Understanding Elder Abuse in Minority Populations

Book excerpt: First published in 1999. Research on elder abuse in the United States has made great strides in recent years. As a result, we have been able to define and discover the causes of elder abuse, design tools to assess the risk of abuse, develop and implement treatment and prevention strategies, and evaluate programs for victims and perpetrators. However, this research has been derived from studies whose subjects were primarily Caucasian. This is not because elder abuse does not take place in minority communities, but rather because researchers wanted first to study the issue in its broadest sense.