COMMUNITY CARE: GENDER ISSUES

Abstract

Development and debate within social work around community care have been prom inent since the Barclay Committee introduced the notion of community social work (Barclay, 1982). Commentary which emerged at the time recognized that Barclay's analysis of the role and task of social work depended upon a notion of community care which involved an idealized notion of community and informal carers, who would invariably be female family members (Allan, 1983). In many ways, the recommendations of the Barclay report have had little impact on the delivery of services in the community. Arrangements for community care prescribed in the White Paper (Department of Health, 1989) and implemented follow ing the 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act were far more radical and far reaching than any envisaged in the Barclay Report, but the themes of commun ity and gender remain central to debates. More accurately, in social policy and soci ology the themes are not only central to debate, they are generating new discourses around citizenship, caring and community. However, social work and social care prac tice and theorizing are paying scant attention to these issues. This may be because the introduction of care management narrowed the focus of social work and social care practice on to individual needs which have to be assessed, codified and responded to. Expectations that needs will be met by 'purchaser' agencies commissioning ser vices from independent sector providers has led to the fragmentation of networks and communities, and to a reframing of the sector into the 'providers' competing for contracts, the conditions of which will be met by ungendered workers responding to the needs of anonymous users or customers who are defined by their packages of care rather than by the sum total of their experiences. Such an analysis might seem unduly harsh on those employed by statutory social services as either social workers or care managers working with community care policies. This critical commentary identifies that an arbitrary overview of journal art icles produces a spectrum of attention to gender in community care debates. At one end, community care is discussed with little or no acknowledgement that the world of service users, carers and providers is inhabited by women and men. At the other end, feminist theorizing in social policy and in the more generic women's studies journals has not only attended to issues of gender, but in doing so has sought to explicate meanings of both community care and constructions of gender. In focusing on three main themes (caring, service delivery and citizenship), it is argued that the initial focus was on, and involved claims making about, the experiences of women as carers. However, attention to the category 'woman' revealed different attention to the © 1998 British Association of Social Workers