Status of Women Committee on Oct. 20th, 2011

[The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Tilly O'Neill Gordon (Miramichi, CPC)), Conservative, Tilly O'Neill-Gordon]

I want to welcome everybody here this afternoon.

We have three witnesses, who are each going to make a 10-minute presentation. Following that 30 minutes, we will turn to our seven-minute round of questioning.

I want to welcome the witnesses and say how happy we are that you are with us today. I realize that this has been your life's work, so I know that you'll have a lot to offer and that you're very passionate about it, as are we.

We are beginning with Charmaine Spencer.

Please begin your presentation.

[Charmaine Spencer, Co-Chair, Canadian Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse]

Good afternoon, members of the standing committee.

Thank you very much for this opportunity to participate in this consultation. My name is Charmaine Spencer. I am the co-chair of the Canadian Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse. CNPEA--RCPMTA in French--is a national non-profit organization that has been working on abuse and neglect issues since before 1991. That was about two years after the first Canadian study on abuse and neglect of older adults came out. The network itself was actually the brainchild of Dr. Elizabeth Podnieks, the lead researcher on that now classic study.

The best way to describe our organization is as a network of individuals, organizations, and regional and community networks. It's unique in its composition and its approach. Our 19-member board includes representatives from each of the provincial and territorial networks, who work with communities on these issues. We are proud of the fact we have representatives from each province and territory. Currently about one half of our board members are seniors, many of whom have been engaged in family violence and related issues for about a quarter of a century. The board includes provincial staff, as well as professionals and academics in the areas of gerontology, medicine, social work, and law.

At CNPEA or RCPMTA, we focus on two key things. The first is sharing current Canadian information about the many different legal, health, social, and cultural aspects of abuse and neglect of older adults, as well as developing information on new and emerging topics. We place this very much in a Canadian context and at a Canadian angle because of the many important and unique features of our country's approaches relative to those of other countries.

We also focus in terms of helping to link local, regional, and provincial and territorial networks by sharing ideas and information and helping them to keep informed about developments in everyday practices, in awareness building, and in practice and policy. This way, communities can find out what is happening in other jurisdictions on particular aspects of the issue and see if that makes sense for their local or regional efforts. That multidirectional sharing is key.

Although this social issue has been around for decades, each jurisdiction in Canada is at a different stage of awareness, knowledge, resources, and community development in this area. As a country, we are still in the early stages of development, but we have seen significant strides made in provinces such as Ontario, Quebec, the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Manitoba, and Nova Scotia. Those are some examples.

In most jurisdictions, that awareness building and that local support is carried out through very time-limited kinds of funding, not ongoing support. The federal elder abuse initiative over the past few years has helped build awareness, but sometimes at a cost to communities who have few, if any, resources to support that awareness and to help individuals. Awareness and appropriate resources need to go hand in hand. Nonetheless, at a community level we are seeing the beginnings of community resources and community responses coming together.

Across the country, our members encourage people to recognize older women and men as a socially, economically, and culturally diverse group that also spans at least two different generations.

Abuse and neglect of older women is a complex, multi-faceted issue that can occur in community settings, as well as in seniors' residences and care-and-support settings such as nursing homes and personal care homes. Older women can experience physical, emotional, financial, and sexual harms, as well as violations of basic rights that other adults take for granted. Commonly, they experience several harms at the same time. Sometimes the harms can occur not from active behaviours, but through neglect from a lack of awareness, lack of knowledge, or lack of personal or community resources. At other times, the neglect may be intentional.

Our organization also emphasizes non-ageist approaches and responses. There is considerable paternalism at one end of the helping spectrum: basically wanting to jump in and rescue or jump in and punish someone. Conversely, at the other end of the helping spectrum, there is the expectation that you can fix the problem simply by providing older women with information while ignoring the dynamics of the relationships that underlie the abuse or neglect, and the policies and practices within the community that help support it.

This is an area that is rife with many myths and misconceptions. We find that older women are often characterized as weak, vulnerable, and less capable people. You'll often hear abused older women described as naive, ill-informed, too trusting, too caring, and too dependent. There is a strong inclination to go around her and to do what people think is best for her.

People hope to be able to distill the often complex issues in this area and try to look for easy answers. There is much less attention given to the social and economic circumstances, such as gender roles and life experience, resource allocation, and social policies, that may facilitate and perpetuate abuse or neglect. Even well-intentioned helpers may ignore or dismiss older women's values, beliefs, and often remarkable strength in the face of adversity.

To better understand how older women are affected, I would like to draw on the lives and experiences of four older women I know in B.C. They have permitted me to share their stories to help illustrate some of the issues and the ways they are being addressed across the country. Their stories are common to many parts of the country.

If you have questions afterwards, I am happy to talk more about the issues, the community challenges, and the progress that has been made in helping these older women and in preventing and addressing situations similar to theirs. In case you are wondering, yes, the names and circumstances have been modified a bit to help protect the women.

Magda is the first woman. She is now in her mid-sixties. She lived in a small community in B.C. and has lived with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse throughout most of her married life. In the 1960s, when she was a young bride being assaulted by her husband, local police typically treated these situations as private matters and took a hands-off approach. There were no transition houses or shelters--there aren't any in her community even today--and the family doctor who treated her broken bones was reluctant to ask questions. Silence was the common response. The expectation of her church, culture, and community was that it was her responsibility as a wife to make things better.

Len doesn't assault her anymore. He simply wore her down through his name-calling and intimidation. Plus, he controlled all the finances. About five years ago, one of her children had almost convinced her to separate from Len and was helping her to live on her own. But Len's health started to decline.

Today he is starting to develop the mid-stages of Alzheimer's disease and once again is showing aggressive behaviour. She won't leave him now. The community health services trying to support the two of them are not necessarily aware of this long history. If an emergency arose and Magda had to leave suddenly, the local women's shelter probably wouldn't be able to accommodate her, and the only place for Len would be the hospital.

Her faith has been a pillar of strength for her throughout this time, and it is part of her resiliency. However, it is only in very recent years that there has been any work done in Canada to explore the role of faith communities and how they might be more supportive and how they might more appropriately help older women in situations like Magda's.

Then there's Helen. Helen is in her eighties. She is another woman who certainly knows about ongoing emotional abuse, as well as financial abuse. About 10 years ago, shortly after one of her sons committed suicide, her youngest son, Matt, started living with her. Matt had lost his job, and his girlfriend had broken off their tumultuous relationship. People who don't know Matt speak about how caring of his Mom he is. That's a very common stereotype for adult children caring for parents.

What they don't know is that up until the last two years, it was Helen who worked eight and nine hours a day babysitting, six days a week, to have enough money to support the two of them and to pay off Matt's mounting debts. She borrowed from each of her friends simply to get by.

Over time, friends became tired and frustrated with what they perceived to be her failure to boot him out. They also worried about their own safety. Matt has been involved with petty crime, including selling drugs to local teens and possession of stolen property. He was charged with assault against his girlfriend. While it might be possible for Helen to get a peace bond or a restraining order, that's often not a logical answer for people who are in her circumstances. It is too easy for him to come back. She wants help for Matt. She very sincerely wants that. But she's clear that she doesn't want him to go to jail, even for the things he has done to others.

Recognizing that, what has been developing only within the last few years in some communities within Canada are specialized police units that are used to dealing with the complexities of these kinds of situations. They also know how to work at the pace of the older woman or older man. They often involve a combination of a police officer and a social worker working together.

There are many other women in situations similar to Helen's. Sometimes they are persuaded by their adult children to cash in their RRSPs or to sell off their primary assets. Sometimes those transactions occur without their knowledge; they have lost their prime asset, but can't get it back. Because of the high cost of lawyers, the narrow scope of legal aid in most jurisdictions, and the retrenchment of legal support in poverty law, these women are effectively left out in the cold.

[The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Tilly O'Neill Gordon), Conservative, Tilly O'Neill-Gordon]

Excuse me, but you only have 30 seconds left. Maybe you can go to the recommendations.

[Charmaine Spencer]

First of all, I'd like to thank Status of Women for beginning this important and complex process of exploring the structural issues. It's important to look at the effect and the intersection of the provincial, territorial and federal government policies in the area. In many cases what appears to be a neutral policy in health care, housing, immigration, and access to justice can facilitate an environment in which abuse and neglect can occur more frequently and more easily.

Some of my colleagues and I have an interest in immigrant seniors, particularly those who are under sponsorship, and how those policies leave them and their families vulnerable.

We also recognize that direct funding for most of the services is the responsibility of the provinces or territories; however, we encourage the committee to help emphasize not only the importance of the issue, but the need for core funding for the agencies that are endeavouring to help, especially those offering specialized services to meet the special needs of older women, and to help provide training and services to service providers. We don't want to continue to be in a situation where provincial organizations have to hold teas in order to raise funds for our dedicated provincial abuse lines, as is the case currently in Ontario.

