Dr. Lesley Jessiman is an associate professor in UFV’s psychology department whose academic career has been focused on aging and how it affects language and memory. In the fall, Jessiman teaches Intro to Developmental Psychology and Adulthood and Aging as well as a special topics research course. Her most recent research project, completed with Dr. Shelley Canning, focuses on elder abuse and ageist opinions and beliefs.
Can you describe a little bit about your research on the misconceptions of elder abuse, and how different age groups make judgments about elder abuse?
Elder abuse was something I was always interested in. One of my honor students in my Adulthood Aging class, Hope Buchanan, said she was interested in doing something in elder abuse. So, we were looking at some topics and then we thought about the perceptions of elder abuse and the fact that people don’t really know what elder abuse is. When you look at the prevalence rate of elder abuse across the world, it’s one in six, and that’s an underestimation.
One of the reasons why that happens is that people who witness elder abuse don’t realize that it’s elder abuse. And people who are victims of it also don’t realize what they are suffering with. So, we thought about how can we identify what’s happening here from an experimental perspective. Why are people not able to see what elder abuse is? So my student, Hope, created scenarios that we could look into. We had some scenarios where the individuals had dementia and some scenarios where the individuals did not have dementia.
In addition to that, we also had different abuse types that people perceive differently. I also collected more data from ElderCollege and some community senior groups in Chilliwack and Abbotsford. And the conclusion that we drew from that was older adults and younger adults perceive different types of elder abuse differently. The sexual and physical abuse are identified more easily by all age groups. However, young adults were not very good at identifying when someone was financially abused, neglected or emotionally abused. Older adults tend to be significantly more able to identify that abuse, compared to young adults.
We also found that the younger adults were justifying the behavior, and the justification was seen more when someone had dementia. Obviously, we are aware that we can’t map what happens in the lab to real lives, but it does tell us that people’s misperceptions really do come from just a lack of understanding and lack of education about what elder abuse actually is and the severity of elder abuse depending on what type it is.
How would you describe elder abuse in a way that people understand and recognize it more? What are the different types?
It is basically when someone’s basic human rights are violated and when someone causes harm to that individual. Its different types are physical abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect. Neglect is very similar to the way we see it with children. It is often not as readily identifiable as it’s the omission of an act, rather than the commission of an act — like in case of physical abuse, where you can actually see the act being committed. But when someone is being neglected, you often aren’t able to see that.
Sometimes, abuse is recognized as a benevolent act and the person might think it’s for the good of the individual. Abuse can also be intentional and unintentional. Sometimes people can engage in abuse, and it can be for the good of the individual. Like they want to make sure that they’re eating, they’re taking their medications, or want to make sure someone doesn’t take their money, so they take control. There are varying degrees of these violations. That is one of the problems — that we don’t all define it in the same way.
There’s lots of factors that can lead to why we misperceive elder abuse. But one of the things that is clear from the qualitative perspective, is that people had difficulty seeing when the abuse was a crime or wasn’t a crime, when in fact all abuse is a crime.
What were your key findings from this research?
The key findings are definitely the misperceptions of elder abuse. The inability to identify elder abuse is because of the age, experience, and the abuse type. The type of abuse influences someone’s ability to identify abuse. The most identifiable ones are the ones that are very well advertised in society as heinous crimes, like sexual abuse and physical abuse. But emotional abuse, financial abuse, and neglect are less easily identified by individuals.
Another important conclusion is that the dementia status of the victims also influences perception of the individual. When an older adult sees someone with dementia, they’re able to sympathize with them more and are more likely to identify abuse. But the younger adults are more likely to look for some justifications for the elder abuse, and they focus on the situation of the care provider. Again, that’s not all younger adults and all older adults. There are obviously some outliers within the research. But overall, older adults were much more likely to identify abuse if the victim has dementia.
One such example was when the dementia patient was overeating, so the care provider told him that the food was poisoned, in order to stop them from overeating and getting sick. The older adults perceived this as being outrageous, while the younger adults provided justifications like, “They have dementia. They have no memory, so it is okay to do that,” but we all know it isn’t.
The purpose of this information is not to point fingers at anyone, but to help them understand what dementia is and how to perceive it, what it is like to have dementia, and what it would look like if someone was being abused. But another one of the wonderful things we found out about both young and older adults was that they both provided alternative strategies, like what could have been done by the care provider to make the situation better. Even when the young adults justified the behavior, they always provided alternatives as well.
Image: UFV Community Health and Social Innovation Hub
