‘We are actually, after all, just children’: caring societies and South African infantilisation of adults with intellectual disability

Abstract

This article comments on infantilisation by attending to South African adult intellectual disability (ID) care through an intersubjective ethics of care lens, and shows how such an ethic can shine light on shifting our responses towards ID. Care performance data were gathered from three sources within two South African specialist ID care sites – from 10 adult residents, 16 nurses as spatiotemporal carers, and three wards as ethnographic sites. Deeply embedded and interwoven throughout various care practices is the disabling of adults with intellectual impairment when literally referred to as ‘children’. These adult-unmaking processes constitute practices that fall short of Tronto and Kittay’s caring societies ethic. Care exchanges generate relational and intersubjective spaces in which people are understood as never meeting full criteria for personhood. Infantilising care dynamics require urgent attention if we wish to change ways in which ID is viewed and responded to in South Africa.

Keywords:

• Intellectual disability
• infantilisation
• South Africa
• ethics of care
• caring societies

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the participants for their invaluable contributions, and Chanellé Buckle and Caitlin Honicke for their independent assessment of the research data and findings.

Notes

1. In Afrikaans, one of the interview languages in this study, this conceptualisation is beautifully distinguished as ‘sorg’ (the tasks of caring which may include practical activities such as feeding and bathing) and ‘omgee’ (holding a relational attitude of caring – a position of caring for and about others). Both words translate back into English as care.

2. In Afrikaans, the care labour (sorg) is performed with care (omgee). A carer is a ‘versorger’ who cares (wat omgee) or does not care (wat nie omgee nie).