There is a need for the next step in training. There is a lot of basic information out there for service providers; however, we're finding an increasing need for specialized people and more sophisticated and in-depth information to help people, whether they are service providers, practitioners, or policy-makers, understand the complexities. As well, there is also a lack of critical analysis in this area, and we need to help understand the connections better.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Tilly O'Neill Gordon), Conservative, Tilly O'Neill-Gordon]

Thank you.

Gloria Gutman is next.

[Dr. Gloria Gutman, President, International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse]

Thank you.

Elder abuse is very much a women's issue. It is fact that, even after adjusting for greater numbers, proportionally more older women than older men are abused. It's also fact that abused older women seeking help are often in situations of triple jeopardy, experiencing ageism, sexism, and victim blaming.

Elder abuse is not gender-neutral. As some of us are old enough to remember, when maltreatment of older people first came to public attention in the 1970s, it was called "granny bashing". In the ensuing years, the gendered nature of elder abuse seems to have been lost.

Why? And with what consequences? Was it a reaction to the growth of the feminist movement? Was it a reflection of the social values and perspectives of the mostly male researchers? Or was it because of the dominant assumption in an ageist society that old age means dependency and diminished competence?

One of the consequences of thinking about old age as a time of diminished competency and dependency is that it tends to lead to viewing all old people as sick and weak, sexless and impotent, and incapable of making valid decisions on their own behalf. Another consequence is that it leads to legislation and services that are developed on a model appropriate for kids but not necessarily for old people.

I'm not here today to argue the pros and cons of mandatory reporting requirements, which tend to be the trend in the U.S.A., in Israel, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and in several of our provinces. I am here to draw attention to the situation of ignoring gender neutrality and the fact that what that does is remove from visibility the differences in power between men and women and some of the challenges of abusive behaviour.

I also want to point out that despite the fact that it's been known for some years now that the rates of physical abuse are similar among young women and women aged 50 and over, the myth still persists that violence against women is violence against young women.

Also, I want to draw attention to the fact that abuse and neglect of older women and older men is an international issue. There is overwhelming evidence that it's not just a social problem for the northern countries or the developed world, but rather that just as population aging is taking place worldwide we also have abuse of older women and older men taking place all over the world, including within those societies that traditionally have been viewed as venerating their old people.

When it comes to what elder abuse is, there are three definitions commonly used around the world. The most common is one that was developed by a U.K. charity in 1995 and subsequently adopted by the World Health Organization and my organization, the International Network for Prevention of Elder Abuse. It is “a single or repeated act or lack of appropriate action, occurring within any relationship where there is an expectation of trust, which causes harm or distress to an older person”.

A common theme in several of the definitions is this idea of abuse of power; hence, there is emphasis on the relationship between victim and perpetrator. What we see in elder abuse is to some extent classically the same kinds of things we see in bullying in younger people: threats, intimidation, and aggression. These are used to maintain power and control of older people.

But there is more. As Charmaine mentioned, the types of abuse that typically are viewed on the international scene would be physical, psychological, financial, and sexual. then there's the issue of neglect, and there's also systemic abuse, wherein we talk about rules and regulations that discriminate against older people. In institutions, you add to these the physical or chemical restraining of residents, depriving them of their dignity and choice of activities, etc.

In terms of the extent of the problem, I can give you details on homicide deaths attributed to elder abuse in Europe. In a recent WHO report, they estimate that approximately 8,300 people aged 60 and over die per year from homicide. About a third of those deaths are at the hands of a family member. That third is considered as an estimate of elder maltreatment as the cause of their demise.

As to hospital admissions, data from six European countries show a U-shaped pattern of hospital admissions for assault: high for people aged 60 to 64, falling for several successive five-year age bands, and then rising then again, tellingly, for people aged 90 and over.

There have been a number of surveys conducted around the world. Not all of them are methodologically sound. Of those that are, the suggestion that comes out from them is that somewhere between 3% and 10% of older people—60 and over—living in the community experience abuse and neglect in a one-year period. The most common types are financial and psychological, but it's not uncommon to have several types of abuse experienced by the same person. Institutional rates are harder to estimate, as there are very few sound studies.

Lynn has been involved in this area for a number of years and will talk more about definitions.

I want to mention that prevalence rates depend a lot on who is doing the reporting. What you will see is that what is viewed as abuse by a general practitioner is different from what is abuse as viewed by an old lady or her caregivers. There also are differences in what is viewed as abuse depending on people's ethnic backgrounds.

