Causes & Effects of Poverty On Society, Children & Violence

Causes and effects of poverty

Several issues like hunger, illness and thirst are both causes and effects - for instance: not having water means you're poor, but being poor also means you can't afford water or food. In a sense, they’re a characteristic of poverty in that they define poverty. Therefore, you should always look at both ends of the problem - and you can refer to the article on the causes of poverty to complete the picture.

The poverty cycle


The effects of poverty are most often interrelated so that one problem hardly ever occurs alone. For instance, bad sanitation makes it easier to spread around old and new diseases, and hunger and lack of water make people more vulnerable to them.

Impoverished communities often suffer from discrimination and end up caught in cycles of poverty. Let's find out just what this means concretely.

Poverty and crime

Crime varies over time and space; it’s high in specific areas and low in others, usually with huge differences in wealth. This has always led experts to study why and what happens in those places where there is a concentration of crime.

It’s unquestionable that crime ranks high among the effects of poverty, and those impoverished neighborhoods or entire cities show the same problems with uneducated adults and kids that nurture more unemployment and crime, and then leading to chronic, long-lasting poverty.

Different types of poverty for different crimes

But to solve these issues, it’s fundamental to have a more detailed and in-depth vision of the poverty cycle here, and what the precise effects of poverty on crime are in different communities and environments.

For example it’s been proved that unemployment is a bigger factor for specific types of crime than income inequality is. Low incomes on the other side tend to spur property-related crimes (burglary and all that) but reduce violence. Overall studies have shown very different effects of poverty, for different types of poverty: from income inequalities, to social exclusion and unemployment.

Poverty and crime