Social worker Emily Brooks talks with a client at the Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Center for Elder Abuse Prevention at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale.
The Day Her Son Hung Her in the Closet
Abuse of the elderly is staggeringly common. Recovery is a long, winding, and often treacherous road.
By Timothy Lavin
The eight elderly women sitting around the table were not obvious victims in any sense. They talked and laughed and ate, and talked some more. They dressed well. Some wore jewels, others sported dyed hair. They appeared, actually, like any group of New York women you’d spot in a coffee shop or on the subway. Then they explained why they were there.
Edith Dorsey described how she had endured nearly 30 years of abuse at the hands of her husband, a heroine addict who, she said, “beat me like a dude.” Her voice trembled and her foot tapped the table leg as she told how he had punched her in the face regularly. As the beatings intensified, she’d started to lock herself in a room. One night he broke in with a crowbar.
The woman to her right, red-haired and gregarious, had had to move in with her drug-addicted son after she lost much of her savings in the stock-market crash. (Like everyone else at the gathering, she asked that I not use her name.) She’d soon found herself living under a harsh regime – forbidden to talk to the neighbors and required to adhere to a curfew. “He treated me like I was five years old,” she said. He and his girlfriend constantly berated her. But she was dependent on them, so she stayed. One day the son became enraged and smacked her. “I know you think it’s unbelievable for a son to treat his mother this way,” she said. “But that’s what drugs can do to a person. I don’t miss him. I really don’t. Not while he’s on drugs.”
Next, a gray-haired woman in a sleeveless dress told, with startling calm, how she had taken in her nephew after his mother died and his father moved to Florida. Though she didn’t know it, he too had been addicted to drugs and was now hooked on Methadone and alcohol. He would scream at her and steal her money. He wrecked her car. On many occasions he wrecked her house. He pushed her around. Sometimes he would bring her flowers and gifts. Then the abuse would start up again. “It was always hot and cold,” she said. “And you really can’t live like that.”
There was a skinny woman with large brown eyes. She had been diagnosed with cancer 21 years ago and her nephew had moved up from Florida to help her. “In the beginning, he really did help. I was so thankful for a while.” But he, unbeknownst to his aunt, was another drug addict. He would have relapses, breakdowns, and would often end up in the hospital. He was drinking and doing crack and heroin, and needed money constantly. He cleared his aunt of her pensions, then her life savings, and finally of her Social Security checks. “I treated him like a son,” she said, making steady eye contact, her head shaking. “From day one. You have no idea.” She tolerated his malice for years. Then one day the nephew – drunk, stoned, and angry – hung her by her dress from a hanger and locked her in a closet. A short while later, he broke her arm. That was enough. When she conveyed her plight to the authorities, a squad of helmeted police knocked down her apartment door and arrested her nephew. “I was absolutely terrified,” she said. “But I couldn’t live with it anymore.”
These women were all members of a support group for victims of elder abuse – a pervasive yet chronically under publicized social malady. The group is run by the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (or JASA), a city-affiliated organization that provides free legal and social services to the elderly. All of the cases here at hand had been resolved, at least in a technical sense, meaning the victims escaped the abusive situation and the abusers were dealt with. Of course the psychological wounds persist, and for these women always will.
“But they can come here, look across the table, and see someone who’s a great mother, someone they can see is a great mother, and she’s had the same problems,” said Lorraine Thomas, the social worker at JASA who runs this group. “That same [kind of] crazy son who’s done terrible things to her. ‘Well,’ she can say, ‘maybe I was a great mother too. It’s not me, it’s him.’ It helps them be normal again.”
As awful as their stories are, the women in this particular group are, in a sense, the lucky ones. Recent studies indicate that roughly 4 percent of seniors are abused each year. In New York City, which is home to more than one million people age 65 and over, this translates to an astounding number. And very few of these cases are ever reported, let alone resolved.
“The percentage of unreported cases is huge. I mean huge,” said Aurora Salamone, the director of the New York City Department for the Aging, which handles roughly 1,200 cases of elder abuse each year.
The reasons for the unreported gap vary. Many seniors suffer from dementia and may be only dimly aware of the abuse they endure, or are unable to express it to others. Some have little contact with the outside world. And, bruises on the elderly, when noticed, tend to be easily explained. Some forms of abuse – verbal or emotional – leave no visible wounds at all. Others like financial fraud can be quite complicated; even lucid, sharp-eyed elders may not realize their savings are being sapped by ostensibly concerned friends.
