UN shocked by level of poverty in Alabama
The US state of Alabama —which is holding a much-watched special election — has some of the worst conditions of poverty in the developed world, according to a visiting UN official.
Philip Alston, whose job takes him around the planet to look at conditions of extreme poverty, said some of the things he saw in parts of Alabama so-called Black Belt, particularly in regard to sewage disposal, were unprecedented in the West, independent.co.uk reported.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the first world. This is not a sight that one normally sees,” said Philip Alston, the UN’S Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. “I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this.” Alston made his comments to Al.com while touring parts of Butler County and Lowndes County, where he met a man who had unreliable electricity and a septic tank that no longer worked.
People in the region frequently suffer from E. Coli and hookworm, a disease associated with extreme poverty and which was thought to have been eradicated in the US more than 100 years ago but which was recently found to persist in pockets of Lowndes County, located just 20 miles from the state capital, Montgomery, where many residents are too poor to afford a septic system and make their own sewer lines using PVC piping.
The lines run from the people’s homes some 30ft above the ground before emptying into ditches or waste ground.
“This seems safe to [the residents],” Rojelio Mejia, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine who led the study that discovered the continued existence of hookworm in Alabama, told NPR.
“But Alabama is very hilly and any drizzle of rain causes flooding, so whatever they delivered to the site spreads to the entire area, including their neighbors’ area.”
The Black Belt of Alabama was originally named for its rich top soil but took on another meaning after the establishment of slave plantations. It has long suffered from poverty and racial discrimination.
Alston, who is carrying out a 15-day tour of the US to produce a report on poverty and human rights, was also taken to a property in Lowndes County where five people, including two youngsters and a teenager with Down Syndrome, live in a home where the sewage is discharged into open pools that flood when it rains.
In Butler County, Alston reportedly told one resident: “The hope is that we’ll bring attention to [these problems], just like we bring attention to people who are being tortured.”
The special election, being held to fill the senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he joined Donald Trump’s cabinet, has featured debate about poverty, jobs and economic growth in the state.
However, the contest between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore, has been largely dominated by allegations of sexual abuse and assault levelled at Moore by a series of women. He has adamantly denied the claims. The gender pay gap is perpetuated by teenage girls who want jobs that pay less in the UK, a major study has found.
While teenage girls have higher aspirations than boys to attend university, their male counterparts tend to aspire towards professions with bigger salaries, according to research by University College London (UCL)’S Institute for Education, telegraph.co.uk wrote.
Professor Lucinda Platt, one of the authors of the study coauthor, said that the findings highlight the “importance of recognizing the role of both boys’ and girls’ choices in perpetuating labor market inequalities”.
She added that teenagers should be “encouraged and supported to think beyond gender stereotypes” and consider a full range of future career options.
On average, girls thought they had a 71 percent chance of going to university, and 14 percent of girls were certain they would go, researchers found.
Meanwhile, the average expectation of boys was 63 percent, and just under 10 percent were convinced they would get to university.
When asked about their ideal job, the average hourly wage for the occupations that girls aspired to was 27 percent or £6.49 lower than boys.
The research team analyzed data collected from over 7,700 teenagers in the UK who are all part of the Millennium Cohort Study, a study which has followed their lives since they were born at the turn of the century.
When they were 14, the teenagers were asked a series of questions to find out their future aspirations. While the most popular jobs for both boys and girls included some highly-paid careers, the pay among the jobs girls aspired to was, on average, much lower.
This remained the case even after excluding from the calculations aspirations among a number of the boys to be highly-paid professional sportsmen.
For girls, the most popular jobs that they said they aspired to were the medical profession, a secondary school teacher, a singer, the legal profession, a vet, a nurse and a midwife.
For boys, it was a professional sportsman, a software developer, an engineer, the army, an architect and a secondary school teacher.
Both genders tended to favor jobs where the workforce was dominated by their own sex. Boys chose occupations with an average workforce that is 74 percent male, while girls chose jobs where women make up 59 percent of the workforce.
Dr. Sam Parsons, a coauthor, said he was surprised to find such ‘gendered differences’ in young people’s aspirations. He said: “Despite aiming high academically and professionally, girls still appear to be aiming for less well-paid jobs.”