The implication is that it's not easy—this, as Charmaine said, is a complex area. There's a very diverse victim population that includes people of different socio-economic strata—rich, poor, and in between. It occurs in ethnocultural minorities. It occurs in the gay and lesbian community, as well as among straights.

In terms of perpetrators, in the case of community-dwelling elderly, the perpetrators are mainly within the informal support system: family, neighbours, and friends. We're only just beginning, really, to look at the situation of home care providers and home support workers of various types. In institutions, of course, the focus has been mainly on staff, but there's also some consideration of family who come to visit and, more recently, of systemic issues.

In terms of consequences, the impact of abuse and neglect goes much beyond the event. Physical abuse of old people, for example, can be more serious than abuse of younger people, because their bones are thinner, among other things, and it takes longer for them to heal.

There has been quite a lot of work done in looking at risk factors. Dating back to the early 2000s, there was an American study done that put them into three categories: those that are possible risk factors, those that are probable, and those that are contested.

It is interesting that the more recent data has picked up on one of the contested ones, which is this idea that somehow elder abuse is a result of caregiver stress. This is a really important one, because it can be used as an excuse. The data simply does not support that this should be considered as a major cause. If you do consider it a major cause, what happens is that the old lady gets blamed. Somehow she's the victim and she should be complying with and being nicer to this person who is caring for her. It takes away from looking at the power differences and at the characteristics of the perpetrator.

To sum up, if we want to move this field to the point of zero tolerance--which in my opinion is where it should be--then we need everybody to come together to the playing field. We need the women's movement. We need government at all levels. We need the gerontological community. We need the faith groups. In the past, there has been too much silo action in this area and not enough as a cohesive whole.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Tilly O'Neill Gordon), Conservative, Tilly O'Neill-Gordon]

We'll move on to Lynn.

When you have one minute left, I'll you know.

[Dr. Lynn McDonald, Scientific Director, National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly]

I'm going to try not to speak to what has already been said.

I would like to thank you for inviting me here as a witness, and I would like to commend the committee for looking at a very serious issue that has been hidden for a very long time.

I am the director of the Institute for Life Course and Aging at the University of Toronto. Our mandate is research and education.

I'm also the scientific director of the National Initiative for the Care of the Elderly, which is an organization committed to knowledge transfer, generally in the field of aging. We have 1,400 members. We produce knowledge in the form of what we call pocket tools, which we've had over 400,000 requests for. This easy tool was developed by a physician--he may be coming to this committee--and it's for identifying if elder abuse is suspected. There are only eight questions. It's very simple and is based on research.

Everything that NICE does is based on research--all of the pocket tools. As well, these pocket tools have been put up onto hand-helds for professionals to use, but older people use them and caregivers use them. Anybody and everybody can use them. As I've said, we've had tons of requests.

NICE is made up of an interdisciplinary group of people who bridge the university to the community. We have doctors, lawyers, anthropologists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, physicians, etc. They're all formed into teams that work together to produce these pocket tools. There are seven teams. The last two teams that were formed are on financial literacy in older women and on elder abuse. Everyone here is on the elder abuse team, which has produced a lot of work.

Having said that, what I want to talk about, given what everybody else has said, is research in this country, in which I think the government has played a very important role and needs to play an even more important role in the future. I'm going to make four points.

Number one is that in this country the last study of prevalence of elder abuse was done in 1999. The one prior to that, already alluded to, was done in 1989. We are way behind schedule in terms of knowing what's going on. The first study, which was done by Podnieks in 1989, was a very fine study of 2,008 people, but what was found in that particular study was that gender didn't matter, so hat being female did not matter.

The second study, by Pottie Bunge, which was done on the General Social Survey run by the federal government through Statistics Canada, also found that gender didn't matter, which is very interesting. Today, I will tell you, there are exactly 14 studies of prevalence. Prevalence is how many cases occurred in one year, as opposed to incidence, which is how many new cases occurred in one year.

What the problem has become is that we actually don't know the size of the problem in this country, yet we keep throwing money at it, hoping to solve it. What I'm arguing for is that we need to do better research that actually starts at the beginning. The beginning is how we define elder abuse.

I can talk about the 14 studies that have been done in the community and the nine that have been done in institutions, and I can say to you, for example, that in Sweden, 11% of people are abused in institutions, compared to 72% in Germany--right off the wall. Because there is no agreement around.... I mean, we do use the World Health Organization's definition, but it has to be operationalized into a study.

