Child Rights, Child Poverty and Gender Equity in Development : Equity for Children mourns the loss of Professor Peter Townsend, a giant among men

Peter Townsend changed the way the world viewed poverty with his research on relative poverty, which contradicted the prevailing view that poor people were biologically pre-determined, or that their problems could be explained in psychiatric terms. A champion of both the young and the old, in the more than 40 years that of his career, he was instrumental in the creation of the Child Poverty Action Group, served as advisor on social policy issues to UK’s Labour Party, served as Head of the Department of Social Policy and Social Planning at the University of Bristol, Acting Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics, and created the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research.

Even with all of this and the many other accolades that he received, all those who knew this intellectual force also knew him to be a humble, open-minded, and well-grounded soul. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. Peter Townsend’s many influential works include:

The Concept of Poverty:Working Papers on Methods of Investigation and Life-Styles of the Poor in Different Countries (1970)
Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living, 1967 - 1969 (1979)
Inequalities in Health: The Black Report (1982)
Poverty Today (1986)
Health and Deprivation: Inequality and the North (1988)
The international analysis of poverty‎ (1993)
A Poor Future: Can We Counter Growing Poverty in Britain and across the World?
Breadline Europe: The Measurment of Poverty (2000)
World poverty: new policies to defeat an old enemy‎ (2002)
The Right to Social Security and National Development: Lessons from OECD experience for low-income countries (2007)