Forensic Skills Seek to Uncover Elder Abuse

By JANE GROSS
Published: September 27, 2006

SANTA ANA, Calif. — The elderly man in the emergency room was covered with bruises, some purple and others fading to yellow. Despite signs of dementia, he told the same story over and over: His wife’s burly home health aide had beaten him. But the health aide and the wife insisted he had fallen. Now it was up to the members of Orange County’s Elder Abuse Forensic Center to decide which story was true.

As the man lay on a gurney, he was interviewed by a team from the center: a geriatrician, a social worker and an investigator from the sheriff’s office. The bruises on the man’s chest, they determined, were the result of being punched. There were bloody outlines of a shoe on the man’s leg. His clear, consistent story, and cognitive tests, persuaded the prosecutor to charge the aide with a felony.

At the center here, public health and law enforcement officials are learning to speak the same language and using the same forensic techniques as those popularized on the three C.S.I. television series to diagnose elder abuse and neglect. For decades, the techniques have been the state-of-the-art approach for investigating child abuse and domestic violence. But elder abuse has lagged far behind, suffering from a lack of financing, research and data.

Now change is in the air, and forensic techniques are just one of many new initiatives nationwide to protect the elderly. Geriatricians at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, for example, review county autopsy reports looking for suspicious themes. Bank tellers at Wachovia branches nationwide are learning to detect irregular transactions in the accounts of elderly customers.
Congress is also expected to consider, before the October recess, the Elder Justice Act of 2006, which would create the first nationwide database on elder abuse, replacing inconsistent or unavailable data. The legislation, which has bipartisan support, also assigns a federal official to coordinate projects and technical assistance and helps replicate programs like Orange County’s.

Abridged
SOURCE: New York Times
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Thank you Jane Gross for the great article. Visitors: please go to source for the whole article.
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