Perspectives on Care and Care-Giving

Family members, friends and neighbours have always looked after people who are old, frail, sick or disabled. But it was only in the final twenty years of the twentieth century that such care-giving came to be named, identified as an issue for social policy and service providers, and that the experience of care-giving became the subject of empirical research and academic study. The term ‘carer’ was not formally recognised until the early 1980s in the United Kingdom (UK) and still has no distinct identity in many languages apart from English. In Italian, for example, the word is not recognised, and those who in England might be termed carers are usually identified as ‘family members’. Research on the subject is rare (Taccani, 1994). This is significant. In this book I argue that the identification and naming of carers as a distinct social group has had an important impact in terms of policy, practice, theory and ethics issues, but that it has also created difficulties and dilemmas in each of these areas. I will discuss these dilemmas and offer both practical and conceptual ways to address them.