Tag Archives: prevent elder abuse

Giving Tuesday – Consider Giving Some Time to an Isolated Elder

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Make the Connection!

Today is Colorado Gives Day!

Otherwise known as Giving Tuesday, the day designed to spotlight opportunities for people to give to charitable causes.  The day seems to have come into existence when two organizations, the 92nd Street Y in New York City and the United Nations Foundation came together in October 2012, with the intention to set aside a day that was all about celebrating the generosity of giving, a great American tradition.   According to USA Today, Giving Tuesday raised $180 million in online donations.  That is nothing to sneeze at!

Donating Locally is Easy!

Here in Colorado, we’ve got our own website with over 2,000 nonprofits listed to receive donor’s contributions.  You can visit the website and find a good place for your donation to support if you’re at a loss about which type of charity you’d like to benefit.

Instead of highlighting the worthy nonprofits which serve low-income elders, I’m looking at Colorado Gives Day with a different goal in mind – to raise awareness about reaching out to socially isolated elders in our communities.  I’m not just talking about making contact with folks who reside in senior housing residences, assisted living or skilled nursing facilities, but also to those elders who are “gaining in place” in their own homes and face considerable social isolation based on a number of factors.

What About Donating Your Time?

One way to ease an isolated elder’s isolation and also solidify our own connections with community members we might never have otherwise met – is to volunteer our time – even if for a few short minutes or hours.

You can easily volunteer your time locally through a nonprofit like Metro Volunteers, who will match your skills with a nonprofit looking for someone with your skills.  Whether it is a board of directors position you seek, a mentoring opportunity with a youth, or serving food to people at a shelter – Metro Volunteers can assist.

But the focus of today’s post is about giving time to an elder who is isolated.

There are numerous article and research into the effects of loneliness on the elderly population.  One recent study concluded that loneliness is a significant public health concern among elders.  In addition to easing a potential source of suffering, the identification and targeting of interventions for lonely elders may significantly decrease physician visits and health care costs.

Decreasing an Elder’s Sense of Isolation Helps Prevent Elder Abuse

I’m reposting a link from an elder abuse prevention listserve I am part of, originally posted this morning by the Social Media Manager of the NYC Elder Abuse Center at Weill Cornell Medical College.  The holidays are difficult times for many of us.  She writes “During the holiday season, family gatherings are more commonplace. Older adults feel social isolation more acutely, yet crave the connection. This holiday season NYCEAC is asking our social media followers to commit to have a conversation with an older adult in their life during the month of December. We know everyone benefits from a connection, and improves the health of the community at large, too.” We’re calling our campaign Countering Isolation, or #CounteringIsolation.

Remember that this type of giving of our time to another who doesn’t have the physical, psychological, financial or emotional wherewithal to engage in the broader community is a good thing with many positive benefits for us,  Happy Giving Tuesday!

© Barbara E. Cashman 2017   www.DenverElderLaw.org

What If We Declared a War on Elder Abuse?

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Diana in Venice

What will it take to raise the public’s awareness of the prevalence of elder abuse? Here is a recent New York Times article about a woman from Washington state, a granddaughter of a victim of elder financial exploitation, who has made her mission in life to secure further legal protection for vulnerable elders.  I tip my hat to the Elder Law Profs blog for the mention of this article.  For this post, I’m focusing primarily on financial fraud and exploitation of elders.

Colorado statistics over the last several years (since the change in law concerning mandatory reporting of elder abuse and investigation by law enforcement) indicate the numbers continue to rise dramatically.  Read this Denver Post article from last fall with some of the breathtaking numbers in Colorado.  The national numbers are a bit more complicated, due in part to the variances of state laws concerning elder abuse – not all states have made it a crime to financially exploit an elder, as well as how such crimes get reported.  In Colorado, law enforcement and county adult protective services are part of the investigative framework for suspected elder abuse and some district attorneys’ offices have specialized prosecutors for such crimes.  The federal law, the Elder Justice Act – about which I have previously written, could provide an important means for developing a more systematic approach to reporting (among other important things) remains only partly funded.

A 2011 study published by MetLife Mature Market Institute estimates the financial loss by victims of elder financial crimes and exploitation exceeds $2.9 billion dollars annually, but this number remains controversial as other studies have estimated $17 billion or $36 billion.  Read about the variety of those numbers here.

How do we define fraud on elders?  That is a big part of the problem with a lack of any “standardized” way to identify such fraud and abuse so as to generate reportable numbers for particular types of fraud and abuse.  One thing that most are certain of is that the exploitation and fraud are both widely underreported –due to the shame and embarrassment factor, particularly when the perpetrator is a family member, friend or neighbor (occupying a position of trust).

Know the risk factors

Forbes recently ran an article by John Wasik that had a great summary of four of these which consider the elder’s behavior:

  • Poor Physical Health. Those who are physically compromised are unlikely to be focused on financial matters. They are often vulnerable to swindles.
  • Cognitive Impairment. When the ability to do basic things like read a banking statement or balance a checkbook declines, that’s when you have to pay attention. Those with declining math skills will not be asking important questions about new investing “opportunities.”
  • Difficulty in Activities of Daily Living. If a person has trouble feeding themselves, bathing or shopping, that’s a big set of red flags. That also means that they will have trouble managing money.
  • Social Isolation.Are they all alone? Then they won’t have the support of a network of peers, who could warn about scams.

