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.