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- Author: Ana Paula Gil x
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Like other Mediterranean countries, Portugal is characterised by a strongly familistic care regime, where women continue to play a central role in family care. Recently, Portugal has attempted to implement the Informal Carer Statute, a policy to support family carers. This chapter aims to chronologically reconstruct the evolution of the carers’ policy in Portugal and identify controversies around this social policy. Based on a documental and historical analysis, 15 regulations were identified between 2016 and 2022, focusing on the benefits for informal carers, cash benefits, and state co-payment of services. Eligibility criteria, based exclusively on income, limit the access of thousands of carers who are silenced by the state. The new care regulation has exclusively become a measure to combat situations of poverty. Recognition of the carer's contribution and protection in retirement and ill-health have been minimised, although these constituted one of the main demands that pushed for the emergence of a carers' movement in the public arena. The struggle for recognition through the social movement for informal carers (O movimento dos cuidadores informais) turned into a struggle to change the law, mobilising civil society. The National Association of Informal Carers, as the representative body of its members, emerged from the social movement and, recently, was the promoter of a citizens' legislative initiative. Through the Portuguese case, different examples of strategies of a process of politicisation are portrayed. Care becomes thus an object of political struggle within the social and political field.
This book offers a new analytical framework for the multi-layered processes of politicising and gendering care for older people, understood as an inherently political and gendered condition of human existence. It brings together contributions that focus on different manifestations and interpretations of these processes in several European settings and at various societal and political levels. It investigates how care for older adults varies across time and place and aims to provide an in-depth comprehension of how it becomes an arena of political struggle and the object of public policy and political intervention. The book comprises multidisciplinary research stemming from gender studies, history, political science, public policy, social anthropology, social work, and sociology. These analyses examine the issue of care for older people as a political concern from many angles, such as problematising care needs, long-term care policies, home care services, institutional services, and family care. The book’s contributions reveal the diversity of situations in which the processes of politicising and gendering care for older adults overlap, contradict, or reinforce each other while leading to increased gender (in)equalities on different levels – familial, professional, and societal. Both caring for older adults or being taken care of when becoming old(er) or frail are potentially a feature of any personal trajectory, which is always contextually situated. Therefore, this book is an invitation to reflect upon care for older people as an issue particularly significant at any time and relevant at any societal level or socio-political sphere.