World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, or WEADD, was launched on June 15, 2006, by the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse and the World Health Organisation.  To date, this day has become an annual global initiative.

The United Nations General Assembly, in its 66/127 resolution, selected the day as World Elder Abuse Awareness Day; a day where the entire world voices its opposition to any form of abuse of the older person generation.

For several years, older persons have wrongly been often viewed as being of a lesser value due to changes in their individualism, self-reliance and independence. Post-retirement older persons largely live in the shadows within a world that is more reliant on the more productive sectors of society. However, older persons can still contribute in so many ways to their families and communities, and their health is surely no excuse to this.

Older persons have the skill, knowledge and experience, and certainly want to feel included and useful within those same communities they strove to build with so much passion. Those same communities stand today through the sole perseverance and hard work of the now-older person generations.

There is so much excitement on cultivating a society devoid of ageist attitudes, behaviours and thinking. Indeed, we have come a long way… but how far is far? 

COVID-19, albeit the destruction in its path, proved to be the perfect audit tool within this perfect storm in respect to the older person status within today’s societies.

In the past two years, we have watched helplessly as a virus, COVID-19, ate through large numbers of older persons, both locally as well as outside our shores. We have watched as a virus sent policymakers and systems in disarray, the headbutting of science vs policymakers and health vs economy.

Within the local context, residents within long-term care facilities were obliged to conform to blanket decisions of sheltering in place, away from what they enjoyed doing with their loved ones and, at times, confined to their own rooms. They watched out of their windows, as community-dwelling older persons continued with their everyday lives.

Some of the older persons and informal carers even shared their plights on the local media, as did the management of both private and non-governmental long-term care facilities, who voiced their concerns on a number of issues mainly related to the exit strategy for the older persons.

A bill was put forward for public consultation around 2017.  Five years on, older persons are still waiting…

Time and time again, older persons within these facilities were inquiring when they would be allowed to go out again. Even though fully vaccinated, it still took some 15 months from the start of the pandemic for the older persons within the local long-term care facilities to resume their activities outside. 

Recently, an older person resident within a long-term care facility said: “Human rights are that you respect someone else as a person. We have been stuck inside for months now… we were told that that was important for our own safety and well-being… there are times where I feel so sad… it seems that now I only have a past and no future to look forward to… Who took these decisions on our behalf? Who decided I was less valuable? No one bothered to talk to us, to listen to us, to ask how we were feeling. We cannot bring the lost time… no one can for the matter, but we are worse off as we are older, and some of us have now been lost forever.”

There was really no exit strategy, which left the older persons to fight this situation largely on their own. The ‘older persons have now lived their lives’ discreetly prevailed in the ways information about the older person was relayed.

The ‘underlying health condition’ and the ‘older persons are affected due to their medical conditions’ overlays, to ‘justify’ older persons dying from COVID-19, laid bare the ageist undertones and further fuelled that which was becoming even more apparent: that the older persons were weak, frail and vulnerable. Society, at times, also argued that COVID-19 was the older persons’ problem!

We need to look forward and truly acknowledge the past as a learning experience. A Bill, entitled ‘An Act to provide for the protection of vulnerable, in particular older adults and adult persons with disability, from harm and abuse, and to provide protection and services to vulnerable adults at risk, and to intervene in court proceedings relating to vulnerable adults, and to enable Malta to ratify an international convention relating to the international protection of adults’, was put forward for public consultation around 2017.  Five years on, the older persons are still waiting…

Beauty is in the depths, not the surface. The older persons’ lives are a testament to us all.

Maria Aurora Fenech is a lecturer at the Department of Gerontology and Dementia Studies, University of Malta, and a national representative of the International Network for the Prevention of Elder Abuse. She is also an educational officer of the Maltese Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics.