Types of Elder Abuse: Recognition, Prevention and Legal Action

Elder Abuse – Vulnerable Victims

Physical, Financial, Emotional And Sexual Abuse

Thousands of older adults are emotionally and physically abused, neglected, and exploited each year. One reason is that elders must depend on others to meet their basic needs thereby making them especially vulnerable to abuse.

What Is Elder Abuse?

Elder abuse is often described as willful neglect, a caretaker’s conscious failure to act that causes physical and emotional harm to an older adult. Elder abuse can also be blatantly intentional acts of injury causing physical abuse and financial exploitation.

Who Are the Abusers?

Common Roles of Abusers

The abuser can work for assisted care facilities, home-based assisted caregivers, neighbors, relatives, former friends, and even family members. It is almost always someone the elder trusts or must depend on for their basic needs.

Assisted Living Facilities

Elder abuse has been a persistent problem at board-and-care facilities and other assisted living environments such as nursing homes.

Dementia Leaves Older Adults Vulnerable to Abuse

Older adults with mid-to-advanced levels of dementia are particularly vulnerable to becoming victims of elder abuse.

Often an older adult with dementia cannot convey to family members or local authorities what has been happening to them.

Families and caregivers must therefore be proactive should they suspect elder abuse and promptly report it to the authorities.

Signs of Elder Abuse

What to Look For:

• An episode of confusion, irritability and fear usually accompanies a sudden shift in the elder’s personality.
• Look for evidence of tension between the caregiver and the elder. The caregiver is supposed to be caring and agreeable – not abrupt and confrontational! Being short and curt with the elder demonstrates a hostile atmosphere.
• A common sign is when the caregivers refuse to allow others to visit the older person or decide which person(s) are permitted to see them.
• Look for new and unusual physical marks on the elder, such as bedsores, bruises, burns, or scrapes.
• Look for a steady weight loss, possibly resulting from malnutrition and dehydration. It is not unusual to have assisted living facilities to cut costs by buying inexpensive and easy-to-prepare foods that lack nutrition.
• If the caretaker and the older person are alone together most of the time. This is highly unusual and should raise suspicions about the caretaker’s motives.
• The elder’s physical appearance and hygiene decline sharply. Also, look for soiled bedspreads and sheets, which points to willful neglect and failure to care for the elder.

Elder Abuse Are Federal and State Crimes

Criminal and Civil Violations of Law

Elder abuse is a federal and state crime for which the offender is subject to criminal punishment and civil damages.

While the legal definitions of what makes up the specific legal elements of specific elder abuse crimes vary between states, there is shared agreement among states regarding the types of elder abuse that are punishable and prosecuted by state and federal criminal courts. They fall under the following categories below.

Elder Abuse Falls Under Broad Categories:

Intentional Physical Harm

• The calculated and deliberate infliction of physical harm against an elder resulting in pain or injury to the elder. Examples of such acts can include slapping, hitting, shaking, violently pushing, and pulling the elder, as well as physically restraining the elder and even over-drugging the patient into unconsciousness. Visible signs of such abuse can be unexplained bruising, cuts, and extreme disorientation to their environment.

Willful Neglect of Elder

• Willful neglect is one of the most common forms of elder abuse. It is the willful failure of those responsible for providing food, shelter, and health care and for keeping the elder protected and safe. These violations can be found in assisted living facilities like board and care and nursing homes.

Financial Elder Abuse

• Financial Elder Abuse is becoming more prevalent as more of our population enters the last quarter of their life. That’s because mental acuity diminishes. Dementia can be subtle, but it can affect reasoning and common sense.
• Financial abuse tends to escalate, especially in a declining economy; even family members can take advantage of a parent’s emotional and intellectual vulnerabilities, especially if the offender is going through their own crises. In these circumstances, the elder can become easy prey, especially when they are going through emotional changes and seek attention from others – even if it comes at a cost.
• Elders are particularly vulnerable to financial crimes. Often elders do not even realize or are willing to admit they have been victims of financial elder abuse. One example is called “Socio-Emotional Selectivity,” a condition where the elderly maximize positive emotions and interactions while minimizing negative ones.
• Even affluent and sophisticated elders can be vulnerable targets to those that prey on elders with these types of sensitivities.

Emotional Abuse

The emotional abuser will try to exploit their fears of abandonment or torment them through bullying, degrading them, threatening them with physical punishment, and ignoring their requests to be fed, washed, or even use the bathroom.

The abuser can be less overt in their emotional assaults of the elder but still be emotionally abusive with manipulative in more subtle ways.

Examples of Emotional Abuse

• An emotional abuser is hyper-critical of the elder
• Emotional abuser humiliates and embarrasses the elder
• An emotional abuser makes the elder the object of their jokes
• An emotional abusers ignore boundaries and will invade the elder’s privacy
• An emotional abuser will tend to be possessive and controlling of the elder
• An emotional abuser will try to restrict and control the elder’s actions
• An emotional abuser will try to Isolate the elder from other people
• An emotional abuser will give and then abruptly withdraw affection from the elder
• An emotional abuser will ignore the elder and exclude them from group activities
• An emotional abuser will try to make the elder doubt themselves and their value
• An emotional abuser will be dismissive of the elder’s feelings
• An emotional abuser will make fun of the elder’s achievements and hopes
• An emotional abuser will be indifferent to the elder’s feelings

Sexual Abuse of Elder

The Crime of Sexual Abuse

Sexual abuse of an elder is unlawful and non-consensual touching with the intent of receiving sexual pleasure of any kind.

