section_path: Characteristics/Prejudice and exploitation
section_name: Prejudice and exploitation
paragraph_text: Prejudice and exploitation
  
  Cultural factors, such as discrimination of various kinds, can negatively affect productivity such as age discrimination, stereotyping, discrimination against people with physical disability, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, and caste discrimination. Children are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as adults. Women are the group suffering from the highest rate of poverty after children, in what is referred to as the feminization of poverty. In addition, the fact that women are more likely to be caregivers, regardless of income level, to either the generations before or after them, exacerbates the burdens of their poverty. Those in poverty have increased chances of incurring a disability which leads to a cycle where disability and poverty are mutually reinforcing.
  
  Max Weber and some schools of modernization theory suggest that cultural values could affect economic success. However, researchers have gathered evidence that suggest that values are not as deeply ingrained and that changing economic opportunities explain most of the movement into and out of poverty, as opposed to shifts in values. A 2018 report on poverty in the United States by UN special rapporteur Philip Alston asserts that caricatured narratives about the rich and the poor (that "the rich are industrious, entrepreneurial, patriotic and the drivers of economic success" while "the poor are wasters, losers and scammers") are largely inaccurate, as "the poor are overwhelmingly those born into poverty, or those thrust there by circumstances largely beyond their control, such as physical or mental disabilities, divorce, family breakdown, illness, old age, unlivable wages or discrimination in the job market." Societal perception of people experiencing economic difficulty has historically appeared as a conceptual dichotomy: the "good" poor (people who are physically impaired, disabled, the "ill and incurable," the elderly, pregnant women, children) vs. the "bad" poor (able-bodied, "valid" adults, most often male).
  
  According to experts, many women become victims of trafficking, the most common form of which is prostitution, as a means of survival and economic desperation. Deterioration of living conditions can often compel children to abandon school to contribute to the family income, putting them at risk of being exploited. For example, in Zimbabwe, a number of girls are turning to sex in return for food to survive because of the increasing poverty. According to studies, as poverty decreases there will be fewer and fewer instances of violence. Some data such as the UNICEF reports and also a research called " Echo of Silence " show that there is a close correlation between economic poverty and early marriage. In some developing countries, child marriage is considered an economic measure that can improve the family’s poor condition, strengthen family bonds.