Airing on the eve on the US election, this Dispatches film follows families failed by a country that offers them almost no security – even during a pandemic
There never seems to be a programme about children in poverty, despair or crisis (if we distinguish between the three) the broadcast of which cannot be described as “timely”. That is bad enough, but American Nightmare: Trump’s Breadline Kids (Channel 4) could not be timelier. That is true on his side of the Atlantic and on ours, as the airwaves of this septic isle fill with the sound of elected officials asserting that, for good moral and economic reasons, hungry children should not be fed via the public purse.
This latest instalment of the ever-reliable Dispatches series was recorded in Ohio over four months that took in the arrival of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests that spread across the US after the killing of George Floyd. It follows the stories of five young people, representing different facets of poverty. Kyah, 14, and her sister Kelia, 18, along with their mother, Becky, are part of the hidden homeless population. They have been sofa surfing with friends and relatives since Covid-19 hit the job Becky was about to start and left the family without an income. Unable to pay rent, they lost their home and then, as they waited for emergency benefits to come through, their possessions. The storage facility auctioned them off to cover the fees they could not pay on time. “Nobody chooses to be poor,” explains Kyah. “Sometimes it can look like that because they give up and accept it, but I don’t think nobody would choose to live this way.” The family are sharing one room at a friend’s house.