The problem is that nobody agrees on what elder abuse is. In the community, you can go from 0.8% in Spain to 18% in Israel. The variation is huge. In the Canadian studies it came out around 4%. In the latest U.K. studies, it was 2.6%. In Ireland it was 3%.

Why do definitions matter? They matter to all of us for the following reasons.

Definitions matter because that's who we include when we count the size of the problem. If we don't have a definition or we have a weak definition, we never know exactly how big the problem is.

Secondly, if we don't know how big the problem is, or if we don't even know what elder abuse is and what we include in it, we don't know what the legislation should cover. If we don't know the nature of the problem, we don't know what type of treatment to offer people. If we don't know the nature of the problem, we don't know who's eligible for services.

As a simple example, if you decide you are not going to include sexual abuse, your numbers are going to be lower, the problem is going to remain as big, and you probably can't compare it with those of other countries like Israel, Great Britain, and Spain.

All of this turns into money. The government has been arguing that we need core services and we need to pay for them. How many core services do we need and how much should they be? If we don't know what the problem is, we can't make that decision. That's the first point I want to make.

The second is that the two studies we have done in Canada basically didn't find gender to be a relevant variable at the time. I'm not saying that a whole bunch of other studies in the world have found that gender matters. As Dr. Gutman has been saying, the Americans did the risk factors for abuse: those that we know for sure are confirmed, those for which we have contesting evidence, and those in between, for which we have some evidence for and some against. Most studies out there today are for and against the matter of gender.

What I'm trying to say is that in Canada, we really don't know. We don't know for sure if gender is an issue. I would argue that gender will be an issue in the most neglected area, which is institutional abuse. I have done a study with Charmaine. The fastest-growing population in this country is 85 years of age and over. That population is women. That population is most likely to be housed in a nursing home.

Of the people in nursing homes today, the average age is 85. They tend to be cognitively impaired. They tend to have two or three diagnoses. They are socially isolated. Only 12% of them still have companions or partners. Something like 60% live away from their families. You can see the opportunity in the institutions just waiting to happen. When you talk about cutbacks and all the rest of it--like lack of staffing--you may have a disaster on your hands. Just from anecdotal information from where I've been, there are horrendous cases there. I'm not saying there aren't in the community, too, because there are.

The third point I want to make is that we talk a lot about intervention. We say that we need intervention. The problem from a research perspective, worldwide, is that we do not have good evidence to support what intervention we should be using. The latest study was done--fortunately by a Canadian--in 2009. It looked at 1,253 studies of interventions around the world, in two languages. It found only eight studies qualified to be included as a half-decent piece of research.

Of those eight, the researchers could not conclude which approach was best. It seemed to suggest, in conformity with what this government is doing today, that education was a good thing. Educating people about abuse seemed to be one of the mechanisms that had some support. So we have to be careful when we talk about what we need. We don't know for sure what it is.

The last point I want to make is that Canada may be ready to move forward. We're all involved in this. NICE has done a huge study on the definition of elder abuse in the Canadian context. It can be expanded or contracted to be used locally, nationally, or internationally. Almost everybody involved in preventing elder abuse in Canada has been part of this. We have had consensus meetings. We are going to have one tomorrow. I don't know how much consensus we will get, but we're going at it all day tomorrow with government policy-makers, practitioners, and researchers.

I would argue that HRSDC has put a lot of money into this and into developing the Canadian scene. Some of the way we went about it is really different from around the world.... We've had the data analyzed by outsiders and they say that Canada has made a huge contribution in starting to move forward in the field, at last. Done. I think you guys need to think about it. You've already invested a lot of money in this and I think it's time to move forward for a prevalence and incidence study, both in the community and really in the institutions.

[The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Tilly O'Neill Gordon), Conservative, Tilly O'Neill-Gordon]

I want to thank all three of you for your great presentations. I assure you of our government's support all the way.

I will now turn to questions. The first round will be for seven minutes, beginning with Madam Truppe.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Charmaine, Gloria, and Lynn, for coming in today to enlighten us on all of your findings and studies. We really appreciate that.

Lynn, this question is for you. You mentioned bridging the community. You had seven teams. One of them was on financial literacy. Can you elaborate more on this project and on the financial fraud abuse of older women?

[Dr. Lynn McDonald]

Yes. Actually, it's a really exciting project. You do have a lot of the financial literacy tools that we've developed.

First, we trained trainers. We trained older women themselves around the whole issue of financial competency, knowledge, and abuse. We have several tools on financial abuse so that women can be alerted if they are in fact being abused, or if something is happening, or if their bank is not acting properly.

