Safeguarding Older People from Abuse: Critical Contexts to Policy and Practice

✍ Scribed by Angie Ash

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 202
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The mistreatment of older people is increasingly recognised internationally as a significant abuse of elders’ human rights. ‘Scandals’ and inquiries into the failure to protect older people from abuse in health and social care systems rarely address, and still less challenge, the social, economic and cultural context to the abuse of older people. This critical and challenging book makes a strong case for the development of ethically-driven, research-informed policy and practice to safeguard older people from abuse. Drawing on findings of original UK research and framed in an international context, it illustrates ways in which ageism, under-resourced services to older people, target-driven health and social care policy and services, and organisational cultures of blame and scapegoating, are a powerful yet invisible backcloth to elder abuse. Safeguarding older people from abuse will be essential reading for policy makers, politicians, professionals, campaigners, researchers and educators, and those working in criminal justice fields.

✦ Table of Contents

SAFEGUARDING OLDER PEOPLE FROM ABUSE
Contents
Acronyms
About the author
Acknowledgements
1. Contexts to safeguarding older people from abuse
Origins of the book
Structure of the book
2. The need for theory, critical thinking and practice
‘Theory’ and why it matters
Critical perspectives, critical thinking, critical practice
3. The abuse of older people
‘Naming’ elder abuse in the UK
Defining elder abuse
Prevalence of elder abuse
Institutional abuse and mistreatment of older people
‘Domestic violence grown old’
Disclosing and responding to elder abuse
Ageism, elder abuse and human rights
4. Adult protection, safeguarding and personalisation
Adult protection law and policy in the UK
Personalisation and its manifestations
Public policy, personalisation and older people
5. Public policy implementation in street-level bureaucracies
Michael Lipsky and street-level bureaucracy
The problem of the street-level bureaucrat
Discretion and its discontents
Understanding policy implementation, understanding the street-level bureaucrat
6. A case study of street-level policy implementation to protect older people from abuse
‘Seeing’ elder mistreatment
Organisational culture
Dilemmas of resources
Dilemmas of care
Power, discretion and procedures
7. Discretion and dissonance in adult protection work
Lipsky revisited
Lipsky ‘then’ and ‘now’
8. Cultures and contexts of complicity
Long tail, long tale
‘Administrative evil’?
Doing more of the same misguided things better
9. Ethics, policy and practice
A question of ethics
Recognition and compassion
Joan Tronto’s four elements of an ethic of care
10. Safeguarding older people from abuse: ethical futures
References
Index