By Marie-Therese Connolly
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Bette Davis once said old age ain't for sissies. She was right.
As though declining health, impending mortality and other challenges weren't hard enough, too often old age is also plagued by abuse, neglect and exploitation.
Science has extended our lives dramatically: In 1900, Americans' average life expectancy was 47. By 2000, it was 77, and it's still rising. But our energy and resources have been disproportionately focused on living longer rather than living better -- a phenomenon called " the longevity paradox."
Estimates of the prevalence of elder abuse vary wildly, but by some reports there could be up to 5 million cases a year, with 84 percent going unreported. All other factors being equal, victims of even relatively minor mistreatment are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who are not victimized.
Although elder abuse typically conjures visions of nightmarish nursing homes, the term actually encompasses a far broader spectrum of trouble, including physical and psychological abuse, neglect and financial exploitation. Practitioners report that most elder abuse occurs at home at the hands of family and that the most frequent perpetrators are adult male relatives with mental health or substance abuse problems,
We are perhaps in greatest denial about elder sexual abuse. When the perpetrator is a son or grandson, these cases are met with disbelief, given the taboo-busting, worse-than-Oedipal nature of the offense.
Take the case of 96-year-old "Miss Mary." To get out of a nursing home, Miss Mary moved into the Jacksonville trailer home of her grandson and his wife. She cooked and cleaned for them and contributed part of her Social Security check to the household; they sold off her belongings and stole her burial payments. One night in 2004, when his wife was gone, Miss Mary's grandson raped and assaulted her for six hours, then threatened to kill her. Instead he fell asleep, and Miss Mary called 911.
Despite serious injuries and abundant evidence of the attack, her entire family took the grandson's side.
.............convicting the grandson of sexual battery, for which he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Until her death last year, Miss Mary lived in the place she had most wanted to avoid -- a nursing home.
Neglect may sound more benign than abuse, but it usually lasts longer, is harder to prove and prosecute, and can be just as lethal.
Thirty percent of seriously ill elders surveyed have told researchers that they would rather die than go to a nursing home.
This fear, founded or not, drives many elders such as Miss Mary and Deering to stay in bad situations at home. But while neglect of one person is tragic, systemic neglect by a facility or chain housing numerous residents can be catastrophic.
Between 1998 and 2001, nursing homes run by American Healthcare Management in St. Louis didn't have enough caregivers to help residents who couldn't feed themselves.
Some facilities provide great care. But the news about staffing, the most critical factor in the quality of long-term care, is bleak: A government study in 2002 concluded that more than half of the nation's nursing homes are understaffed at levels that harm residents. Nursing homes receive $80 billion from Medicare and Medicaid annually to care for 1.5 million residents. Another million Americans live in other long-term care facilities, and 10 million receive care at home, where oversight is sparse to nonexistent and the potential for abuse is great.
Yet not a single federal employee works on elder abuse issues full-time. Ironically, the family violence field has largely ignored elder abuse, and most entities devoted to aging issues assign it low priority. This inattention is all the more baffling given the approaching tsunami of 77 million aging baby boomers, and given that the fastest-growing segment of the population, those 85 and older, are at greatest risk for mistreatment.
……… the relatively uncontroversial Elder Justice Act, modeled on those laws, has languished since 2002.
Perhaps the twin culprits of ageism and denial are to blame.
How do we as individuals and as a nation measure the value of life in old age? And why have we not done more to protect and defend our most vulnerable elders?
But we have overestimated our civility. Because in the end, we subject many of our old people to a plight as bad as, if not worse than, the ice floe.
(Marie-Therese Connolly, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is former coordinator of the Department of Justice's Elder Justice and Nursing Home Initiative. )
Abridged Article. ( ** Please read full article from: Washington Post)
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Thank you Marie-Therese, for this excellent article. Perhaps, this will "prick" the collective conscience of our society. We need to be OUTRAGED by the increasing number of reported Elder Abuse cases. This is an issue that should concern us ALL.
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