Caring for others – through social work, volunteering, and caring for family members and close circle – allowed the Ukrainian people to survive during the Russian aggression.
This is what the participants of the study “Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care”, Agnieszka Fal-Dutra Santos, Elisabeth Prügl and Yuliia Soroka, write about in their blog for the LSE: “What does the Ukrainian experience teach us about care economies in wartime?”
The researchers identified four main areas of social reproductive work that support the functioning of society in conditions of war and reduced government spending.
Household and domestic labour
Due to the destruction or inaccessibility of public care and education networks, a significant burden of childcare falls on the family, mainly on women. This also applies to elderly family members, for whom families either decide to remain in dangerous regions or constantly face difficulties in trying to organize remote care or periodic visits.
Neighborhood and family networks
To survive the horrors of war in Ukraine, there has been a surge of solidarity, as neighbors have organized to share food, water, and even electricity. And families have expanded, often including elderly relatives, particularly elderly women who provide childcare themselves.
Volunteering and civil society
Volunteering is also partly social reproductive work. Baking pies, delivering humanitarian parcels, meeting internally displaced persons at train stations, and organizing events are all part of the volunteers’ work. Civil organizations also often reorient their activities towards humanitarian aid.
Caring through the state
Social workers played a significant role in overcoming the consequences of the war. They returned to their wards from the first days of the war, despite the danger to their own lives. And now they have the additional emotional burden of overcoming the fears and anxieties of those who were under their care. However, social work remains one of the most underpaid branches of state services in Ukraine, and the sector is being depleted.
The researchers emphasize that care work, along with ensuring the survival of society, has exhausted those who perform it.
“For better recovery, the invisible labour within the households and communities must be recognised. Better accessibility of public services, including childcare and eldercare services, but also mental care and support for the carers themselves, is necessary to ensure that Ukrainians can not only survive, but rebuild and recover. Those providing care must be included in the policy and planning processes, so that their experience and expertise can be built on when designing a recovery process,” the researchers emphasize.