'Real number' of older people being sexually abused unknown

HSE CEO Bernard Gloster also said on Wednesday the State failed an elderly woman known as ‘Emily’ and other residents in a nursing home where what he sees as institutional sexual abuse took place. File photo: Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie

The “real number” of older people being sexually abused is unknown and legislation has not been a priority because society does not believe this abuse happens, Safeguarding Ireland has warned after the publication of two damning HSE reports.

HSE CEO Bernard Gloster also said on Wednesday the State failed an elderly woman known as ‘Emily’ and other residents in a nursing home where what he sees as institutional sexual abuse took place. Some 21 cases of physical or sexual abuse have now been reported to the Gardaí from that particular home, one report found.

A male staff member was sentenced to 11 years in prison for raping ‘Emily’ in 2020. However, it later emerged other residents previously made allegations and were not believed.

A review by the National Independent Review Panel (NIRP) found staff could not believe sexual abuse would occur in their unit. “This is despite the fact that the NIRP have information from a number of sources that a number of residents on occasions displayed signs and symptoms of possible sexual abuse,” they said.

They warned: “This issue runs much deeper than just training and speaks to a general societal disbelief that sexual abuse does not happen to older people.” 

The report goes on: “This attitude is reminiscent of the early 1980s in Ireland when concerns around the sexual abuse of children were emerging in relation to Industrial Schools and the Catholic church. At that time there were strongly held societal beliefs that this simply did not happen.”

Safeguarding Ireland CEO Patricia Rickard-Clarke said: ”There is no collection of data at all. We do not know how many older people are being abused.”  She said while some information is collected around residential centres or allegations made directly to the HSE, the wider picture is not examined.

She said:

I would say, as many people would, that those figures we have are the tip of the iceberg, they are not the real figures at all.

“And even in that, you don’t come across many figures on sexual abuse. The higher ones are coercive control and financial, because they are the easier ones to detect or easier ones which people are more aware of and pick up on.” 

She welcomed a call made in the second report, from a HSE safeguarding team local to the community nursing unit, for development of legislation around protecting vulnerable adults. “There’s been such a delay with the legislation because people don’t realise the seriousness of the abuse of older people,” she said.

“Why have we waited so long? The Oireachtas Health Committee absolutely said this was an urgent matter, in 2017. Nothing has happened.”  This review also made national recommendations for national reforms. 

Apology

Mr Gloster met Emily’s family to apologise in person on behalf of the HSE. He said that there was no other way to describe the situation in this unit as anything other than “institutional abuse.” 

“What else could you call it?” he said on RTÉ's News at One. “The reality is that there are many fine staff working in this nursing home and I think it's really important to emphasise that they were very traumatised after this incident," he added. 

“But the culture, the informed learning, the very over medical approach to the model of care in the nursing home, all of that contributed to a situation where simply basic indicators were repeatedly missed.”