Research Guides: Human Rights 75: Care and support system

About Care and Support System

For too long, we’ve relied on women and girls to provide care to sustain families, communities, and societies. At the same time, older people, persons with disabilities and children, are seen merely as passive receivers of care. Their rights, both as givers and receivers of care and support, have been neglected. The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that we need to transform our care and support systems. All of us need care and support that enable us to participate in society, and to live in dignity and with choice. Rights-based care and support systems, that are gender-, disability-, and age-responsive, are a key lever for achieving sustainable development.

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk call to transform care and support systems

In the context of the Human Rights 75 campaign, Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for the establishment of support and care systems that are human rights-based, gender-responsive, disability-inclusive and age-sensitive.

Care and support as human rights

On the International Human Rights Day in 2021, Michele Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, underscored that "care is not charity. In many aspects, “care” are human rights." She stated: "We must invest in public care services, including support services for persons with disabilities. We must break the gender stereotypes which assign care responsibility only to women and girls. And we must protect the rights of care workers and unpaid caregivers.

Inclusion of persons with disabilities

In 2023, the report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (A/HRC/52/52) examined the main elements of care and support systems to ensure community inclusion of persons with disabilities, including as a means of building forward better after the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

Gender-responsive care and support system

In 2022, the Human Rights Council held a panel discussion on how to transform the care and support systems to advance gender equality and the rights to support and care, with a focus on the intersectionality of discrimination.

Story: Care and support is about human rights

Marking the first International Day of Care and Support in 2023, this web story shares voices of people - persons with disabilities and their families, women community care workers and older women - on their views on care and support.

Story: Care and support systems: A matter of human rights

February 2023, UN Human Rights Office dedicated the month to highlight the human rights dimension of care and support. This web story also shares voices of persons with disabilities, domestic migrant workers and grandmothers caring for the family.

Story: “Care and support allow me to live independently”

Marking the International Day of Persons with Disabilities in 2023, UN Human Rights Office underscored that "support and care systems are essential for persons with disabilities to fully participate in society, with choices equal to others, and to live with dignity, autonomy and independence."

United Nations Observance of the International Day of Care and Support

At the celebration of the first International Day of Care and Support in 2023, Ilze Brands Kehris, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights stated: "We must strive for establishing care and support systems that are gender-, disability-, and age-responsive and that fully respect the human rights of givers and receivers of care and support. To realize these ambitions, we must recognize, reduce and redistribute unpaid care and support work, and reward paid care and support workers, while securing access to quality care and support by recipients, in a manner that promotes the enjoyment of human rights by all. And we must ensure voices of paid care and support workers, unpaid carers, and recipients of care and support, in all their diversity, are integrated in decision-making."

