10 million children in Turkey living in poverty: report

Nearly 10 million children in Turkey are living in poverty, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing a child poverty report released by The Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV).

Titled “Türkiyede Çocuk Yokusulluğu: Mevcut Durum ve Riskler” (Child Poverty in Turkey: Current Situation and Risks), the report examines child poverty in Turkey since 2011.

The findings highlight that younger children are particularly vulnerable, with over 43 percent of those aged 0-14 living in poverty. Social exclusion among children in Turkey remains alarmingly high, with recent data showing little to no improvement.

Social exclusion refers to the process in which individuals or groups are systematically marginalized and denied full access to various rights, opportunities and resources that are available to others in society.

The report also points to significant regional disparities, with the southeastern region bearing the brunt of child poverty. Despite accounting for only 29.6 percent of Turkey’s child population, 48.5 percent of the region’s children live in poverty. The provinces of Şanlıurfa and Diyarbakır alone represent 13.1 percent of the country’s impoverished youth.

Since 2012 Turkey has received millions of migrants from neighboring Syria, most of whom were granted temporary protection status. The situation of migrant children is often described as precarious, and several reports have documented the problems related to their access to education.

Labor rights groups regularly report the death of migrant children who were forced to work in dangerous jobs.

A post-coup purge carried out by the government after a July 2016 coup attempt has also presumably contributed to child poverty by incarcerating thousands of parents, including former civil servants summarily dismissed from their positions and people from almost all walks of life, on political grounds.

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International have described the situation of former civil servants as “civil death,” as the decree-laws that enabled the purges also brought severe restrictions on the victims’ access to the job market in the private sector.