Center tackles elder abuse
Team of experts will strengthen prosecutions
Twenty years ago, when Harris County social services officials first asked Dr. Carmel Dyer to help check on homebound elderly residents, the geriatrics physician figured she’d be sipping tea with grandmas while checking their blood pressure.
Instead, she was horrified to find senior citizens living in squalor, neglected by caregivers, or worse, abused and exploited by them. And little was being done to protect them.
“We found that people had died because we were not getting services to them quickly enough, we were not recognizing the problems quickly enough, and we were not prosecuting the perpetrators,” said Dyer, a professor of geriatric medicine at UTHealth’s McGovern School of Medicine. “And so the idea for the Senior Justice Assessment Center was born.”
After years of planning, that idea became a reality on Thursday as Harris County officials launched a new collaborative office with the goal of better investigating and prosecuting elder abuse.
The Harris County Senior Justice Assessment Center, the first of its kind in Texas, will be similar to the county’s Children’s Assessment Center, pulling together experts in geriatric medicine, protective services, civil and criminal prosecution, and law enforcement.
“We’re taking lessons that have been learned in handling child abuse cases and applying it to cases in which an older adult has been abused or neglected,” Dyer said prior to the ceremony at the Harris County Protective Services center, where the new office will be located.
Every year, thousands of elderly residents are abused or exploited, said Mary McFaden, a Harris County prosecutor who oversees elder exploitation cases. Only a small number of elder abuse cases — as little as 1 in 14 according to one study — are ever reported. And those that are reported are difficult to prosecute, McFaden said, in part because of bureaucratic obstacles.
The problem will only get worse as the state’s elderly population continues to swell, said Hank Whitman, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Texas had about 3.8 million people age 60 and older, roughly 15 percent of the population. The number is expected to more than triple to 12 million by 2050, a sobering statistic when paired with a recent study finding that one in 10 Americans older than 60 have suffered some form of abuse.
“The sad thing about it is a lot of our elderly population is being exploited by family members,” Whitman said. “I’m glad now that we’ve risen to that forefront and have realized this is a big problem, and that Harris County has taken this step.”
The new center will put social workers, investigators, health experts and prosecutors together in the same room, allowing them to work collaboratively on cases, potentially streamlining and strengthening prosecutions.
“What we face is an epidemic,” McFaden said during the ceremony. “An epidemic that cannot be approached by traditional investigations. An epidemic that cannot be approached through traditional prosecutions.”
One factor making elder abuse cases more difficult than child abuse cases — particularly those that involve financial exploitation — is the legal requirement to prove the victim was vulnerable at the time of the abuse.
That’s why Dyer is leading a team from UTHealth and Harris Health that will interview elderly victims and provide medical assessments that can be introduced as expert opinions in court.
“A child has a presumption of lacking capacity,” Dyer said. “With older adults, you have to prove they lack that capacity, which is why the medical piece of this is important.”
The new center, launched with the help of a $383,000 grant from the Governor’s Criminal Justice Division, builds on similar efforts in New York City and California and is part of a greater nationwide trend toward collaborative approaches to elder abuse cases.
Whitman said the new center — the idea Dyer began dreaming of more than a decade ago — will be a model that should be replicated across the state.
“We want convictions,” Dyer said. “The goal is to protect the older adult and, in doing so, protect the broader community from perpetrators of these crimes.”