On a more complicated level, many seniors find it impossible to believe, let alone acknowledge, that a family member would abuse them. This is the case about 90 percent of the time. I asked if the women at JASA had all been abused by relatives. Around the room, heads nodded.
“My husband.”
“My son.”
“My nephew.”
“My nephew too.”
“I myself felt guilty,” said a woman in a brilliant green-and-gold dress, whose son had exhibited such terrifying behavior after joining a gang – screaming, punching holes in the wall, ripping doors off their hinges – that she eventually threw him out. “This is my child,” she said. “What did I do wrong raising him?”
Indeed, the counselors and social workers I spoke with all agreed that shame presents a persistent and enigmatic obstacle to recovery – no matter how awful or prolonged the abuse.
“Oh, it’s horrible for an older person to come in here and say my son or daughter is exploiting me or hitting me or screaming at me,” said Ms. Salamone. “That’s demeaning. This is their flesh, this isn’t a stranger.”
As a consequence, even those who do seek intervention often decline to press charges. “A lot of times the perpetrators are on drugs or alcohol or they have mental-health issues. And the victims want these people helped, not prosecuted.”
JASA’s Thomas agreed. “My clients come to me, and the first thing they say is: ‘Lorraine, my son’s got this problem, this problem, and this problem. Can you fix him? What can you do?’”
Keeping this need in mind, judges who hear elder-abuse cases will often require the abuser to get help if he or she hopes to avoid the clink. “Very often the offender will choose rehab over jail,” Lorraine Thomas said. “And sometimes it actually has a good ending.”
In the meantime – between the initial cry for help and the eventual resolution – there’s an awful period of limbo. Adult Protective Services, a small city agency, is the presumed authority for such cases. But it has an agonizingly narrow mandate; it can help only abused adults who lack mental capacity. Other cases get referred to JASA. More often, abused seniors must navigate a bewildering patchwork of non-profit groups, nursing-home programs, law-enforcement task forces, and social workers. And taking that step is never easy.
Beyond the shame, degradation, and pain associated with turning in a relative, more practical concerns abound. Nobody wants to leave the house or apartment they’ve occupied for years, or the community in which they feel comfortable. Many are more fearful of what awaits them elsewhere than of remaining in a familiar albeit ruinous loop.
“There’s a big fear among our clients that they’ll be institutionalized,” said Carmen Escobar, the director of programs for One Stop Senior Services, a non-profit support group that aids victims of elder abuse. “That’s not the case, but the fear is that if they get out of this abusive household and they have no other support system, they’ll end up in some home they don’t want to be in.”
Where will they in fact end up? Most often, agencies like One Stop and JASA aim to get the abuser out and the victim back in his or her home. But that’s not always feasible. And trying to get people into shelters is a crapshoot. Most shelters are designed for mothers and young children. Single women occasionally have difficulty gaining admittance. And shelters were never designed with seniors in mind. They may not accommodate wheelchairs, for example, or have anyone on staff who can adequately handle the infirmities of old age.
In Riverdale, N.Y., the Hebrew Home for the Aged recently opened a shelter called the Weinberg Center specifically for abused seniors. It is believed to be the first of its kind – a striking fact, given the extensive networks available for the homeless and victims of domestic violence in New York City. But the Weinberg Center, discouragingly, only has room for about 30 people. “The hope is that others will replicate what we’re doing here,” said Hebrew Home president Daniel Reingold.
The center is designed to look and feel not like shelter. “A lot of agencies are out there doing the work,” said Anne Marie Levine, the Weinberg director. “But what happens is they hit a gap. They’ve identified a bona-fide case of abuse – a person is being hurt or stolen from – and they’re helping out. The next step is, ‘Where do I go?’ We take care of that next step.” Those admitted to the Weinberg Center can stay as long as they need to. But a shelter is, by its nature, a temporary stop.
Like all the other agencies, the Weinberg Center works with legal teams to force abusers out of the victims’ homes. Weinberg may also press for an order of protection. “But an order of protection is only as good as the person who uses it,” said the Department for the Aging’s Aurora Salmone. “You can have this piece of paper, and if you don’t use it, it won’t keep anybody out. Sometimes it can escalate the problem. So it’s a tricky tool to have.”
And so, whether out of sympathy, acquiescence, or practicality, many abused seniors end up right back where they started – living with their abusers.
