Extended Summary

Today, poverty is becoming more complex with its increasingly different dimensions, and it turns members of different social groups into disadvantaged individuals with each passing day. Household or individual income is often used regularly to measure poverty. The argument here comes from the fact that income can be measured continuously over time. On the other hand, these incomes, which are determined according to poverty thresholds, have some important limitations. In this narrow-scoped approach, characteristics do not reflect households and individuals’ debts, as well as different income sources and access to resources. Ignoring the complex needs of different household structures, they present a narrow picture that does not include their disadvantaged status. Income has more constraints, especially in a structure where it is not known at what level children’s income in the household is distributed. For this reason, there is a need for an additional approach in understanding the dimensions of poverty experienced by children. In this context, material deprivation is useful in revealing the poverty experienced more strikingly and in explaining the inadequacies of the social policies carried out in terms of conditions, opportunities and result equality in a society. The problem of poverty, which has been entrenched for many years in Turkey, affects children the most among age groups.

In this respect, child poverty in Turkey is at the level of 32% on average compared to 2006-2020, and one out of every three children is in poverty and deprivation. The fact that these children growing up in poor households experience significant deprivation not only determines their entire development (physical, cognitive, spiritual, etc.) but also often face poverty and deprivation in their adult lives.

This study is derived from the author’s doctoral thesis titled “A Social Policy Proposal Against Child Poverty: Minimum Income Guarantee Model”. In this respect, the material deprivation of children in Turkey for the years 2006-2020 has been examined in many dimensions as the data permits, on the TUIK Income and Living Conditions Micro Data Set, and it is aimed to contribute to the gap on this subject in the literature.

Children affected by poverty and material deprivation caused by poverty in Turkey face a cycle of poverty throughout their lives. According to the material deprivation rates of children, a significant decrease was observed between the years 2006-2013, but the course of decrease was very slow in the following years and the material deprivation experienced by children became entrenched. The increasing financial deprivation experienced by girls is particularly striking. TUIK statistical level-1 and level-2, which reveal the important structural and deep-rooted problem of Turkey, also reveal child material deprivation rates, socio-economic differences between regions, income distribution inequalities and the segregation created by social injustice.

The analysis of child material deprivation in Turkey between the years 2006-2020 is the first comprehensive analysis of child material deprivation by years in terms of literature. According to the results of the analysis, the deepest deprivation is the deprivation of vacation with 65.1% (14.6 million). On the other hand, there is no automobile in the household with 40.0% (9.2 million) children. On the other hand, 8.6 million (36.4%) children live in households where there is difficulty in paying rent, housing loans and interest loans. The fact that there are 8.2 million children living in undernourished households shows that there is a severe deprivation caused by income poverty. In this respect, 41.8% of children in Turkey cannot be fed with protein-containing foods such as meat, chicken or fish every other day. Children’s physical, cognitive, mental, spiritual, etc. This situation, which creates irreversible damages in their development, brings with it strong problems especially in the education life of children and then in their adulthood.

It is clear that there is a need for radical social policy solutions to protect all vulnerable social groups, especially children, and to protect children from the cycle of poverty in their adult lives. It is seen in the light of these analyzes that especially children and their families need to break the cycle of poverty and ensure their social integration in parallel with their own economic and social development, together with other articulated social policy practices, especially income support. In this respect, the minimum income guarantee programs in the European Union, which have a more established and institutional structure compared to other practices in the world, can provide an example of a first step in this regard. Although income assurances are thought of as a palliative solution proposal, they actually create a significant level of continuous and unconditional assurance especially for households with very low incomes and the children in these households. In a process where the economic, social and political structure evolves in the world and in Turkey, income security becomes more important than ever in a climate where income inequalities and poverty increase, as well as in a climate where social justice is increasingly distanced and inequalities deepen. On the other hand, in addition to income guarantees, increasing women’s employment, reducing the burden of care for the elderly, children and disabled in the household, expanding free public nurseries, free nutrition at school, free provision of all current and all components including education, expanding the scope of health services for children, deterring child labor abuse. and additional social policy sets that include positive discrimination for groups with poor, disabled and migrant children may have stronger, permanent and lasting results in the fight against child material deprivation and poverty.