We are the UK’s leading publisher of books on Ageing and Gerontology and our titles fill a clear gap in the current literature. The list interrogates the challenges of an ageing population, push forward knowledge and reframe perspectives.
Central to this are the international and comparative works in the Ageing in a Global Context series, published in association with the British Society of Gerontology, and the Longitudinal and Lifecourse Studies journal.
Ageing and Gerontology
The framing of old age has long been regarded as being relatively unproblematic, given that old age and decline appear inextricably linked. This connection helps to explain why concerns of the latter part of the lifecourse are regarded as the province of health and social policy. Old age was a period marked out by ‘agedness’, something constituted by both physical need and social dependency (Pickard, 2013). Even the most noticeable marker of old age, the state retirement pension, was a product of the widespread recognition that older workers (in the first instance men) needed a substitute income to compensate them for their inability to work, given the physical limitations accompanying ageing (Scheubel, 2013). Similarly, the health problems of the older population were assumed to be intractable chronic conditions that led to institutionalisation of one kind or another (Trattner, 2007; Levene, 2009). The modern welfare state categorically saw older people as a residualised group incapacitated by their social dependency and individual passivity (Carey, 2016).
In many European countries a climate of austerity and cuts to health and social care budgets, alongside issues of population ageing, are creating particular challenges in the provision of services for older people in the community (Lymbery and Postle, 2015; Donnelley, Begley and O’Brien, 2018). The introduction of neoliberalism into many European welfare states since the late 1990s has also meant challenges in terms of the reorganisation of social work policy and practice (Milner, Myers and O’Byrne, 2020). Budget cuts have taken place and standardisation has become commonplace, which has impacted on changing legislative and policy drivers for gerontological social work (Ray, Bernard and Phillips, 2018). Social workers have a key role to play in ensuring the participation of all older people in assessments, care planning and decision making in ways that uphold human rights, autonomy and self-determination. The application of a critical gerontological lens is particularly important in a context of neoliberalism and scarce resources, where social workers are increasingly reliant on informal caregivers, mainly family members, to provide care and support to older people, creating challenges and ethical dilemmas in practice situations.
This original collection explores how critical gerontology can make sense of old age inequalities to inform and improve social work research, policy and practice and empower older people.
With examples of practice-facing research, this book engages with key debates on age-related human rights and social justice issues. The critical and conceptual focus will expand the horizons of those who work with older people, addressing the current challenges, issues and opportunities that they face.
Dementia is a broad clinical term used to describe a group of illnesses that have common symptoms but different origins. There are hundreds of different types of dementia, but by far the most common is Alzheimer’s disease (Winblad et al, 2016). Age is the single strongest risk factor for dementia (WHO, 2019), but some rarer types of dementia, such as frontotemporal dementia, can occur in younger to middle-aged adults (Jefferies and Aggrawal, 2009). Around the world, about 50 million people have dementia, of whom about 10 million live in Europe (WHO, 2019). However, population ageing means that over the next 30 years the numbers of people likely to develop dementia will reach 131 million. The biggest increase will be among people living in low- to middle-income countries, as this is where population ageing is happening fastest (WHO, 2015a). Dementia does not only incur emotional and social costs; its economic cost is very considerable. For example, in 2018 the global cost of dementia was estimated to be circa $1 trillion (ADI, 2015). Accordingly, the magnitude of dementia should not be underestimated.
Over the last 20 years, increased public and political awareness has developed alongside research, policy and professional developments to advance our understanding of the abuse of older people in families, communities, hospitals and institutional settings. In 2002, the World Health Organization (WHO) argued that elder abuse was a distinct social problem, defining abuse as ‘a single, repeated act or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship where there is an expectation of trust which caused harm or distress to an older person’ (WHO, 2002). In 2007, the first United Kingdom (UK) prevalence study of elder abuse reported that 4% of older people living in the community were subject to abuse or neglect (O’Keefe et al, 2007). In 2010, a prevalence study of elder abuse in Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain and Sweden found that 19.4% of older people aged 60–84 years were exposed to psychological abuse; 2.7% to physical abuse; 0.7% to sexual abuse; and 3.8% to financial abuse (Soares et al, 2010).
This chapter draws attention to three identification grounds that social workers are expected to consider and that policy makers see as a priority, that is, ethnicity, race and migrancy. One of the reasons why this is the case is that the globalisation of international migration is one of the greatest challenges many societies have been facing in recent decades (Torres and Lawrence, 2012; Lawrence and Torres, 2016; Torres and Karl, 2016). As a result of this, social workers must now address the challenges that increased diversity can pose. In the case of those who specialise in ageing and older people, referred to in this book as gerontological social workers, it is important to note that population ageing has also increased the number of older people who need eldercare services. Thus, gerontological social workers have to deal with both the challenges that population ageing poses and the ones that the globalisation of international migration presents. Their work is therefore impacted upon by two major societal trends that most societies are facing these days, which is why this book proposes that critical gerontology could offer a valuable tool to advance research and increase the user-friendliness of social work policy and practice as far as our ageing populations are concerned.
This chapter explores the meaning of human rights for older people, and for the social workers who work with them, within what is often referred to as a human rights and social justice profession (International Federation of Social Workers, 2014). At the outset, it must be understood that although human rights invoke ‘moral obligation’ (Townsend, 2006, p 166) and ‘can provide social workers with a moral basis for their practice’ (Ife, 2012, p 1) they are not fixed. Human rights are both dynamic and complex. They pose complicated and difficult questions, rather than providing answers. The challenge for gerontological social work is to both address that complexity and lend its support to the struggles that diverse older people face in gaining access to their rights.
The lifecourse perspective is a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the mental and physical health of individuals. For older people, it is a particularly helpful lens, as it takes account of what has happened across that person’s life and considers how what has happened has affected their health and well-being (Milne, 2020). Old age is, in turn, a social category that may be damaging to a social worker’s understanding of age as a lived experience or of differences between a 65- and a 95-year-old. As a ‘catch-all’ label, this category may also contribute to ageism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, care home residents were effectively ignored until quite late on and many died. The fact that they were marginal to national public health considerations played a key role in their treatment; some commentators would even argue that their human rights were violated – an issue that should be of concern to social workers (Amnesty International, 2020; Anand et al, 2021).
