By Andrew Chadwick
31 March, 2009
Various studies from around the globe, have found that the majority of elder abuse cases are committed by family members.
Physical abuses are easier to detect than psychological or emotional abuses. These sort of abuses occur together with other types of elder abuse; such as finanicial abuse, sexual abuse and abandonment.
Psychological abuse includes verbal assaults (yelling, insults, infantilization) and threats, which induce fear but do not involve the use of a weapon. Psychological neglect includes isolation, lack of attention, and deprivation of companionship or social contact.
Violation of rights includes acts such as forcing elderly persons to move into a nursing home against their will, prohibiting marriage, or preventing free use of their own money. The majority of victims suffer from more than one type of abuse or neglect.
How can we prevent elder abuse in the privacy of victim’s home?
The difficulty of obtaining evidence and even to get the victim’s consent to investigate the case is a real barrier.
Why is elder abuse underreported?
Often, victims of elder abuse have:
- feelings of shame,
- fear of retaliation,
- fear that they will ‘lose’ family members,
- fear of institutionalization,
- failed to identify the situation as abusive,
- the perception that the abuse is deserved.
Publicity of the unacceptability of elder abuse, I believe will go a long way to preventing elder abuse.
Elder Abuse is a human rights issue. The government of a country should fund publicity campaigns to highlight the issue.
The populace need to be reminded that elder abuse of any shape or form is NOT acceptable.
Perhaps we should follow the lead of the USA, where criminal prosecution has an additional charge of elder abuse for any crime committed on an older person.
What happens to victims of elder abuse by family members have been removed from the abusive situation?
Can these victims continue to have a ‘normal’ relationship with the family member who abused him/her? Not likely.
Take the case of Frank Punito. The abuses have stopped, but the victim could no longer bring himself to have any sort of contact with his adult children.
The victim actually said that ‘they have robbed me of a family, and their own children a grandparent’.
At 79, and with a number of health issues, he is struggling to maintain a ‘normal’ existence.
Are there services available for victims of elder abuse, after they have been removed from abusive situations?
The traumatic experience, loss of dignity, shame and guilt suffered by victims of elder abuse surely affected their mental and general health. Who can they turn to?
Elder abuse prevention and intervention is a complex problem requiring mult-disciplinarial and multi-sectorial approaches.
It is very disappointing to note that politicians are very good at ‘passing the buck’. Part of the political game is to call for an inquiry, whenever a social problem is highlighted by the public.
Even after the reports of inquiry have been published, little is achieved as those reports gather dusts in Congress or Parliament.
It is therefore, important for elder rights advocates to continue to remind the government of the day that recommendations made in those reports be implemented.
The local community must also bear some responsibilities. If someone you know is being abused by their adult child(ren), spouse or other members of the family; are you prepared to do something?
Not many would want to get involved in what they perceive as ‘family matters’.
Sure, anything that occurs in a family is classified as family dynamics, but once evidence suggest abuse, be it child abuse or elder abuse, it should be taken out of the family privacy context.
Human rights should not and do not have boundary where the rights are waived.
Reporting elder abuse is not an easy task, especially if it is perpetrated by a family member. That calls for another posting.
We have a lot more to do.
