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Awareness campaign underway to help protect abused elderly
Like children, the elderly is a vulnerable group in Guyana. For this reason, Director of Social Services within the Ministry of Social Protection, Wentworth Tanner, said that all of Guyana has a responsibility to protect elderly persons.
Wentworth Tanner, Director of Social Services.
According to him, many elderly folks are abused in many forms while in their own homes or those of their family members and efforts must therefore be made to safeguard them.
“If persons see these elderly folks being abused verbally, emotionally or physically, we are encouraging them to call our offices and report these cases, and we will come down and do an investigation.”
Persons desirous of reporting cases of abuse perpetrated against the elderly are asked to make contact with the Probation and Social Services Departments that are located in nine of the 10 administrative regions. Currently, there is no Department in Region Eight, but Tanner noted that this is being addressed, whereby an officer will be placed there, at least by the end of next month.
“Anyone can contact a Probation and Social Services officer in their area and report the matter,” said Tanner as he pointed out that “the Ministry has its own offices in the respective regions and it’s not through the Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs) or the Regional Democratic Councils (RDCs), but through our (the Ministry’s) offices set up in the Regions.”
Tanner’s remarks were forthcoming on the heels of reports published in the media about elderly persons who were abused by their own children and subsequently died.
According to Tanner, not many reports of these abuse cases are reported to the Ministry. He however disclosed that the few that are brought to the attention of the Ministry are cases of neglect, and those cases usually gain the attention of an officer attached to the Palms Geriatric Home.
“Depending on the severity of the situation or depending on exactly what is going on at that time, we would make a decision as to whether we could place that person with a relative or take that person into the Palms or one of our facilities,” Tanner added.
“Once information comes to our attention we act; we call in the Guyana Police Force to deal with assault and work with the abused, elderly persons to see if we can find alternative accommodations or if it is a case where these are persons in the homes, we try to work with the Legal Aid Clinic to ensure that the abuser is removed from that premises,” Tanner noted.
He did point out that the Ministry is currently working on a public campaign to raise awareness, given all of the troubling reports that are surfacing in the media as it relates to the abuse of elderly persons.
“We are working diligently to get our message out that help is there for elderly persons who are being abused. There are lots of persons who silently suffer from verbal and physical abuse, some of them have to deal with younger relatives taking away their pension books and things like that. So those are things that we are working on in our public campaign,” said the Social Services Director.
He disclosed, too, that what the Ministry is able to do is to reach out to some of the elderly folks via its Social Security Department. Through this Department, the Ministry is able to interact with the elderly, mainly because of the old age pension programme.
Tanner also explained that “our officers are encouraged to speak to the elderly when they visit homes from time to time and various community organisations… to not only speak to the elderly, but also persons who might have knowledge of our elderly folks being abused…once people come forward, we treat such matters with great urgency, which is the same way we deal with our child protection matters.”
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