and as far as that goes I have no disagreement. But there are serious problems in the language that she is using, and in particular in her persistent references to inter-generational problems. She’s talked about “welfare dependency and sexual abuse going back generations.” She refers to “entrenched cycles of suffering problems and causing problems”. She claimed that “problems such as sexual abuse, teenage pregnancies, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency and educational failure were often repeated by different generations.”
This argument has a long history. “Troubled families” have been called degenerates, moral defectives, the abyss, problem families, multi-problem families, the ‘hard to reach’ and the underclass. The claim that they passed problems from one generation to another features in arguments on degeneracy, the culture of poverty, the cycle of deprivation, transmitted deprivation and the dependency culture. And what we can say about all of these arguments, because there are decades of evidence to draw on, is that they are not true. The population of people who have problems now is not substantially the same as those who will have problems in ten years’ time. Most adults have varying experiences through their lifetimes. Most children from deprived backgrounds are not deprived as adults. Keith Joseph, who coined the phrase “the cycle of deprivation”, set up a major social science project to investigate it. From that project, we know that if, over a long period of time, we begin with a cohort of the most deprived children and follow them through the generations, their great-grandchildren will have much the same profile as the rest of the population. For example, as part of the work, a thousand deprived families in Newcastle were followed through the generations. They did not pass down problems from parent to child. (The main source is I Kolvin and others, Continuities of deprivation, Avebury 1990.)