Ms. Levine told of an elderly Queens man who sought refuge at the Weinberg Center. He had found himself subsisting on income from redeemed bottles and cans after his abusive son starting appropriating dad’s Social Security checks. The son then wanted to force his father to move down South with him – to keep the cash coming. The father refused, and eventually made his way to the Hebrew Home, where he stayed for two months. Now he’s back with his son.
“That is common,” said Anne Marie Levine. The shelter sets their residents up with a network (social workers, local senior centers, law- enforcement numbers to call). “But these are competent adults. Often the victims just want to get back to their homes, get their lives back together.”
Elder abuse eludes concise definition. Cases generally have a few things in common: The victims are elderly, the reprobates are often relatives and usually affected by drugs or mental illness. The crimes, by any objective standard, are abominable. But in most other respects, elder abuse cases vary wildly.
“If you’ve seen one elder-abuse case,” said Levine, “you’ve seen one elder-abuse case.”
This wreaks legal and administrative havoc. Laws on the subject vary greatly from state to state. Even within New York City, the situation can be confusing. “One reason why this is so difficult is because you’re not dealing with simple abuse,” said Sherry Hunter, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. “It’s fraud, it’s theft, it’s harassment, it’s assault, it’s sexual assault. Or usually some combination. It’s this whole range of crimes that’s complicated by the fact that the victim is an elderly person.”
For the abuse to qualify as a hate crime in New York City, and thus be subject to a stricter code of punishment, the victim must be 60 years of age or older, and demonstrably vulnerable – that is, suffering from some disease related to old age that renders him or her incapable of managing his or her own health. Anyone who has ever met an elderly person can sense, immediately, how arbitrary that distinction is.
Many places in the country lack even this stab at codification. In an attempt to fill that gap, lobbying groups in Washington have devoted great resources to mobilizing a federal response to the problem. They point out that on similar issues, like domestic violence and child abuse, until the federal government provided funds and leadership, very little got done. What was accomplished tended to be ad hoc and arbitrary.
The most comprehensive attempt to mount a federal response to elder abuse has been the Elder Justice bill, which was derailed in the last Congress by a combination of poor timing and opposition from the Bush Administration. Now it is in the process of being revised.
“The administration’s objection was that this bill wasn’t really necessary. That it was duplicative of what they were already doing,” said Robert B. Blancato, president of the National Committee for the Prevention of Elder Abuse. “Is that the case? No, it really isn’t the case.” He noted that of all the funds the federal government devotes to combating abuse, only 2 percent is earmarked for the elderly.
“A little money to print pamphlets, and then it’s like, hang up your boots and call it a day,” said one of the top legislative aides who worked on the bill. “The bottom line is, they haven’t gotten it done.”
What was merely insufficient last year may prove catastrophic five years from now. “If your caseload is increasing, and you’ve got an aging population, and you recognize the potential for abuse when 70 percent of the wealth in this country is now controlled by people 50 and over, you’ve got to rethink this,” said Blancato, who then went on to express optimism about lobbying groups that he thinks will reach a compromise with the Administration.
Beyond more cash and a more orderly response to the problem by the government, activists hope for funding of studies that will generate reliable information.
“A huge problem we have is that the statistics aren’t there,” said Sara Aravanis, director of the National Center on Elder Abuse. “We’re hampered in this field because we don’t have credible studies. More science in the arena would be welcomed by everybody.”
Though little is empirically known, one thing nearly everyone agrees on is that the problem is growing. Partly, this reflects an aging population. But there’s also a lot of money to be made in scamming old people. They have houses, a lifetime of savings, and regular checks from pensions and Social Security. Lack of employment or affordable housing for adult sons and daughters, especially in New York City, is another contributing factor.
Finally, though, we may just be seeing new light shed on an old problem. One of the primary missions of places like JASA and the Hebrew Home is getting the public to acknowledge the extent to which our elders are being abused. Part of the program at the Hebrew Home’s Weinberg Center involves training people to recognize abuse – not just nursing-home staffers but also doormen, bank tellers, bus drivers, and law-enforcement officials.
“There’s no question, every year we see more and more [abuse],” said JASA’s Lorraine Thomas. Just like domestic violence 20 years ago – people are no longer so ashamed to say: “I’m a victim.”
That’s the point of the support group she runs. Without exception, every woman sitting at that table in Queens asked that I mention JASA prominently.
“You feel like you’re alone,” said the woman whose nephew had locked her on a hanger in the closet. “You feel like everybody else washes their hands of the problem. Here, they don’t talk back to you, they don’t accuse you, they don’t tell you it’s all your fault. Other victims need to know they’re not alone – just how not alone they are.”
