ABSTRACT
You will realize by now that defining key terms is often difficult, that their meanings can be slippery. Within social work and social care various definitional issues arise. One is about the terms used to identify different people or groups of people who use social care services. These include terms such as ‘the elderly’, ‘the mentally ill’, ‘the mentally handicapped’ or ‘the disabled’. These terms and others have been highly contested and the language of welfare has changed accordingly. Also worth noting here is that when we write ‘the’ in front of a term, the group becomes homogenized.
