1 Million Citizens Vulnerable, House Hearing Told : Elderly Protest Physical Abuse, Loss of Dignity

Elderly persons abused by their loved ones often don’t know where to go for help, a House subcommittee was told Friday.

“One reason you don’t get a lot of complaints from the elderly is, I’m living and they’re dead,” said a Massachusetts man wearing a thick gray wig and dark glasses and introduced only as 75-year-old “Mr. Smith.”

“I have lost my dignity,” he told the House Aging subcommittee on health and long-term care led by Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.), 84, the oldest member of Congress.

“You can’t go to the police and tell them you think he is going to kill you,” Smith said, adding that his son attacked him with a hatchet last year after subjecting him and his wife to years of abuse.

It was the hatchet attack that finally brought help, he said, because then the police had to get involved.

‘Going on Everywhere’

“I am here to emphasize that abuse of the elderly is going on everywhere in this country,” he said. “The stories you have heard are true. This is not hearsay. I am not hearsay.”

Scott Harshbarger, district attorney of Middlesex County, Mass., who accompanied Smith to the hearing, said Smith’s story is not unusual.

“The elderly victim is a target because of age,” Harshbarger said. “The elderly, like the poor and children, because of their relative or perceived powerlessness, suffer most dramatically from the effects of actual crime as victims.”

A survey by the subcommittee showed that abuse of the elderly is increasing nationally and may affect about 4% of the aged population, Pepper said. This would be an increase of 100,000 abuse cases annually since 1981, he said.

“It represents a shocking and still largely hidden problem affecting over a million of our nation’s most helpless and vulnerable citizens,” Pepper said.

Abuse Rarely Reported

The survey indicated that one of every three cases of child abuse is reported, but only one of every five cases of abuse of the elderly comes to the attention of appropriate authorities, he said.

Another witness, Lois A. Pope, came to the hearing from the Federal Women’s Prison in Lexington, Ky., where she is serving a two- to six-year sentence.

Pope said she admitted embezzling $170,000 from 32 patients at the U.S. Soldiers and Airmen’s Home in Washington between March, 1980, and October, 1983.

“I have tried since to understand why I did something so wrong,” she said. “I am 61 myself and growing older. At the time, I felt these patients loved me and would want me to have the money to buy the things I needed. I think now I was simply afraid of being old and alone and unloved.”