Crime, Abuse and the Elderly

Mike Brogden, Preeti Nijhar

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781903240021
• eBook ISBN: 9781135990343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines and analyses the experiences of older people as both victims and perpetrators of crime. Drawing upon a wealth of research from British and North American sources, the authors detail the historical experience of the elderly as victims, the extent of present-day criminal victimisation in the home and institutions, the social theories which attempt to explain that experience, and the types of resolution available.The book also addresses the experiences of elderly people in the criminal justice process - the offences to which they are prone, and the implications for penal policy of an increase in the elderly penal population. Crime, Abuse and the Elderly breaks new ground in its focus on the experiences of elderly people as criminal victims in private space, its insistence on a proper engagement of criminology with crimes involving older people, and in its argument that much so-called abuse can be explained criminologically and should be dealt with by the criminal justice system rather than by treatment and welfare agencies. It will be essential reading for students, academics and professionals concerned with the experiences of the elderly.

1

Abuse Versus Crime in Criminological History

The most recent attack occurred on Thursday evening, when men wearing balaclavas forced their way into the Croagh, Co. Limerick home of Martin and William O'Brien, twin brothers aged 73. Martin O'Brien was hit on the head with a hammer when he tried to stop the men from entering and both brothers were tied and £500 cash stolen. Some of the recent attacks have been fatal. Earlier this month an 89- year-old Dublin woman died from injuries when her handbag was snatched in a robbery in Herald's Cross, and in September a 69-year-old widower died shortly after being attacked beside his wife's grave in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin.

(Irish Voice, 24 October 1995)

The exclusion of criminology

In this text, we explore the experience of older people, both as victims and occasionally as victimisers. We outline the current debates about crime and the elderly while simultaneously debunking several myths. The experience of some older people – such as the elderly Irish people quoted above – may be the type of ordeal that makes the news. But it is also untypical. In modern Western society, few ‘old ladies’ suffer such drama. The headlines are out of proportion. Melodrama is not life.

Nevertheless, there are many less dramatic tribulations suffered by the elderly. However, until recently, both criminologists and law enforcement personnel have generally taken a relaxed view of or ignored elder victimisation (and, to a lesser extent, their role as perpetrators). This chapter therefore deals with two major questions:

• Why has criminology generally ignored offences against – and by – older people? Why has criminological theory failed to engage with those issues?
• Whether those afflictions should be classified as ‘abuse’ or under the criminal justice rubric of ‘criminality’? Should they be dealt with as a problem of welfare and of personal needs or should the law take its course?

We use the word ‘experiences’ deliberately. Formally, criminology as an academic discipline was only concerned with infractions of the criminal law. It has often excluded harm such as the neglect or self-neglect of elderly people. Secondly, criminology has usually been limited to what we might call ‘street crime' and ‘stranger crime' – the crimes of public space – with offences ranging from housebreaking, to theft from the person, to disorderly conduct. As the pioneer elder abuse researcher Steinmetz has noted ‘Criminologists … have contributed little to the debate over elderly criminal victimisation' (1983, p. 147).

If we were to accept that conventional approach, it might be possible to deal with crime in relation to older people within a single chapter. It would note that older people are less exposed to street crimes than are younger people. The chapter would also briefly describe those rare occasions when older people indulge in criminal activities in public space.

In practice, the criminal experiences of older people are not quite as limited. To this end, it is important to explore the relationship between ‘crime' and ‘abuse'.

Until recently, most elderly victimisation has been assessed by researchers as abuse rather than as crime. Older people's problems have frequently been dealt with by social workers, not by police officers. Given that elder victimisation ranges from neglect to serious violations such as sexual offences, this lack of criminological and criminal justice interest is remarkable.

Why should acts which in other contexts may be regarded as ‘criminal' such as assault, rape, or theft, come to be seen as physical abuse in the context of older people with dependency needs? … Does the understanding of violent acts against the person as ‘abuse' rather than within a criminological framework not down-grade older people's experiences and obscure the enormity of the acts to which they have been subjected?

(Hugman, 1995, p. 497)

The answer is convoluted, owing something – as we shall see in the first part of this chapter – to criminological history. But the limitations of the concept of crime in terms of ‘street' and of ‘stranger' offences are now recognised. For example, where criminological research has noted undue fear of crime by older people, that same research often failed to recognise that that fear may be a manifestation of real household experiences, suffering that affects perceptions of other areas of life. Criminological accounts have been myopic in trying to understand their experiences.

Generally, traditional criminology has by-passed a population caricatured by ageist stereotyping and by assumptions about inviolate private space. Criminology, and especially sociological criminology, initially washed its hands of a group whose experiences of crime are often banal – not worth bothering with. Is a minor assault on an aged resident in a care home by a nursing aide, struggling to toilet the elder, really crime? Conversely, that neglect is partly due to the way researchers from a treatment-oriented, pathological background, have regarded the experiences of older people as their academic territory. In the next section, we map out that changing direction in criminological enquiry.

