Children With Disabilities Are Victimized More Often

Children With Disabilities Are Victimized More Often - NYTimes.com: Children with disabilities are almost four times more likely to be victims of violence than other children, according to a new report commissioned by the World Health Organization.

The report, published in The Lancet on Thursday, found that disabled children were 3.6 times more likely to be physically assaulted and 2.9 times more likely to be sexually assaulted. The most common victims of sexual assault were those with mental illness or retardation, and institutionalized children were attacked more often than those living at home.

Editor: Could the reason for the abuse be an extension of the cavalier attitude society holds toward the unborn disabled baby?

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Last Will & Embezzlement

Imagine the Elder Exploitation in an Assisted Suicide World: The abuse wouldn’t just be about property.

Assisted Suicide: A Recipe for Elder Abuse and a Threat to Individual Rights

Elder abuse includes physical, psychological and financial abuse. Financial abuse is the most commonly reported type. Elder abuse is, however, largely unreported and can be very difficult to detect. This is due in part to the reluctance of victims to report. 

If assisted suicide were to be legalized [in Canada], new paths of abuse would be created against the elderly. The most obvious path would be due to [the] lack of required witnesses at the death. Without disinterested witnesses, an opportunity is created for a family member, or someone else who will benefit from the patient's death, to administer the medication to the patient without his consent. Alex Schadenberg

MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Goes to D.C. Activist Who Fights Elder Abuse

MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Goes to D.C. Activist Who Fights Elder Abuse: Marie-Therese Connolly, who for years has been trying to place elder abuse in the national spotlight, is being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the $500,000, “no strings attached,” so-called “genius” grant given annually to a couple dozen artists, thinkers, social advocates and historians.

In issuing the award, the foundation said Connolly, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, has “devoted her career to laying bare the many forms of elder abuse: physical and psychological, as well as financial exploitation and wrongful deprivation of rights.”

Related:
Congressional testimony on elder abuse
Life Long Justice
True Dignity Vermont - citizens against assisted suicide

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Research on Mistreatment of People with Dementia by their Caregivers

In a study by the University of California, Irvine, Program in Geriatrics published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, nearly half of the people with dementia who participated had been mistreated. Specifically, 42% (54) experienced psychological abuse, 10% (13) physical abuse and 14% (18) caregiver neglect. Center of Excellence

The following factors or characteristics of the caregivers and the participants with dementia were risk factors for one or more types of mistreatment.

1. Caregiver: higher anxiety, more depressive symptoms, fewer social contacts, greater perceived burden, as well as two other measures of poor emotional well-being from a widely used survey.
2. Person with dementia: more psychological aggression (for example, swearing at the caregiver) and any physical assault (for example pushing or shoving the caregiver) behaviors.

New Hampshire House Strikes Down Assisted Suicide Bill

The New Hampshire House of Representatives on Wednesday rejected a bill that would have legalized assisted suicide. Lawmakers voted 242-113 to kill the measure. HB 304, introduced by Representative Charles Weed, would have allowed a "mentally competent person who is 18 years of age or older" who was deemed terminally ill to request a fatal drug through a written request. "It's not the function of government to encourage suicide in the young or the old," said Committee Republican Rep. Nancy Elliott in November. "It's a prescription for elder abuse." LifeSiteNews

Patients being tube-fed 'to save time'

Patients are having their health put at risk by staff who feed them through tubes unnecessarily because they are too busy to help them eat normally, a UK report has warned. Putting a tube into the stomach to give nutrition artificially should be a last resort but busy hospital wards and care homes are using them inappropriately. Experts said that there could be a "hidden agenda" for fitting feeding tubes due to staffing issues and costs. Care homes are refusing to take some patients without a tube in a widespread practice which was condemned. Telegraph

Schiavo's brother backs local woman's custody fight

Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo, was in Elmira, NY, Monday to show his support for Sara Harvey, who is attempting to regain custody of her injured husband, Gary Harvey. Harvey has been in a persistent vegetative state since he fell down his basement steps in January 2006. Sara Harvey was removed as her husband’s guardian in February 2007 after a judge found she was ill-suited to care for him and did not follow medical advice. The county attorney’s office claims Sara Harvey has a history of abusing her injured husband, an allegation she denies. She claims Chemung County is trying to kill her husband, as evidenced by its request in May to remove Gary Harvey’s feeding tube. Ultimately, the county withdrew its request to remove Gary Harvey’s feeding tube, but a do-not-resuscitate order remains in place. Online Leader

Prof Accuses Hospital of 'Culture of Euthanasia'

A key report has accused a Hampshire hospital of a “culture of involuntary euthanasia on the wards” after questions were raised over the deaths of several patients. A senior doctor, Dr Jane Barton, in charge of the ward known as the ‘end of the line’ where almost 100 patients died at the time, faces a hearing with the General Medical Council later this year. The Christian Institute

NHS Meltdown: Blow the Whistle on Neglect of Elderly Patients--and You Take the Fall

Our world is so upside-down. A nurse secretly filmed terrible neglect of elderly UK hospital patients--and she is sanctioned for misconduct! Whistle-Blower Elder Neglect From the Original Story

Dignitas Under Investigation for 'Profiteering' from Assisted Suicide Patients

Dignitas, which is meant to be a non-profit organization, is being forced to open its accounts to prosecutors in Switzerland and disclose how much money it is receiving from its controversial business of assisting suicide. The founder of the group is reported to have become a millionaire by helping at least 870 terminally ill people – an estimated 100 of whom were British – die. It is said to have taken as much as £61,000 from one woman, 10 times its usual fee. Dignitas Possible Profiteering Investigation

Patient Died of Starvation in NHS Hospital

Martin Ryan, 43, was left unable to swallow after suffering a stroke but a "total breakdown in communication" meant he was never fitted with a feeding tube. Doctors thought that nurses were feeding him through a tube in his nose, an internal inquiry by the hospital found. But by the time they discovered this was not happening, he was too weak for an operation to insert a tube into his stomach. Mr. Ryan, who had Down's syndrome, died in agony five days later. Downs Patient Dies of Starvation in NHS Hospital Also: Horrific Pattern of Neglect of Patients with Disabilities

Frail Elderly Vulnerable to Abuse

Police said one was beaten and tormented, another was duct-taped and kidnapped, and that a third wandered off alone and died in the cold after getting stuck outside. Each of the women in these recent incidents was older than 85, placing them among the region's fastest-growing population segment -- and, experts said, among its most vulnerable. Elder Abuse

How Hitler Perverted the Course of Science

We all have an image in our minds of the role of scientists in Nazi Germany: sinister, lab-coated figures who spent half their time conducting gruesome – and largely pointless – experiments on concentration‑camp inmates to gratify their own cruel impulses, and the other half devising futuristic weapons of mass destruction for Hitler to hurl at the advancing Allies in a last attempt to stave off defeat. Yet once you dig a little deeper, what is so disturbing is how prosaic the reality was, how similar in form, if not content, their work was to the research of today. Hitler's Perversion of Science