Who cares for whom in this world? - is the question that Zrinka asks in today's article, 'Insult and injury' - to which Jenny replies, "For the people locked up in Campsfield (for what?) - not enough people." This is a very uncomfortable exchange for those of us in the middle ground or the silent majority. In her piece later this week Sonja Linden mentions some caring professionals that have inspired a character in her play, Crocodile Seeking Refuge, who ruin some aspects of their lives when they "step over the professional line in their dedication to their [asylum seeking] clients." But in the course of her work with the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum, Zrinka's encounter is with another type of professional, as she puts it:
"I find this one of the biggest challenges that I face. It is easier in a way to comfort a victim or stand up to a straightforward xenophobe. But what can one say to an essentially good bystander in denial? - someone too busy to ask WHY? let alone think that they should and could do something to prevent it."
The line between these two 'excesses' is an increasingly vexed one for all of us. There is nothing at all easy about Zrinka's conclusion that "we have to make a moral choice". And of course it isn't a conclusion, or an end at all - it is just a beginning. Meanwhile, for the Zrinka's and Jenny's of this world - the people who have already begun to care in a rather consistent way - there is something wearying and puzzling about pointing the finger at the Emperor who has no clothes and finding that many of us carry on walking around them and going about our daily business.
Why this is the case would take a great deal more discussion than we can have on this blog this week. But I've been thinking about one way of looking at it. What if one were to compose a recent history of 'caring' - say over the last two decades.
One of the processes involved, certainly in this country, has been the reaction of society to the pill, women in the workplace, and the exposure of a previously unrecognised fact of huge implications ie. the feminist 'discovery' of the 'private/public split' and 'a male breadwinner bias' that had linked citizens' entitlements to a model of life-long employment not constrained by the reproductive responsibilities of childbearing, childrearing, domestic work and caring for the sick and elderly. In short, women as 'carers' had been taken for granted and for centuries, caring had been a private matter, not 'rated' by the state, although essential to it.
Perhaps this new awareness made the NHS - a health service free at the point of need - such a precious exception to the rule. But this very attachment by the same token deepens the predicament of how to care for people who are indeed 'just' - in fact like all of us, human beings in need.
For feminists over the last 20 years there have been all sorts of reactions to these discoveries. One reaction to the public/private hierarchy was to defend the rights of women as active, independent individuals in the public realm. Many people from all sorts of backgrounds tried to have everything: and marriage perhaps became a more fragile institution as a result. Others, once this Pandora's box had been opened, pointed to the exploitation and inequality that arose on a global scale directly from the private/public split, and still others pointed to the limits of its relevance in some societies. There were also those particularly interesting gender analysts and activists who drew attention to the set of practical ethical values that arise from the interconnected lives of mutually dependent people - moral concepts such as responsibility and care, attentiveness, responsiveness, trust, patience and caring - and asked why these qualities as opposed to power-seeking of various kinds, had remained so absent from the public sphere and that of, for example, international relations? Towards the end of the Cold War, that became quite a challenge - and then 'events' intervened.
But the question, what would happen if care-giving went public has never entirely disappeared since that time. And yet, who back in the 1980s would have anticipated some of the forms it would take? Saskia Sassen, another of our contributors to MigrantVoice this week, was a contributor to the 2003 compilation of essays edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy which drew attention to the 'underside of globalisation'. Saskia wrote about a 'feminisation of the job supply' that gave many women, 'more control over budgeting and other domestic decisions, and greater influence in their lives': including the 'cross-border care chains of low-paid nannies, nurses and sex workers' hastened by the 'hollowing out of the welfare state' and the 'gathering demand for a global professional market which no one will explicitly own up to, but which exists nevertheless.' These roles, she argued, are made typically invisible by mainstream accounts of both the globalisation and immigration processes that they intersect. But these processes have 'created a growing demand for top-level women professionals and low-wage service workers - mostly women, the latter often employed by the former.' Then of course there are trafficking and sex tourism - further strange fruits of caring 'going public.'
So, it seems as if there all sorts of new answers which need to be given to the question of who cares for whom? - new invisible processes to be 'outed' and maybe, new reasons for majorities to be silent...