From criminology to a sociology of deviance

The state of criminology in the quarter century after World War II is an important reference point in understanding the reticence of criminologists to engage with elder victimisation. Until the 1960s, criminology in Anglo-American society was dominated by positivist, pathological approaches – the offender as sick or incompetent.

Criminology drew primarily upon a psychology and a sociology, infused with a ‘golden' preconception about family and social structure. These included:

• a view that society was basically harmonious
• an image of society as resting firm on the foundations of family and community
• a perception of social change occurring naturally and gradually
• an explanation of aberrant behaviour in terms of the temporary breakdown of family and community structures.

Psychologists might focus on delinquency in a household where an adult role model was absent. Similarly, sociologists stressed youth delinquency as a product of the modernisation process (such as the break-up of the extended family). In most studies, the focus was on crimes committed by young (male) people in the street. The literature was replete with accounts of the delinquent behaviour of a ‘criminogenic generation’. While a few researchers had enquired into white-collar crime, and into extreme violence, sociological criminology had frequently been constrained by a street focus – a territory inhabited mainly by young males. The private space of the household and of the care institution received the Nelson's eye.

Much of that criminology relied upon quantifiable data drawn liberally from the available police statistics. The argument was circular. The statistics demonstrated, tautologically, the validity of the orthodox approach by documenting that most recorded crime was conducted by stereotypical young males and that the majority of it occurred in public space.

In the 1960s, however, this criminological consensus on the nature of crime and on its resolution was sundered. Events, both political and academic, splintered this complacent criminology. It is useful to outline a few of those catalysts (Cohen,1985) in order to understand how the focus on street crime altered to take account of household concerns.

The break with pathological explanations

External events impacted on criminology in the 1960s, and contributed to its reorientation. Social conflict, internal and external, together with educational expansion, undermined the academic consensus. For example, riots in the black ghettos of the United States disrupted the social consensus. Existing criminology, with its stress upon harmony could not furnish a plausible explanation of that mass delinquency. In the evolving, apparently prosperous, American social order, urban rebellions were inexplicable. Criminological theory was unable to explain the marginalisation and alienation of many black youth.

Similarly, the major conflict of the Vietnam War had incremental effects in challenging the academic status quo. The American war machine, the apogee of technological achievement, was humbled by a peasant army, an event that not merely disenchanted many young Americans but also challenged sociological understandings of the ‘good society’ and its social system. The presuppositions of modernisation and of economic development were disputed. The subsequent radicalisation of a younger generation overflowed into the classroom, challenging orthodoxy in criminology as elsewhere. In the UK, parallel political developments were accompanied by a different manifestation of social change, the expansion in the institutions for higher education. In criminology, there was now room to develop alternative accounts of crime and delinquency as the founding fathers were laid (albeit temporarily) to rest.

Refocusing criminology

Into this void, materialised several alternative criminological (predominantly sociological) models of explanation. Labelling and conflict theories, together with phenomenology, dominated. They challenged conventional wisdom about the crime problem, its stereotypical objects of ‘disorderly youth’, and of the underlying harmony of Anglo-American social order.

• Labelling theory suggested that older people were only dependent or ‘natural’ victims, because of the way they were stereotyped by wider society.

Labelling theory (or social constructionism – see Chapter 8) re-emerged from the archives of sociological history. It sought to explain how social problems (especially in relation to ethnicity, but also phenomena such as mental illness and ageism) was a function of societal reactions to the ‘other’. It turned attention away from the presumed deviant to the professional ideologies of those who did the defining, such as social workers, the police, and the media. Being old was perceived to be a socially constructed phenomenon. Old people were classified as elderly, not by virtue of any intrinsic personal characteristics, but because it suited social and professional interests to categorise them as a kind of social detritus (Spitzer, 1975). Ageist stereotyping portrayed them as harmless, dependent, ‘coffin-dodgers’. Professional ideologies rather than intrinsic physical and mental attributes socially constructed the elderly and their problems (Leroux and Petrunik, 1990).

Secondly, ideas of political economy (Chapter 7) emerged, drawing heavily upon European Marxism.

• Conflict theories suggested that older people were discarded and deprived of human rights because they no longer produced goods valued on the market.

This generic approach, emphasising economic conflict and social schism located the primary source of crime and delinquency as lying within economic inequalities. Problem populations (from the young to the old) did not contribute to the society. Youth were both marginally and criminally threatening (social dynamite) while the passive elderly were generally socially disposable. Only the economically active – as producers and consumers – deserved appropriate rights. Old age was an economically constructed status in which, once people stopped producing on retirement (Harper and Lowes, 1995), they became dependants.

