A nearly decade-long fight for increased federal focus on elder abuse won a huge victory Tuesday when the Elder Justice Act was signed into law as part of health care reform legislation.
For the first time ever, efforts to prevent elder abuse will be coordinated at the federal level. Additional research, worker training for adult protective services (APS) and elder abuse forensic studies, plus an ombudsman to oversee the program, will provide crucial help for a problem that is only expected to grow as boomers reach retirement age, experts say.
“Congress has now passed the most comprehensive federal legislation to combat elder abuse, neglect and exploitation in its history,” says Robert Blancato, national coordinator of the Elder Justice Coalition, which led the effort to get the bill signed. “Hopefully for a lot of seniors, this is about raising awareness across the country so that older Americans never have to confront elder abuse.”
Abuse, often unreported, “can impact older adults across the spectrum regardless of who they are,” says Rhonda Richards, senior legislative representative for AARP. “This bill will hopefully mean better coordination of existing efforts across prevention, detection and law enforcement.”
Help for uncovering abuse
Inadequate research hampers efforts to mitigate elder abuse in its many forms—physical, emotional or sexual abuse; financial exploitation; neglect (either self-neglect or by a caretaker); and abandonment. For example, a National Center on Elder Abuse study states that more than 500,000 Americans over age 60 were victims of abuse in 1996. Other more recent estimates suggest there may be as many as 5 million victims a year. With a discrepancy that wide, it’s impossible to know how to properly address the problem.
“I think the starting need is really around data,” says Charles Sabatino, director of the American Bar Association Commission on Law and Aging. “We’ve got all kinds of programs out there; we really have very little evaluative research as to what works.”
Now that federal funding will be available for research grants, more academics interested in studying elder abuse should be able to pursue their research. “You’ve had wonderful people doing research on this and they did it unfunded because they had such a passion for it,” says Pamela Teaster, director of the Graduate Center for Gerontology at the University of Kentucky. “But not being funded can easily affect the quality of and ability to do the work. So this is a huge shot in the arm for this field.”
More troops in the trenches
The passage couldn’t come at a better time, says Kathleen Quinn, executive director of the National Adult Protective Services Association (NAPSA). A recent survey of 38 states by NAPSA showed that caseloads at APS agencies, which investigate reported cases of elder abuse, increased by 24 percent in 2009. Yet state agency funding was cut by an average 14 percent. The bill’s provision for adult protective services would allow an additional 1,700 caseworkers to be hired nationwide, a huge boon to a sector that badly needs more manpower, Quinn says.
“If you’re somebody who wants to report abuse, the phone might ring 20 minutes before it’s answered,” she says. “In some states, workers are triaging reports and can only respond to those people in imminent danger.”
Quinn also says that workers have been unable to be proactive in preventing abuse. But now, the game has changed. “If we can get out there early we might be able to prevent all a person’s assets from being stolen,” she says.