Featured Books

Translating Human Rights in Education by Julia Biermann
ISBN: 9780472055289
Publication Date: 2022-05-24
The 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) is the first human rights treaty to explicitly acknowledge the right to education for persons with disabilities. In order to realize this right, the convention's Article 24 mandates state parties to ensure inclusive education systems that overcome outright exclusion as well as segregation in special education settings. Despite this major global policy change to tackle the discriminations persons with disabilities face in education, this has yet to take effect in most school systems worldwide. Focusing on the factors undermining the realization of disability rights in education, Julia Biermann probes current meanings of inclusive education in two contrasting yet equally challenged state parties to the UN CRPD: Nigeria, whose school system overtly excludes disabled children, and Germany, where this group primarily learns in special schools. In both countries, policy actors aim to realize the right to inclusive education by segregating students with disabilities into special education settings. In Nigeria, this demand arises from the glaring lack of such a system. In Germany, conversely, from its extraordinary long-term institutionalization. This act of diverting from the principles embodied in Article 24 is based on the steadfast and shared belief that school systems, which place students into special education, have an innate advantage in realizing the right to education for persons with disabilities. Accordingly, inclusion emerges to be an evolutionary and linear process of educational expansion that depends on institutionalized special education, not a right of persons with disabilities to be realized in local schools on an equal basis with others. This book proposes a refined human rights model of disability in education that shifts the analytical focus toward the global politics of formal mass schooling as a space where discrimination is sustained.
Care and Support Rights after Neoliberalism: Balancing Competing Claims Through Policy and Law by Yvette Maker
ISBN: 9781108485203
Publication Date: 2022-04-28
This book offers principles for designing care and support policy to address two persistent sources of tension in the field. The first is the tension between supporting women's unpaid caring and supporting their paid work participation. The second is the tension between carers' claims for support based on the 'burden' of caring and disability rights claims for support for choice and independence for people with disabilities. Policies tend to favor one activity and one constituency over the other. Consequently, individuals' access to resources and choices about how they live are constrained. Using a citizenship rights framework, with insights from human rights law, the principles provide guidance for designing policy and legislation that avoids 'either/or' approaches and addresses the interests of multiple constituencies. Analyses of Australian and English policies demonstrate the value of the principles for developing policy that reduces inequality, responds to 'failures' of neoliberalism, and expands choice for all.
Accessibility Denied. Understanding Inaccessibility and Everyday Resistance to Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities by Hanna Egard (Editor); Kristofer Hansson (Editor); David Wästerfors (Editor)
ISBN: 9781000512700
Publication Date: 2021-11-09
This book explores the societal resistance to accessibility for persons with disabilities, and tries to set an example of how to study exclusion in a time when numerous policies promise inclusion. With 12 chapters organised in three parts, the book takes a comprehensive approach to accessibility, covering transport and communication, knowledge and education, law and organisation. Topics within a wide cross-disciplinary field are covered, including disability studies, social work, sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, and history. The main example is Sweden, with its implementation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities within the context of the Nordic welfare state. By identifying and discussing persistent social and cultural conditions as well as recurring situations and interactions that nurture resistance to advancing accessibility, despite various strong laws promoting it, the book's conclusions are widely transferable. It argues for the value of alternating between methods, theoretical perspectives, and datasets to explore how new arenas, resources and technologies cause new accessibility concerns -- and possibilities -- for persons living with impairments. We need to be able to follow actors closely to uncover how they feel, act, and argue, but also to connect to wider discursive and institutional patterns and systems. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of disability studies, social work, sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, political science, and organisation studies.
Economic Woman in the Age of Capital by Frances Raday
ISBN: 9781138189027
Publication Date: 2019-05-14
The author introduces the concept of economic woman and makes her visible in duality with and opposition to the exclusive model of economic man. Economic man has epitomized neo-liberal capitalism, which embraces competition and maximization of profit, resulting in a steep increase in economic inequality. The book demonstrates that women's inequality is a crucial factor in economic inequality, which cannot be fully understood without relating to women's situation, and that economic woman cannot thrive in the conditions of economic inequality created under global neo-liberalism. Emphasising the international human rights guarantees of women's right to equality in all fields of life, the author documents woman's increased participation in political, public, financial and corporate institutions, employment and entrepreneurship, with some women reaching high profile positions. Nevertheless, using global data, she reveals that economic woman lags behind, with a severe economic power deficit, an unfulfilled promise of equal employment opportunity, a gendered impact of poverty and barriers to gender equality in the family.
Lone Mothers Between Paid Work and Care by Majella Kilkey
ISBN: 1351743503
Publication Date: 2018-02-06