We have over 300 women. We've trained about 20 who go across the country and run two-day workshops with older women around financial literacy. That includes the whole notion of financial abuse.

In fact, at this time, we're testing a really excellent 25-item tool that has been validated in the U.S. The Government of Illinois uses it. We're using that in our workshops and testing, because we're looking for something that's really good, short, and sweet, so we can get to the point where women themselves know. Then we hope to pass it on to bankers, law firms that do estate planning, and so on.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you.

This question can probably be for either of you. Can anyone explain what are the causes or reasons that contribute to elder abuse? Has that been studied or does it come up when you're interviewing everyone?

[Dr. Lynn McDonald]

There are about seven different theories that have been offered to explain elder abuse. From what Gloria was talking about, the family stress model, which is flat-out wrong, through to intergenerational violence, the cycle of violence, that if you were abused as a child you're going to be abused as an older person.... There is the ageism theory, which may have some traction; it basically says that ageism attitudes in our society, which of course are all well hidden, are the cause behind elder abuse.

What other theories can you remember? Is that about it?

There are numbers of them. Those are probably the main ones. None of them have been shown to be true. What is going on now is that people are starting to say that different types of abuse probably have different causes. There may be an overarching paradigm. In fact, what we are testing right now is a life course perspective. This is really interesting. This gets to the intergenerational issue, where we actually found in a survey of 300 people--not random--that if they had been abused as a kid, they're abused as an older person. We're the first people who have ever researched that, so we were quite surprised to see that it was true.

[Susan Truppe, Conservative, London North Centre, ON]

If the elderly person was abused as a child, the cycle continues throughout their whole life...?

[Dr. Lynn McDonald]

Yes. We were quite shocked. But it's not a random sample at this point, so I wouldn't like to say that.

[Susan Fruppe]

For sure. Okay.

[The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Tilly O'Neill Gordon), Conservative, Tilly O'Neill-Gordon]

Did you want to comment, Gloria?

[Dr. Gloria Gutman]

The risk factors for the different types of abuse seem to be different, or the weighting of them. What will apply for financial abuse may not necessarily be exactly the same set of risk factors as you see for physical abuse.

Similarly, when you try to apply theories, as Lynn was saying, we have a very diverse group of women out there. There are some who, from the time they were children, were abused by fathers. Then they got married and were abused by a husband. There are other people who, for the first time in their lives, experience this when they’re old, with a new partner, or because their old partner develops a dementia and loses control of understanding of who's friend and who's foe.

So one-size-fits-all is not anything that will work.

[Dr. Lynn McDonald]

There's a cycle of violence, caregiver stress, and the situation model, which means you're in a bad situation, so you'd be person who would steal their money, and...[Technical Difficulty--Editor].

[Charmaine Spencer]

Just following up on a couple of those points...[Technical Difficulty--Editor]...it's quite different. In general, we find that younger women—by which we mean women in their sixties, maybe into their early seventies—actually are at greater risk of physical abuse and psychological abuse within the community than older women are. However, older women appear to be more susceptible to neglect. There are differences there in terms of.... Again, it's really important to recognize that we're talking about at least two generations--and in some cases we're talking about more, depending on the beginning age that we're talking about--in terms of who's an older woman in the first place.

One of the things to be mindful of—it's one of those stereotypes out there around social learning—is that adult children may have experienced abuse or neglect when they were younger, and now it's turnaround time. We don't find much support for that. As a matter of fact, if you follow across the life course, for the children who experienced the most severe types of harm—physical abuse, sexual abuse—about a quarter of those go on to be abusers. So this idea that having experienced harm from somebody earlier in life sets you up to be an abuser later in life is not necessarily the case.

[The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Tilly O'Neill Gordon), Conservative, Tilly O'Neill-Gordon]

We'll move on to the NDP.

I understand that you're going to share your time. You have seven minutes.

[Charmaine Borg, NDP, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

Actually, we are going to share our time.

I would like to thank our witnesses for being here today.

My question is for Dr. Gutman.

Is the translation working?

[A voice]

We're finding out who the culprit is--

[Charmaine Borg, NDP, Terrebonne—Blainville, QC]

Okay.

You have done a number of studies and made several international comparisons with respect to this problem. I want to know whether Canada's weaknesses are comparable to those of other countries.

Have you seen models that work well in other countries and that we might be able to adopt here?

[Dr. Gloria Gutman]

The question is, have we seen models of different countries...?