Elder Abuse - Types

Types

Although there are common themes of elder abuse across nations, there are also unique manifestations based upon history, culture, economic strength, and societal perceptions of older people within nations themselves. The fundamental common denominator is the use of power and control by one individual to affect the well-being and status of another, older, individual.

There are several types of abuse of older people that are generally recognized as being elder abuse, including:

• Physical: e.g. hitting, punching, slapping, burning, pushing, kicking, restraining, false imprisonment/confinement, or giving excessive or improper medication
• Psychological/Emotional: e.g. humiliating a person. A common theme is a perpetrator who identifies something that matters to an older person and then uses it to coerce an older person into a particular action. It may take verbal forms such as name-calling, ridiculing, constantly criticizing, accusations, blaming, or non verbal forms such as ignoring, silence or shunning.
• Financial abuse: also known as financial exploitation. e.g. illegal or unauthorized use of a person’s property, money, pension book or other valuables (including changing the person's will to name the abuser as heir). It may be obtained by deception, coercion, misrepresentation, undue influence, or theft. This includes fraudulently obtaining or use of a power of attorney. Other forms include deprivation of money or other property, or by eviction from own home
• Scam by strangers: e.g. worthless "sweepstakes" that elderly persons must pay in order to collect winnings, fraudulent investment schemes, predatory lending, and lottery scams.
• Sexual: e.g. forcing a person to take part in any sexual activity without his or her consent, including forcing them to participate in conversations of a sexual nature against their will; may also include situations where person is no longer able to give consent (dementia)
• Neglect: e.g. depriving a person of food, heat, clothing or comfort or essential medication and depriving a person of needed services to force certain kinds of actions, financial and otherwise. The deprivation may be intentional (active neglect) or happen out of lack of knowledge or resources (passive neglect).

In addition, some U.S. state laws also recognize the following as elder abuse:

• Rights abuse: denying the civil and constitutional rights of a person who is old, but not declared by court to be mentally incapacitated. This is an aspect of elder abuse that is increasingly being recognized and adopted by nations
• Self-neglect: elderly persons neglecting themselves by not caring about their own health or safety. Self-neglect (harm by self) is treated as conceptually different than abuse (harm by others).
• 'Abandonment': deserting a dependent person with the intent to abandon them or leave them unattended at a place for such a time period as may be likely to endanger their health or welfare.

Institutional abuse refers to physical or psychological harms, as well as rights violations in settings where care and assistance is provided to dependant older adults or others.