BARBADOS: Senior Citizens' Protection & Safety Policy Ready

BRIDGETOWN, St. Michael, Barbados (The Nation Newspaper), June 4, 2006: There is dire need for legislation to deal specifically with abuse and crimes committed against the elderly. And chairman of the National Assistance Board (NAB), Henderson Bovell, has come up with a Senior Citizens' Protection And Safety policy paper which he hopes could be the impetus toward rectifying this situation. In an interview with the SUNDAY SUN, Bovell said abuse of the elderly was believed to be significantly under-reported. Victims might be reluctant to report abuse because they were completely under the control, or care of the abuser; feared being placed in an institution; simply did not know what to do; or did not want to involve the police, he stated. "Unfortunately, even though such abuse is known to exist, there are no available figures at present to quantify such abuse. It is, however, believed that once mechanisms are put in place to encourage reporting, this will be addressed and corrected," he said. Bovell, who is also a research analyst with the Ministry of Social Transformation, identified neglect, abandonment and self-neglect, as well as physical, sexual, emotional, medicinal and social abuse, as areas of maltreatment discovered in the research. He also said that research had shown the elderly to be extremely vulnerable to financial and material abuse from both family and non-family members. Bovell said the wide-ranging policy paper recommended the institution of a Commission For Elder Affairs to be solely responsible for all matters affecting the elderly, except matters related to health and medical care. Safety: He suggested such a commission should have a duty in law to sue on behalf of the elderly if it believed such persons were being abused, neglected or their safety was being compromised. He also proffered the institution of a Central Abuse Registry to compile data of all reports made under mandatory reporting provisions. Bovell said research had shown that ill-treatment of seniors had been identified in facilities like nursing homes, residential care, hospitals and day-care facilities in almost every country where such institutions existed. A distinction had to be made between individual acts of abuse, neglect in institutional settings and institutionalised abuse. By Wade Gibbons © 1997-2005. Nation Publishing Company Limited.