MyFavouriteClintonisGeorge
You mistake me -- or, rather, I most likely didn't make my thoughts very clear. My post from last night is rather unwieldly.
I was thinking about "tribal children" in that last paragraph within the context of children not wearing pants, rather than neglect. While I writing about her comment, I was trying to figure out a) what kind of headspace CB inhabits and b) whether there would be any reason why a child in Britain would not own pants other than neglect.
I was playing through scenarios in my mind. Is it possible that there are some situations where some parents in London misunderstand Western dress codes? So I started considering all the instances in the world where children do not tend to wear pants, so we are looking at traditional cultures such as African tribal children, South American tribal children, South East Asian village children, and instances were children don't wear underwear under their clothes, so Chinese village children, Mongolian tribal children etc.
So then I thought, okay, say, a family from this cultural background comes to London and their child goes to school, is it likely they would make the mistake of dressing the child in western clothes without purchasing underwear? It is possible but, to be honest, I just cannot see that such a thing occurs regularly to the point of being "18 percent" of a deprived group. And, again, Britain doesn't really have a lot of migrant families from this type of background. As a rule, traditional Mongolian tribal families do not migrate to Britain.
Again, such families would not necessarily fall into a "deprived group" as commonly defined by CB, which also seems to focus heavily on neglect and mental health, and further more, the instances of non-pants wearing tends to be confined to rather young children in these cultures. Once a girl hits puberty, by default, in some of these cultures, she requires some sort of undergarment.
So I came to the conclusion that if CB were channeling this type of image, it would be have to be site specific, so it would be an African tribal pantless child in Africa, iyswim ...
... because this is how I suspect she works. As a pp said, she manipulates "semiotic markers" or, as I would adapt, she uses images of arresting and potent, almost cinematic, narratives to her own ends.
So for her own life story, we get "Escape from the Shah", "A Beautiful (Camila) Mind", "Mother Teresa Camila of Calcutta Southwark", there's also a bit of "(Camila's) House of Sand and Fog" in there too in terms of nearly losing her flat, and when she is using this type of imagery to describe her clients, we get "The Feral Apocalypse", "London's Ragged Children", "Shame of Romania London" (a transposing of the developmental problems of Romanian orphans onto Southwark children).
All these are borrowed narratives with a lot of cultural resonance. So if she was looking to reflect a resonant image of a pantless child, there are only a small number of options: the historically potent image of the deprived Victorian child, or an indigenous image that implied a climate of economic underdevelopment, so the indigenous child.
This probably makes no sense whatsoever. 
I should have just said that I didn't mean to imply the African tribal child was deprived.