The United Kingdom has the highest child mortality rate in Western Europe except for Malta. The UK’s child mortality rate currently stands t 6.5 per thousand live births.
This has been the case for many years now and a recent research study into the causes has found that deprivation is the key factor which correlates with higher infant mortality rate.
Dr Karen Luyt from the University of Bristol lead the study which found that every extra 10% increase in deprivation, there is a corresponding increase in the child mortality rate.
To put it bluntly* the poorer a child is the more likely they are to die before they reach 18 years of age. (*and maybe crudely as poverty isn’t exactly the same thing as deprivation).
It’s not that being born into deprivation itself directly causes a child to be more likely to die compared to a child born into wealth, it’s the societal and lifestyle factors associated with being born into deprivation.
And the primary factor which causes higher child mortality rates is exposure to smoking.
The programme above features one interview with someone from a deprived background which illustrate how this works – she describes how she started smoking at 14, along with all her friends, and this wasn’t discouraged as her entire family smoked too.
She describes how her friends would pool their lunch money to buy cigarettes and do without lunch and sometimes use the school emergency fund not for lunch but again for cigarettes.
And then when these teenagers become adults they carry on smoking, and when some of them eventually get pregnant, around 6% of them continue smoking into pregnancy, and it’s that which increases the likelihood of child mortality.
(The link between smoking during pregnancy and damaging the foetus is well established).
There have been government intervention programmes to try and help people quit smoking but they are less successful in poorer areas where more people smoke as it’s simply harder to quit when more people around you in your daily life are smoking.
And not to mention cuts to government pubic health funding recently which mean many of these quit smoking programmes have been cut back.
This issue was the investigation of a recent News Night study which you can view on YouTube:
NB – the first half of the video is about the issue of smoking, the second half mainly consists of politicians lying about their commitments to improving public health funding.
Relevance to A-level sociology
This provides yet more evidence of the consequences of inequality in society, and the harmful effects of deprivation in particular, and it’s a useful update to topic of death rates, which have long been declining in rich countries, but this reminds us that even in rich countries like Britain the death rate can be relatively high in deprived areas.
If we look at the agenda of the report it’s also interesting that ‘deprivation’ is the main cause of high child death rates and yet the whole video is about the lifestyle issue of smoking – this might be an example of agenda setting from a Marxist point of view – shifting the emphasis away from the broader issue of inequality to the ‘lifestyle’ factor of smoking.
Finally, it’s a good example of quantitative data analysis – with a research team talking data from the public health database and correlating this with other factors such as the deprivation index. This is is research broadly in line with Positivist tradition.
