8 - Who Cares? ‘External’, ‘Internal’ and ‘Mediator’ Debates about South Asian Elders’ Needs

Summary

Introduction

People are living longer and that doesn't mean that if people are living longer they are happy and healthy, they are not. That's the main thing … Care … is it the family's responsibility, or the land, or should the country take responsibility? (An outreach worker for Ekta, a voluntary group, London, 19 March 2004)

I don't think that the Asian community like us to be involved. They’re very independent people and look after their own people. They usually have some family and feel reluctant to accept services from outside the family. (Social worker, quoted in Department of Health publication 1998: 31)

This chapter explores how ‘external’ debates, notably in the public sphere which, as Grillo supra notes, often reflect migrants’ imagined cultural practices, interact with ‘internal’ debates that occur within migrant families. Several authors draw attention to the impact of external debates in the form of policies on South Asian families in Britain in the arena of care and service provision (Boneham 1989; Forbat 2004; Katbamna et al. 2004). South Asian families are often positioned in public discourses as ‘looking after their own’, and this, it is argued, contributes to the low take-up of services by Asian elders and the misrecognition of their actual care needs (Forbat 2004; Harper & Levin 2003). Such assumptions about families fail to recognise that they are undergoing change arising from a variety of factors related to the migration process and the development cycle of households (Mand 2004), and it is in these contexts that internal discussions and negotiations about who cares, and for whom, occur. Through a focus on the elderly, this chapter illustrates how external discourses in the form of policies construct South Asian families in a guise that marginalises the experiences of the elderly who may need care beyond the family. At the same time debates within families concerning who should care for the elderly are apparent and, more often than not, stress idealised situations based on gender models which denote specific family members to care for the elderly (Gardner 2002)

Alongside public discourses and internal debates within South Asian families there is a third voice, that of voluntary organisations, and this chapter will draw attention to the role of such organisations working in the ‘community’.