This title was first published in 2000. This is a study which compares and contrasts how lone mothers' relationships to paid work and care-giving are constructed across 20 countries, and with what outcomes for lone mothers' levels of economic well-being. In doing so, the book explores from an international perspective, the implications of the re-orientation of lone mothers' citizenship within the UK policy field from that of care-giver to paid worker. The volume engages with feminist comparative social policy literature concerned with specifying a construction of citizenship appropriate to capturing international variations in women's social rights. By incorporating social rights attached to paid work and care, as well as those which enable lone mothers to move between sequential periods of paid work and care-giving across the child-rearing cycle, the study makes a significant contribution to the literature.
When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work by Mary Romero (Editor); Valerie Preston (Editor); Wenona Giles (Editor)
ISBN: 9781134762255
Publication Date: 2016-02-11
Women who migrate into domestic labour and care work are the single largest female occupational group migrating globally at present. Their participation in global migration systems has been acknowledged but remains under-theorized. Specifically, the impacts of women migrating into care work in the receiving as well as the sending societies are profound, altering gendered aspects of both societies. We know that migration systems link the women who migrate and the households and organizations that employ domestic and care workers, but how do these migration systems work, and more importantly, what are their impacts on the sending as well as the receiving societies? How do sending and receiving societies regulate women's migration for care work and how do these labour market exchanges take place? How is reproductive labour changed in the receiving society when it is done by women who are subject to multifaceted othering/racializing processes? A must buy acquisition, When Care Work Goes Global will be an extremely valuable addition for course adoption in migration, labour and gender courses taught in Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, Women's Studies, Area Studies, and International Development Studies.
Children's Rights and the Developing Law by Jane Fortin
ISBN: 1139168622
Publication Date: 2012-06-05
Following the implementation of the Human Rights Act 1998, awareness has increased that we live in a rights-based culture and that children constitute an important group of rights holders. Now in its third edition, Children's Rights and the Developing Law explores the way developing law and policies in England and Wales are simultaneously promoting and undermining the rights of children. It reflects on how far these developments take account of children's interests, using current research on children's needs as a template against which to assess their effectiveness and considering a broad range of topics, including medical law, education and youth justice. A critical approach is maintained throughout, particularly when assessing the extent to which the concept of children's rights is being acknowledged by the courts and policy makers and the degree to which the UK fulfils its obligations under, for example, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy by Professor Helma Lutz
ISBN: 1848132891
Publication Date: 2011-08-11
The New Maids is a pioneering book, grounded on rich, empirical evidence, which examines the relationship between globalization, transnationalism, gender and the care economy. Expertly addressing the thorny questions that surround the increasing number of migrant domestic workers and cleaners, child-carers and caregivers who maintain modern Western households, the author argues that domestic work plays the defining role in global ethnic and gender hierarchies.Using a central ethnographic study of immigrant domestic workers and their German employees as its starting point, The New Maids uses the voices of such women themselves to provide unique conceptual and evidential support for this vital new approach argument. This exciting book will not only enhance the reader's understanding of the new care-economy, it also sets standards for feminist global methodology.
Ethics of Care: a feminist approach to human securit by Fiona Robinson
ISBN: 1283244640
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
In"The Ethics of Care," Fiona Robinson demonstrates how the responsibilities of sustaining life are central to the struggle for basic human security. She takes a unique approach, using a feminist lens to challenge gender biases in rights-based, individualist approaches.Robinson's thorough and impassioned consideration of care in both ethical and practical terms provides a starting point for understanding and addressing the material, emotional and psychological conditions that create insecurity for people."The Ethics of Care"examines care ethics and security at the theoretical level and explores the practical implications of care relations for security in a variety of contexts: women's labor in the global economy, humanitarian intervention and peace building, healthcare, and childcare. Theoretically-innovative and policy-relevant, this critical analysis demonstrates the need to understand the obstacles and inequalities that obstruct the equitable and adequate delivery of care around the world. "
Valuing Care Work: Comparative Perspectives by Cecilia Benoit (Editor); Helga Hallgrimsdottir (Editor)
ISBN: 1442610921
Publication Date: 2011-02-12
There are many forms of paid and unpaid labour encompassed in health care systems, including home care for the elderly or disabled, community health services, and the care family members provide for loved ones. Valuing Care Work is an international comparative study that examines economic organizations as well as intimate settings to show how personal service work is shaped by broader welfare state developments. To trace the relationships between gender, labour, and equity in health care, the essays in this volume analyse the rules and practices that shape care work. The contributors highlight how national configurations of the welfare state shape the gendering of paid and unpaid intimate labour in a range of settings and discuss how the policies and practices associated with neoliberalism have focussed on efficiency and accountability to the detriment of other policy agendas, including those that might further increase dignity and equity for both recipients and providers of paid and unpaid health care.