Investigate a Social Issue Essay

Dannie Baker
Professor Jayne Spencer
Sociology 100
Investigate a Social Issue
10/29/2011

Poverty seems to be slowly creeping into every facet, every neighborhood, and everyone’s lives. Reports have stated that we were no longer in recession, but as we approach a new year, three years after the market crash, I would like to believe that things aren’t getting better, but getting worse. Job loss is at a 9.1 percentage rate, which is equivalent to 14.0 million people unemployed as of last month (Statistics, 2011).
So how does society define the issue of poverty? A very well-known author, liberal political commentator, and entrepreneur decided to put together a tour called “Poverty Tour. In a telephone interview, Travis stated “They sense that they’re being rendered invisible, they sense that the focus has been on Wall Street, not Main Street, much less on the side street.” Interest in the weeklong series might be lifted by the recent Census Bureau finding that nearly one in six Americans — 46.2 million — live in poverty, the highest number ever reported by the bureau. The finding was widely reported in the news media last month. He summarized his findings by saying “The new poor are the former middle class (Stelter, 2011).”
However, as I research the subject more and more, I’m finding that single parent families are the ones that are being hit the hardest. In a newsweeks.com article, I read some alarming statistics from a 2010 Census report: 42.2 percent of single mothers and their families in the U.S. are impoverished, and a whopping 85 percent of all single parents in the country are women. Poverty rates among single mothers are up nearly 4 percent from last year alone and 10 percent from the millennium, according to the report. More unsettling data revealed that poverty rates among single women in the U.S. are significantly higher than those in other high income countries. "The ever-increasing plague of poverty in America warrants an equally strong...