Recognize the signs

The signs are of course numerous and varied, but keep in mind that there are many ways in which the behavior of the perpetrator of the fraud or exploitation of the elder mimics that of a perpetrator of domestic violence.

  • Use and abuse of control of the elder’s finances, such as taking, misusing, or using without the elder’s knowledge or permission their money or property;
  • Forging, forcing, or using deception, coercion or undue influence to get an elder person’s signature on a legal document – this could include signing over title to a home or other asset, or a power of attorney or a will;
  • Forging or otherwise forcing, or using deception or other inappropriate means to misappropriate funds from a pension or other retirement income, to cash an elder’s checks without permission or authorization;
  • Abusing joint signature authority on a bank account or misusing ATMs or credit cards;
  • Exploitation through a fiduciary relationship – such as an agent under a financial power of attorney acting beyond the scope of the agent’s authority, or improperly using the authority provided by a conservatorship, trust, etc.
  • Misleading an elder by providing true but misleading information that influences the elder person’s use or assignment of assets, persuading an impaired elder person to change a will or insurance policy to alter who benefits from the will or policy;
  • Promising long-term or lifelong care in exchange for money or property and not following through on the promise, overcharging for or not delivering caregiving services; and
  • Denying elders access to their money or preventing them from controlling their assets or gaining information about their assets.

Keep in mind that neither of these lists is comprehensive or exhaustive!

Report suspected abuse, exploitation or fraud

If you aren’t sure who to call and the situation doesn’t require a 911 call, use the National Center on Elder Abuse’s resource page to determine who to call.

The only way we will get a better handle on the extent and pervasiveness of elder financial abuse and exploitation is to become more familiar with it so that we know how to ask those whom we seek to protect.

© Barbara E. Cashman 2017   www.DenverElderLaw.org

Dementia and the Growing Prevalence of Elder Abuse

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Not Winter Flowers

Not Winter Flowers

I was reading a list serve post yesterday that told of the member’s father (a retired attorney in another state) who got a call from a scammer claiming to be an attorney working on behalf of a grandchild in trouble with the law.  The post was essentially a “heads-up” kind of post to a new mutation on the old long lost grandchild scam.  You can read an article about how that scam works from the perspective of the scammer here.  Sadly, some other members of the list serve community reported a couple instances of this one when it worked successfully, relieving the loving grandparent of a sum of money.  One such scam was traced to a caller in the Ukraine!  If it sounds like it might never happen to an elder you know, think again – these folks are quite sophisticated.

This is an introduction to some news that I recently read about our neighbors in the UK: Dementia is the leading cause of death in England and Wales.  Read the BBC News article here.

This means that as other health challenges are effectively managed throughout one’s old age, dementia remains in the background so to speak, a silent killer.  It’s no surprise that the bulk of these dementia deaths were of women, as women tend to have a longer life span than men.  What I thought was particularly interesting was this figure: Dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, accounted for 15.2% of all female deaths, up from 13.4% in 2014.  Is this due to more effective means of diagnosing Alzheimer’s (which ordinarily must be done with a brain autopsy or at least a slice of that organ’s tissue to identify those amyloid plaques)? Or is it due to an actual rise in the number of persons afflicted with the disease, as demonstrated in the graph in the article which shows it steadily overtaking heart disease since 2012?

Dementia is a leading side effect if you will – of our longevity.  This news doesn’t just impact our health and longevity of course, factors mightily in the need for further raising the awareness of elder abuse.  Folks with dementia are likely to be victims of some form of elder abuse, neglect or exploitation.   The burden on the rest of us to be able to detect elder abuse is crucial to our collective well-being.  The community plays a foremost role in the detection of elder abuse in its many forms and so community members – through meals on wheels volunteer, peers at a community center or members of a faith community, can play a major part in this effort.  I don’t want to minimize the importance of prevention, but I think our awareness needs to focus first on the detection of the myriad forms of elder abuse.

My introduction to this post was about a scam by someone posing as a person assisting a grandchild – but most of the reported cases do not involve “stranger danger” as it is called in the child welfare context.  Sadly, when the abuser or exploiter is an adult child or other family member (as the vast majority of such cases appear to be) the elder is faced with a difficult choice indeed because their ability to be maintained in their own home is severely compromised.  We have some battered women’s shelters, but no emergency housing for abused elders.   We simply must be able to move forward with the development of services for at risk elders and design some kind of basic architecture of supportive services.  Right now, everything is dependent on where an elder lives.   How many community resources there are largely depends on local and state funding because whether the detection resources, such as law enforcement and adult protection services, are adequately informed to detect elder abuse – makes a huge difference.

Here’s a link to a very informative program from Nashville Public Television.  Especially as we tout “aging in place” as the best kind of living arrangements for most elders, we must face what that can mean for them and the risks it can pose.  We must respond to this call for being present to our elder community members!  I will write more about what looks to most of us to be a challenging landscape of familial relations and unfamiliar ethical territory.

© Barbara E. Cashman 2016   www.DenverElderLaw.org