Analysis of legal cases for prevention of elder abuse: decisions from New Zealand

Elder abuse is a universal concern and is gaining greater public and professional attention. This increased concern to protect elders is internationally evident in policy reform, multidisciplinary research and education. Yet neglect in care settings continues. This research responds by contributing to the international effort to promote humane care for elders who are in a position of dependence, particularly in residential facilities. The legal cases that result from some complaints by aggrieved elders and their advocates may offer insights that are relevant for prevention. While the law is often viewed merely as a system of control, it may also be a resource for learning, particularly in the context of abuse prevention. Although the analysis references New Zealand law, the discussion may have broader application by indicating factors that precede, or trigger, unacceptable conduct. By understanding what went wrong and why, we may decrease the likelihood of future incidents. Also, understanding the legal ramifications may have a deterrent effect. Many advocates and activists have asked how we can ensure that abuses do not recur; some answers may lie within the legal cases themselves. How may recent legal cases be used to prevent mistreatment of elders in residential facilities? This question is applied to select decisions of New Zealand's Health and Disability Commissioner, Human Rights Review Tribunal and Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal. While each body has distinct functions, relevant factors identified within the cases may reveal information that is of interest to elderly people and their advocates, caregivers, health educators and professional registration bodies. The research is timely in light of New Zealand's Review of Elder Abuse and Neglect Prevention Services in New Zealand (Department of Child Youth and Family Services, 2004) and New Zealand's Positive Ageing Strategy (Office of Senior Citizens, 2001). This article incorporates current debates regarding the use and analysis of legal cases and suggests that such analyses offer learning opportunities.     

D. Reviews and notes: bibliographies and works of reference

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Measuring Attitudes toward the United States Supreme Court

It is conventional in research on the legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court to rely on a survey question asking about confidence in the leaders of the Court to indicate something about the esteem with which that institution is regarded by the American people. The purpose of this article is to investigate the validity of this measure. Based on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2001, we compare confidence with several different measures of Court legitimacy. Our findings indicate that the confidence replies seem to reflect both short-term and long-term judgments about the Court, with the greater influence coming from satisfaction with how the Court is performing at the moment. We suggest a new set of indicators for measuring the legitimacy of the Court and offer some evidence on the structure of the variance in these items.     

Feeling Things: From Visual to Material Jurisprudence

Law and Critique - In this article I analyse the extent to which there has been a shift in the cultural turn in legal scholarship and specifically from visual to what I call material jurisprudence,...     

A Conversation About Q. D. Leavis

Mary Ellen Mark's photographic collection Twins (2003) raises provocative questions about performance, contingency and the relativity of difference, self and other. Her images complicate notions of individuality and foundational difference and challenge both self-recognition and recognition by others. They require viewers to observe closely, to spend time studying her subjects and to address the relativity—sometimes the radical relativity—of difference but also of sameness. Difficult questions about where ‘you’ end and ‘I’ begin are raised. Though Twins contains images of fraternal twins and triplets, Mark's subjects are, overwhelmingly, identical twins. She usually photographs them standing together, dressed in precisely the same way, in carefully constructed poses. This recreates the carnivalesque, performative aspect of Twins Day, held each year in Twinsburg, Ohio, in which the fact of being a twin (or in some cases triplet) is affirmed. Some identical twins choose to represent themselves as twins rather than solely as individuals, or as siblings who are also twins, in order to test out the limits of individuality. Here, I consider the ways in which such a chosen celebratory representation challenges different ways in which identical twins have been conceived of, which emphasise instead alterity and uncanniness.