International Day of Families 2026: Dickens would be appalled, so should we
May 15, 2026
By Celestine Greenwood
Today, 15th May, has been designated by the United Nations as the International Day of the Family. The aim of designating such a day is to draw focus onto the wellbeing of families, seen by the U.N. as the building stones of society. This year the theme for the day is “Families, Inequalities and Wellbeing.” Today, the need to focus on families could not be more acute. Today approximately 4 million children in the United Kingdom live in poverty; some don’t have a book of their own to read today, some will not go to sleep in a bed of their own this evening and some will go to sleep hungry. According to the National Literacy Trust almost a million children aged five to 18 do not own a book, research published by Barnardo’s in 2023 revealed that approximately 900,000 children live in ‘bed poverty’ (referred to as being without access to a suitable bed of their own) and as recently as Wednesday this week research was released by Big Issue and Sainsbury’s suggesting that one in six adults put a child to bed hungry at least once each week over the last 12 months. These statistics and the picture they paint of life for some children in this country should be shocking to us all. As the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel De Souza, observed in a report published in 2025, some children are living in Dickensian levels of poverty.
Charles Dickens drew the attention of Victorian society to the dire poverty in which so many families and children were living and to the horrors of the work house, a system instituted by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. He died in 1870. In 1948 the modern welfare state was created with the aim of providing ‘cradle-to-the-grave’ protection. How then can it be that in 2026 we have families and children living in withering poverty? This is a deeply shameful situation and one that should call us all to action.
As lawyers engaged in public-facing and public-serving work such as criminal and family law cases we regularly engage with people with lived experience of poverty and see its impacts on individuals, families and communities. Data that disaggregates the number of children subject to care proceedings who live in families in poverty are not readily available. Our professional experience might suggest that the majority of applications for care orders involve families who either live in poverty or who nonetheless cannot be categorised socio-demographically as ‘middle class.’ Our experiences are confirmed by reliable research that establishes a compelling link between families in poverty and families experiencing state intervention through public law children proceedings. In our professional roles we should identify when poverty and disadvantage underpin a family situation in which children face the risk of significant harm, draw this to the attention of the court and advocate for appropriate supportive intervention from the State. If we do not address this corrosive link between poverty and the permanent separation of families through care proceedings, we risk the legal system becoming, to borrow from the work of Randles and Woodward, one that is about policing poverty not protecting families. We can each attempt to address this in our daily work and in our roles as citizens we can support the development of policies that combat the stark inequalities experienced by so many of our children. Every child should have access to books and toys to stimulate their development, to adequate and nourishing food, to a warm and secure home and to their own bed to sleep in – this is the minimum baseline, not a list of luxuries to be enjoyed by some and denied to others.