This economic subordination had several consequences. The aged needed (whether they wished it or not) protection ‘for their own good’. Being unable to make rational decisions with regard to their safety, they were especially vulnerable to crime. Their life-styles required supervision. Assumed frailty exposed them to the unlawful.

• Phenomenology claimed that older people were sentient, reasoning beings – not senile incompetents.

Finally, the ‘new criminology’ received a contribution from phenomenology (and its offshoots such as ethnomethodology). Human beings were subjective and sentient. They were interpretative actors, not empty vessels. They were no longer to be seen as passively responding to the actions of others. For example, if older people worried about crime, that fear could not be dismissed as irrational but recognised as a real problem for which solutions should be sought, not just as an error to be explained away.

Gender studies and post-modernism

Gender studies opened up the household – the principle space of older people – as a realm for criminological study.

These contributions to a new criminological focus were later complemented by gender studies. To labelling theory, political economy, and phenomenology, was added an important dimension from feminism. Gender studies assisted in bringing elderly victimisation in from the cold in two ways. In spotlighting the abuse of spouses, it paved the way for recognition of crime against older people by intimates. It also helped differentiate amongst the elderly – perhaps the older woman's fear of crime could be explained not by virtue of her age but by a more pivotal female status. It might be that the older woman had more in common with a younger woman over crime than she had with older men (Pain, 1995).

Post-modernism recognised the diversity of older people's experience in relation to crime. Post-modernism asserted the heterogeneity of elder experience (Pain, 1995; Griffin and Aitken, 1996). It emphasised the diversity of ‘elderly’ identities rather than the homogeneity of experience and of ascribed status. Postmodernity fractured age-specific groups (Featherstone and Wernick, 1995). The elderly status was cross-cut by divisions of ethnicity, of gender, and of socioeconomic class. Post-modernism separated out different elderly experiences of crime, refusing to see them as possessing a collective history. Social science generally, and criminology specifically, came to increasingly recognise multiple elderly cultures and identities.

• Together, labelling theory, Marxism, phenomenology, gender studies, and post-modernism contributed to a new criminological focus on older people.

The administrative reaction – victims and crime as banal

But what none of these strands of criminological thought could offer clearly was policy guidance. Refocusing criminology away from its traditional targeting of wayward youth, towards other social groups, was only a first step. There were no immediate dividends for criminal justice personnel. It might be more criminologically accurate to recognise the unique experiences of older people and their different power relationships. But it did not address their needs in relation to the ‘crime problem'. In the 1980s, a new pragmatic administrative criminology took root.

Administrative criminology helped understand the experiences of older people by focusing on victims. Promoted by the Home Office (and its Research and Planning Unit), the new administrative research promoted a victim-oriented agenda. If the new criminology of the 1960s and 1970s pointed to the intractability of the ‘crime problem' for older people, the administrative response was to alleviate victim experience and especially fear. What could not readily be solved, could however be reduced. Strategies through the medium of crime prevention campaigns such as Community Safety and Safer City Schemes (Gilling, 1997), Neighbourhood Watch, Community Alarms, and target-hardening, all reflected a new sensitivity to – amongst other things – older people's fear of crime.

Administrative studies focused on misdemeanours, if they might contribute to criminogenic environments. Crime, it contended, was often unsolvable without major (and unlikely) shifts in state policies. The problem was to deal with criminogenic environments (encompassing a range of spatial and physical defects). For example, Routine Activities crime prevention theory aimed to minimise elderly victimisation in public space. The key questions which might affect the criminological enterprise were those of a taken-for-granted type, minutiae often too mundane for critical theorising but central to public anxieties. Commonsense precautions could forestall crime for the old. Criminology developed an interest in the ordinary (including the territory of the elderly) rather than in the exceptional.

Administrative criminology also recognised that misdemeanours might be as important to the older victim as more serious crimes were to others. Traditionally, criminologists have ignored much of the experience of older people because of its sheer banality. There had been little academic reward in research grants fo...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Author
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowlegements
• Introduction
• 1 Abuse Versus Crime in Criminological History
• 2 The Mythologies of Elderly Victimisation
• 3 Stereotyping the Elderly as Victims
• 4 Victimisation in Private and Public Space
• 5 Old People and the Fear of Crime
• 6 Victimisation in Private Space – the Household and Care Institutions
• 7 Sociological Explanations I: Gender and the Political Economy of Older People
• 8 Sociological Explanations II: Organisation, Power, Neutralisation, and Labelling
• 9 The Elderly in the Criminal Justice Process I: Is there an Elderly Crime Wave?
• 10 The Elderly in the Criminal Justice Process II: Experience of Arrest and Detention
• 11 Conclusion – Towards a Criminology of the Elderly?
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index