Elder Abuse
| Pages | 46-48 |
| Published date | 01 November 2001 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14668203200100030 |
| Date | 01 November 2001 |
| Author | Leo Quigley |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care,Sociology |
46 © Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Limited The Journal of Adult Protection Volume 3 Issue 4 • November 2001
Many years ago, in the days when computers were the size of
living rooms and the literature on ‘elder abuse’ consisted of
just one book (Robb, 1967), RKP published a Library of Social
Work series which attempted the impossible – to cram an
introduction to an area of social work into a hundred or so
pages, and still make it an easy read for social work students.
The series formula demanded a careful use of language and
structure to reduce the subject to its essentials without
rendering the text inaccessible to a non-academic audience.
Under Noel Timms’ watchful editorship, and through a careful
choice of authors, the RKP series by and large succeeded in its
aims. If this new book is anything to go by, we have a modern-
day successor to the RKP series in the Practitioner’s Guides
from Venture Press.
Seeking to provide an overview of contemporary
developments relating to practice and policy in situations of
elder abuse and neglect, the book begins with a useful
introduction. This goes straight to the ‘protection’ debate,
deconstructing the concept of protection with the aid of
diagrams, and highlighting legislation, prevention and
domestic violence as key areas, which can inform the
approach to protection.
The next chapter sets out an overview of elder abuse, and
again succeeds in compressing contemporary ideas on
definitions, incidence/prevalence, and risk factors into a few
pages without glossing over the underlying complexity of
these concepts.
There then follows a chapter on power and gender in elder
abuse, in which the attempt to simplify and compress is less
successful. This is the least accessible chapter, and the only
one which does not set out a conclusion. To be fair to the
authors, their task here was a difficult one. Power, gender and
abuse are difficult concepts to define individually, and so it is
especially challenging, in so limited a space, to relate them to
each other in a clear and straightforward way. Nevertheless,
the chapter does cover the important areas, offers some
significant insights, and certainly serves as an adequate
introduction for those willing to undertake further reading
Elder Abuse
Bridget Penhale and
Jonathan Parker with
Paul Kingston
Birmingham: Venture
Press, 2000
ISBN 1 86178 047 8
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