Elder Sex Crimes Challenging to Prove

The prosecutor bases the determination on whether to file elder abuse charges based on the case’s specific circumstances and is usually predicated on whether the prosecutor has a good faith belief there is a significant chance of obtaining a conviction in the case. That will depend on the quality of the evidence.

Prosecutorial Discretion To Charge

Determining whether to charge the crime will depend on whether the elderly victim is credible, makes a good witness, and can recall the events with reasonable specificity. The latter issue can be particularly challenging if the victim has dementia or other forms of memory loss.

Other filing factors in determining whether to file criminal charges focus on the defendant’s profile, occupation, and whether the accused has a criminal history of sexual assault or violence. The prosecutor will, of course, want to show, as in most criminal cases, that there was a motive and opportunity to commit the crime.

Other than the ability to accurately recall the event, another determining factor in prosecuting elder sexual assault crimes is whether the victim was mentally or physically incapacitated at the time of the sexual assault. If so, this is considered a serious aggravating factor.

Assuming the sexual battery occurred while the elderly victim was so incapacitated, they could not physically resist or were conscious of what was happening during the assault.

The criminal investigation and prosecution emphasis in these cases will focus on the available physical evidence, the presence of a credible intervening witness, and whether the offender had the opportunity to commit the crime.

Notwithstanding whether the defendant is charged with a misdemeanor or a felony, the prosecutor must convince the jury that the crime had been committed beyond a reasonable doubt.

Legal Responsibility for Abuse

Nursing homes can and regularly face civil actions and criminal penalties for their harmful conduct and willful neglect of elders.

These legal actions are reported, documented, and become part of an assisted living facility’s official history and overall rating. There are various ways board-and-care and nursing homes can be held legally responsible for the harm suffered by residents.

Board And Care Facilities and Nursing Homes

Medicare Rating System for Assisted Care Facilities

In recent years, through state and federal health inspection surveys, the federal government developed a quality of elder care rating system for nursing homes nationwide and ranked them accordingly.

Using a five-star rating system, over twenty-five percent of the nursing home facilities reviewed and rated received just one star – the lowest rating possible. This statistic is particularly troublesome to nearly sixty percent of the baby boomers expected to receive long-term care by age 70.

One of the significant purposes of the Medicare rating system is to keep consumers and their families informed and warned of certain nursing homes that have documented allegations of abuse.

There has been a wide range of reported abuse, also known as deficiencies, relating to unsanitary conditions and the mismanagement of resident nutritional and personal hygiene needs to actual mental and physical abuse of residents.

Nearly half of all nursing homes in the country have been cited for incidents involving documented abuse.

Concerning actual care of the resident by staff, the most frequently cited deficiency is resident dehydration and malnutrition.

This is particularly troubling when we consider that nearly fifty percent of nursing home residents require assistance with eating and drinking.

Furthermore, it should be noted that nonprofit facilities had been consistently outperforming for-profit facilities by a significant margin.

Reports of Physical and Emotional Abuse

Reported physical abuse ranges from ignoring residents’ bedsores to pushing and shoving residents to all-out physical beatings. There have even been documented reports of residents being physically burned by staff.

There are also documented cases of mental abuse. Among the types of mental abuse, residents endure verbal threats, degradation, and daily humiliation.

There have also been rising concerns regarding sexual elder abuse.

Reasons For Board-and-Care and Nursing Home Abuses

Failure To Perform Adequate Background Checks

One of the many reasons abuses is so rampant in nursing homes is that many fail to conduct thorough background checks on the people they hire.

Inadequate Staffing and Training

Another reason is that nursing homes are notorious for understaffing and not adequately supervising their employees. Perhaps this can explain the sharp rise in financial elder abuse, including fraud and theft.

A Bleak Picture

Sadly, the elder sexual abuse problem will only worsen as the elderly population is slated to double between 2020 and 2050 while the funds to protect the poor and elderly decline.

Separate and distinct from civil penalties for sexual elder abuse, most, if not all, states make it a separate crime to commit a sexual assault and battery on an elder, which is usually defined as any person over 60 years of age.

According to a CNN study published on February 17, 2017, on sexual elder abuse, nearly 300 nursing homes were officially cited for failing to adequately protect long-term care residents from sexual abuse between 2010 and 2015. According to the report the federal government flagged more than 1,000 long-term care facilities as failing to prevent alleged cases of sexual abuse.

Politics Have Their Negative Impact

Ironically, the sexual elder abuse report was published just one day before former President Trump’s State of the Union speech proposing massive spending cuts in federal programs that adversely impact the poor and the elderly.

According to the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), sexual abuse is one of the least studied aspects of elder abuse. Based on one sponsored study, “Forensic Markers in Elder Female Sexual Abuse Cases,” the study reported that the older the victim, the less likely the offender will be formally charged with the crime unless it can be shown that the elder has physical signs of trauma, such the presence of sexually transmitted diseases, vaginal infections, anal bleeding, bruising around the breasts and genital area, and torn or bloodied undergarments.

A Call To Action

We need to educate the children of elderly parents on how they can protect their parents from elder abuse. Children of the elderly must be able to identify elder abuse and take immediate action by contacting the police or elder protection service.

Helpful Resources – Local & National Assistance

Find Help Near You

• Find elder abuse resources in your state.
• National Care Locator Helpline: 1-800-677-1116
• Report Elder Abuse to Adult Protective Services
• Report Financial Elder Abuse

Locate An Elder Abuse Attorney

Elder abuse is not only a crime; it can also be filed as a civil lawsuit in which compensatory damages can be recovered, including punitive damages.

If you have further questions or concerns about elder abuse and want to know whether an elder has legal rights to compensation for their injuries and abuse, contact a verified Eder Abuse Attorney immediately.