18/08/2022
Is there the potential for Fraud? - Abuse can be minimised with proper pre-planning and appointing, but no amount of legislation will deal with people who want to do bad things and abuse people. However, having said that we have no proper adult safeguarding legislation. We have very large figures for abuse even though we don’t capture them on a national basis, but the figure that is captured by the HSE would indicate say in 2017 about 10,000 cases of concern. That was increased in 2018 up by about 25% because Safeguarding Ireland did a public awareness campaign about this and another piece of research, indicates that 10% of the Irish population has witnessed abuse in the previous 12 months. Now if you extrapolate that to say that there are 3.8 million adults in Irish society, that would imply that 380,000 people have witnessed abuse. Very few of them are reported because we don’t have the proper legal framework or legislation to tell us who to report to. It is one thing to report and incident to the HSE, whilst in care. However most of the abuse takes place in the community where people are not interacting with services. A lot of the abuse, particularly of older people, is financial abuse. We need a mechanism to identify what abuse is, to understand it is abuse, to detect it and to ensure that the perpetrators are actually caught. There may be criminal offences and even if people are pilfering the pension or doing people out of other income for example, such as family members collecting the pension and keeping some of it, that is theft.
There is a huge area of psychological abuse of people of very vulnerable people who are under the control of somebody. This is a huge issue, and again as a society, we have to embrace that issue and recognise that we have to do something about it. We need adult safeguarding legislation which also should have a mechanism to put in procedures and policies to prevent abuse and when others of us see it and should call it out and make sure it is addressed.
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