Elder Abuse and Protection — Prelims Strategy

Prelims Strategy

Distinguish physical, emotional and financial harm, neglect and abandonment. Financial exploitation does not require visible physical injury, and account access is not equivalent to consent to appropriate money. Older age alone should not be treated as proof of inability to make choices.

Under the 2007 Act, section 23(1) connects relief to a conditional property transfer and refusal or failure to provide the specified needs. Section 24 concerns a person having care or protection who leaves the senior citizen with the intention of wholly abandoning them. Temporary absence with continuing support does not by itself establish that offence.

Keep Elderline's support function separate from Tribunal adjudication. A referral is not a maintenance order. For data interpretation, a rise from two hundred to three hundred reports is a fifty-percent increase in reports, not automatic proof of a fifty-percent increase in prevalence. Source year, geography, population and measurement method matter when using research findings.