Prevalence and Correlates of Emotional, Physical, Sexual, and Financial Abuse and Potential Neglect in the United States: The National Elder Mistreatment Study

conducted more than a decade ago, was the first major investigation of mistreatment of the elderly in the United States. It found that 449924 persons aged 60 years or older had been physically abused, neglected, or in some way mistreated in 1996. However, the study did not solicit data directly from older adults; rather, it assessed Adult Protective Service records and sentinel (e.g., community professionals) reports. Thus, it is very likely that the results greatly underestimated the true scope of the problem of abuse of older Americans, because a large ma-jority of cases are unreported and are undetected by monitoring agents. In another, earlier investigation, more tha