Thank you very much.
Excuse me if I can't speak very well; it's my allergies. It's the wrong time of the year for me. I sort of lose my voice and all of that.
You're suggesting, Ms. Brayton, a comprehensive national strategy. Having done a lot of work on senior abuse in my other life as a physician, I think that disabled women obviously carry three specific burdens: being a woman, being a senior, and being disabled. This makes it far more difficult for them than for other seniors. However, I would like to hear you tell me a little bit more about abuse and the fact that it's not only women who are living alone.
Senior women suffer abuse from three sources. The first is family: if they're living with a family who may abuse them financially by taking away their paycheque when they get it, their GIS, etc., and keep it, and who may verbally abuse them. They may benignly neglect them and quite often just basically give them really poor care. That's a form of psychological as well as physical abuse.
Then you have caregivers in seniors homes, where we hear there are many incidents of abuse by caregivers in seniors homes, especially if the senior person is disabled or has some neurological disorder and is unable to think or remember clearly.
Third is societal abuse, which I think I heard you talk about. It is that benign abuse of society that doesn't seem to really care about a particular group and, just by neglect, by lack of good public policy, etc., abuses certain groups of society.
If we looked at those three areas, and if we looked at the obvious housing, etc., what are the elements—just broad-based, you don't have to go into them in detail—of a national comprehensive strategy that would address prevention of seniors abuse?
There is also the issue of notification. Seniors, like most abused people, don't like to tell you they're abused because they're terrified of the abuser--that they might be abused a bit more or they'll get kicked out of wherever they are. How do we do notification? How do we find a way of ensuring that we prevent this kind of thing?
Also, how do we deal with the psychological effects of abuse? Obviously if you have physical abuse you can deal with the bruises, etc., but what about the psychological effects? There aren't very many mental health solutions for seniors. Can those fit into a five-part strategy? What would you see?