By Marcie Benson
the daily cardinal
The protection of elderly and at risk groups typically is not a saucy subject that generates hours of vehement debate. However, a new set of laws in Wisconsin is scratching its nails on the political chalkboard and causing controversy among conservative critics.
These agitated opponents claim the mandates will cost too much to enforce, and therefore should be repealed. However, given the law was only implemented Dec. 1 of this year, it is impossible to precisely quantify the holistic costs.
Furthermore, the abuse of the vulnerable populations should not even be a subject of controversy, but rather a standard social obligation entrenched in our nation's social fabric woven with the threads of compassion and awareness.
The new law seeks especially to target abuse of individuals with disabilities as well as the elderly in three ways: reform of guardian laws, reform of reporting laws and expansion of the legal definition of abuse.
Such reforms provide people of these demographics with greater due process rights, a higher degree of court scrutiny during the process of guardian selection and financial exploitation included in the definition of abuse. These measures function in a complimentary fashion to act as a more comprehensive umbrella to protect against the torrent of maltreatment.
However, while critics gripe about the cost, they forget abuse bears hidden societal costs in terms of increased strain on the already burdened health care system in the United States, as well as the individual and psychological detriments to the victims.
Hopefully, implementing a system that seeks to undermine the start of potentially abusive patterns by giving extra protections to vulnerable demographics will defray these societal costs by preventing cruelty and mistreatment. This could provide a cost effective and socially compassionate alternative to the apathetic, penny pinching as implicitly advocated by opponents.
Moreover, abuse on the whole is already a contentious quandary where it is difficult to dole out justice to the victims and the perpetrators. Abuse is the result of dysfunctional, hyperactive power and control dynamics that exist in situations where there is intimacy and access to a vulnerable party.
The problematical intricacy of this matter is enhanced by the entangling victim/perpetrator relationship that brands the victim with a seal of shame and despondence, which consequently has the propensity to effectively hamper the desire to report incidents of maltreatment.
Furthermore, even when episodes of abuse are reported, this does not guarantee swift and steady justice, and can sometimes endanger the victim to additional retaliatory abuse.
Given the inherent labyrinthine substructure that supports the occurrence of mistreatment, the elderly and other vulnerable populations who are constantly under the care of others are especially in need of supplementary legal protection and recourse in order to safeguard these imperiled groups. They live in conditions that make it especially difficult to come forward about situations of abuse, and to protest their need for legal armor would be turning a blind eye to appalling atrocities.
Above all, as citizens not only of the United States, but as citizens of humanity, everyone deserves the freedom from maltreatment and a basic standard of respect and fairness.
To deny that fundamental right on the basis of monetary cost tugs on the proverbial thread that begins the dangerous unraveling of a fabric that seeks to shelter our citizens from the hardship and pain of being a powerless victim.
