Nurturing Elders and Others:
Safe Sanctuary to Include Older Adults
By the Rev. Paul Graves
On the day I wrote this column, my wife visited our local bank. There she watched a healthy interaction between an elder, his adult daughter, and the bank teller. The man was apparently withdrawing money that was to be later invested with his financial planner.
His daughter did two important things:
- she kept her dad focused on the task at hand when he would let the conversation with the teller wander somewhere else; and
- she made gentle comments to reassure her father that what he was doing was what he intended to do.
She was a “good daughter”. It is unfortunate that not all older adults have “good children”, or friends they can trust. This is one good reason why our Annual Conference has decided to include older and vulnerable adults in the conference-wide Safe Sanctuary policy.
Elder abuse appears in many forms: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation of an elder’s money or property, neglect, abandonment, or self-neglect, and even spiritual abuse. Too often, the abuser is a family member, caregiver or another trusted person outside the family. Outrageous!
Here are two facts worth considering:
- A 2006 study by the National Center on Elder Abuse identified self-neglect as the most common type of abuse (29.4%), followed by caregiver neglect (26.1%) and financial exploitation (18.5%).
- A 2009 study by the same group estimated that 50% of older adults are victims of financial exploitation. But only 4%-15% of those cases are ever reported!
To provide some measure of educated protection for older adults, the Conference Council on Older Adult Ministries recently met with Brant Henshaw, assistant treasurer of the PNW Conference and a member of the team that is updating the “Safe Sanctuary Guidelines” for our local churches and conference events.
Our Council is particularly focused on developing policies to guide paid and volunteer staff members working with “vulnerable adults”. One of our Council members rightfully suggested that “functional ability”, not chronological age, is the key element that identifies who a vulnerable adult is.
One of the primary resources we will use in this project is a new book authored by the Rev. Joy Melton. It is called “Safe Sanctuaries: The Church Responds to Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation of Older Adults”. Melton is an attorney and a United Methodist clergyperson.
Her Atlanta, Ga. law practice is dedicated to the protection of vulnerable individuals – children, youth and older adults. She works with many churches across our denomination to provide resources for churches to protect and serve the vulnerable in their church families.
In addition to using Joy’s book as a resource for the Safe Sanctuary guidelines, our council will use her book as the basis for a 3-hour workshop on Elder Abuse to be shared with churches around our Annual Conference. We see these workshops as “train the trainer” events.
We want to engage church folks whose passion is to alert and call their churches to take the issue of elder abuse seriously – whether it occurs in their churches or their communities. Whether clergy or laity, these persons will be invited into a three-hour primer course on how to address elder abuse.
They can then go back to their congregations and communities with new energy and strategies to engage others in a restorative effort to reduce the number of incidents of elder abuse. We will soon be putting out the invitation for churches to attend these “train the trainer” workshops.
We want to insert Jesus’ call to serve “the least of these” into an education effort that can move us toward a transformative experience. When older adults are considered by family members, a community, or even a church to be less valuable than younger people, it is imperative to find new ways to transform elder abuse into honoring elders.
The Gospel calls us to do that!
The Rev. Paul Graves serves as the chair of the Council on Older Adult Ministries for the PNWUMC
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Safe Sanctuaries: The Church Responds to Abuse, Neglect, and Exploitation of Older Adults by Joy Thornburg Melton |
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Hallelujah. We are a fledgling group in Sequim,WA dedicated to raising awareness of the idignities and often neglect resulting from traditional models of care in Assisted Living and skilled communities. Members of a study group at TUMC Sequim raised money to send me to 1 day of the 5 day Pioneer Conference. Following this, we started discussions with CEOs from 4 care communities in Sequim and Port Angeles. They are complying with mandated “quality care” but we are interested how this is measured. We are particularly interested in Resident Directed Care and Green Houses, started 10 years ago by Mississippi Methodist Social Services at Tupelo. Any chance of our conference becoming more involved in the process of raising awareness that change is needed and the time is now?
Hello Pauline. Thank you for telling me about your group’s effort to both hold traditional models of care in Sequim accountable; but also seeking more information on alternative models Green Houses and Resident Directed Care. I’m familiar (on paper) with Green Houses — I know of only one in the greater Pacific Northwest (Billings, MT). Maybe you’ve learned of others. I haven’t heard of Resident Directed Care, but will look it up.
Yes, the Conference Council on Older Adult Ministries is very open to supporting local efforts — like yours in Sequim — by calling attention to them however we can. Plus we are preparing a series of workshops on “Safe Sanctuary” that we hope will identify both the hidden problem of elder abuse and any new opportunities that our increased awareness and attention can unearth. Please send more information to me at elderadvocates@nctv.com and I will be quick to pass it along to the rest of the council on older adult ministries.
Well done to you and your friends!
Peace,
Paul Graves