Senior abuse
This article first appeared in the Minden Times and Haliburton Echo in December 2025.
As some of my readers know, much of my professional life was in the field of child welfare, including child protection. It was an impossible job. Once, early in my career, a principal, when we’d finished our conversation about the child in question, asked me why a smart young thing like me was doing this work. With the misplaced confidence of a 21-year-old, I said it was devilishly difficult work and required the best and the brightest, which I guessed was me. I may have been wrong about that, but I wasn’t wrong about the complexity of the work.
The child protection job was to follow up on a complaint about a child being abused or neglected by their caregiver by investigating to the point where you could defend a decision to either take the child into care or leave them in parental care, perhaps (in the olden days) with a measure of support or surveillance in place. If you opted to remove the child from their home – to apprehend them (the language, unfortunately, suggesting the child was the perp, even though the sins of omission or commission were attributed to parent/s) – you had to defend your decision before the court. The parent could oppose the action, and in a well-resourced world might have the assistance of legal representation. If you decided there was no basis to the concern (or, if you chose to be simplistic, the complaint), you could close the file, and were responsible for that decision only to your supervisor, who may or may not read the report analytically. If you decided to leave the child with the parent but impose some conditions, you had to go to court to defend your decision and declare the intervention plan, and report progress to the court within a specified time.
There are clearly many loopholes in this system. It may, however, as Churchill is purported to have said about democracy, be better than the alternatives.
And, clearly, it is better than the system we have in place to manage senior abuse. Which is nothing: there is no Canadian legislation that relates specifically to mistreatment of seniors. And therefore there is no resourced system, robust or otherwise, to investigate and intervene in problematic circumstances.
Arguably seniors are potentially at greater risk for abuse and neglect than are children. The vulnerability of children lies in their dependence on adults for the necessities of life. Ditto seniors.
And, it is increasingly recognized, dependency is the crucial element in intimate partner abuse that needs to be taken into consideration in assessing situations.
Bill C-332 - Coercive Control of Intimate Partners - was introduced as a private NDP bill in the Canadian legislature in June 2024 and gained unanimous support from all parties, only to die in the Senate when government prorogued in January 2025. It did not specify seniors as among the protected population, even though they, like spouses, and children, live within ‘relationships of trust and dependence’.
So, to put these things together, seniors are apt to be cared for by family as they become increasingly dependent, and as alternative living arrangements become unavailable or unaffordable or both, and there is no legislation or mechanism protecting them from abuse in this situation.
And yet, there are several reasons why they may be more vulnerable than children.
What are these reasons? One is that they are more likely to be isolated. Children are required by law to attend school, so there are eyes on them, and investigation if they do not attend. There is no such safeguard for seniors.
Another is that seniors may have assets that others want to have or to control. Abhorrent as the thought is that spouses or adult children would sacrifice their loved-one’s well-being to greed, it has been known to happen. Even in families where the asset is not huge.
A third is that seniors can misbehave, in ways that range from annoying to dangerous, especially as their cognitive capacity declines and/or their frustration mounts. The person assuming responsible for them needs to manage that behaviour. The line between containment and punishment is fluid. Caregivers are human: they can lose their perspective, their tempers, their judgement. (This is the core of child welfare assessment, which recognizes that children can be frustrating.)
A fourth is that seniors are not necessarily nice people, and perhaps they never were, but dependence makes it more likely that bad behaviour will not be tolerated. Retribution is a possibility.
I wish there were an easy pathway to ensuring seniors are safe and well cared for. I don’t know what it is, no more than I know how a child welfare system would reliably provide as good a childhood as a well-functioning home. I am truly sorry about that.
