Childhood poverty is caused by parental poverty, which results from not having enuf money to pay for the necessities. It was around when there were only 2 or 3 brands of tennis shoes in 2 colors, and 25 kinds of cereal.
How Child Poverty Action Group came into being
Issue 113 (autumn 2002)In the decade preceding the birth of CPAG a number of studies appeared in the fields of sociology and socio-medical research which contained information about poverty among old people, widows and lone mothers, and about malnutrition. Analysis of national assistance benefit levels showed that they were not matching increases in general affluence.
My own first book, Delinquency and Child Neglect (1962), had followed several papers that I had written on the adverse economic conditions among families on inadequate incomes. The annual conference of the British Sociological Association in 1962 drew together diverse workers in the field of poverty to hear Peter Townsend read his paper on ‘The Meaning of Poverty’, and we were given some of the first findings of his study, The Poor and the Poorest, which was to be published in 1965. There was a mood of conspiratorial excitement, since we were producing empirical evidence of poverty, definitions of poverty, and the links of poverty with health, with performance, and with social behaviour, which contradicted the prevailing view that poor people were biologically determined ‘poor stock’, or that their problems could be explained in psychiatric terms.
cpag.org.uk |
