Neither Ragged Right
nor Ragged Left 

II.  From Abuse Response to Elder Justice to Rights: A Field Still Arriving

The elder justice field did not begin with rights. It began with abuse.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the field emerged from a simple and urgent recognition: that older adults were being harmed — by family members, by caregivers, by institutions — and that the systems meant to protect them were not looking. The early work was reactive. Document the abuse. Train the responders. Build the hotlines. Establish the protocols. It was necessary work, and it saved lives.

Over the following decades, the field matured. The reactive model gave way to something more ambitious — elder justice, a framework that situated the mistreatment of older adults within broader structures of law, policy, and social obligation. Financial exploitation gained recognition as a serious crime. Adult protective services expanded. Federal legislation followed. Proactive and preventive approaches emerged alongside the reactive ones.

And then, with the Elder Justice Act (2010), the field took another step. Driven in part by the disability rights movement, which had long argued that protection without autonomy is not protection at all, elder justice began to embrace a rights-based framework. Supported decision-making entered the conversation. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities set an international standard. The vocabulary of dignity, self-determination, and legal capacity moved from the margins to the center.

This is genuine progress. It deserves to be named as such. But progress is not reckoning. And the elder justice field has not yet fully reckoned with the conditions that make its work necessary in the first place.

III.  Ageism: The Predicate

Every system of exploitation requires a predicate. Before rights can be removed, before property can be seized, before a person can be rendered legally invisible, something must first prepare the ground. In elder abuse, that something is ageism.

Ageism is not simply the prejudice of individuals who hold contemptuous views about older people. As the World Health Organization has recognized, it is the most socially normalized of all prejudices — one that operates through institutions, policies, professional practices, and cultural assumptions so pervasive they are rarely examined and almost never named. Robert Butler, who coined the term in 1969, defined ageism as a process of systematic stereotyping and discrimination against people because they are old.

The empirical link between ageism and elder abuse has now been established at the level of proclivity and perpetration. Chang, Monin, Zelterman, and Levy (2021), in a study published in Innovation in Aging, found that structural ageism and individual ageism simultaneously predicted elder abuse proclivity and perpetration. This is not a finding about attitudes or risk factors alone. It is a finding about behavior: ageism — both the cultural form embedded in institutions and the individual form held by actors within them — directly predicts who will abuse and how likely they are to do so. Ageism is not merely a context for elder abuse. It is a cause.

Nils Christie identified the structural mechanism forty-seven years ago, though he did not name it elder abuse. Writing about what he called “structural thieves” — the social forces that dispossess victims of their conflicts before professional actors ever arrive — Christie observed that age-based segregation in industrialized societies is among the most consequential and least examined of these forces. Age, he argued, is nearly perfectly synchronized to the needs of modern industrial society: it is a continuous variable whose cutting points can be moved up and down according to social demand. We divide the population by age not because age is a natural boundary but because the division is useful — for labor markets, for institutions, for the administration of social life. The result is a society in which older adults are progressively separated from the networks of relationship and mutual knowledge that make harm visible and resistance possible. The more isolated a social segment becomes, Christie wrote, the more its weakest members are exposed to harm with no external network to appeal to. The isolation he described is not incidental to elder abuse. It is the precondition for it — socially constructed, institutionally maintained, and, as the field has been slow to acknowledge, reinforced by the very protective systems that claim to address it. It is also what the dyad frame, by focusing only on the two parties already in proximity, systematically fails to see.

What has received insufficient attention is ageism in the justice system — in the courtrooms where capacity is assessed, where guardianships are granted, and where rights are routinely removed with procedural informality that would be unthinkable if applied to any other population. Ageism is the predicate. Without it, the system of exploitation this essay addresses could not function. It is what makes a guardianship petition filed on the basis of a urinary tract infection seem reasonable. It is what makes a brief clinical assessment, conducted in a hospital room by a stranger, seem sufficient to determine whether a person may govern their own life. It is what makes the removal of an elder’s rights feel protective rather than punitive — even when it is neither.

The elder justice field has made significant progress in naming and addressing ageism in healthcare, in financial services, and in the broader social environment. What it has been slower to confront is ageism within its own systems. A field that rightly condemns age-based stereotyping in hiring and in media representation cannot remain silent about age-based stereotyping in the courtrooms where its most vulnerable constituents lose their rights.

IV.  The Stress Test

The stress test of a rights-based framework is whether it survives contact with the system that operates most directly and most totally on the rights of older adults: guardianship.

Edwin Sutherland’s theory of differential association (1939) holds that exploitative behavior is learned — that bad actors acquire both the techniques and the rationalizations for harm through sustained exposure to environments where exploitation is modeled, normalized, and unpunished. The theory was developed to explain white-collar crime: the corporate officer who learns, through the culture of the organization, that certain violations are acceptable, that regulators do not look closely, that colleagues who push the limits are rewarded rather than sanctioned. Guardianship is that environment. Courts are overloaded and proceedings often perfunctory. The plenary removal of rights can follow a brief clinical assessment conducted by a stranger in a hospital room. Fees are drawn from the estate of the person whose rights have been removed. And the professional appointed to protect that person — the guardian, the conservator, the care manager — operates with minimal oversight in a system that has not developed the institutional culture of scrutiny that Sutherland identified as the necessary condition for deterrence. The law teaches what it tolerates. In guardianship, it has tolerated a great deal.

Guardianship is not a peripheral issue in the elder justice field. It is the accountability question the field has deferred too long. And it is, as criminologist Nikos Passas has argued, the paradigm case of conduct that is “lawful but awful” — producing serious harm without triggering legal sanction, operating under the costume of protection while functioning as an instrument of control.

This stress test appears twice in the essay’s argument: first here, as the proof that the journey from abuse response to rights is incomplete; and again in the companion essay “The Stress Test,” which develops the full accountability argument and asks what the field must do if it means what it says about rights.

V.  Standing: Who Counts in the Eyes of the Law

Before justice can be justified, there is a prior question: who is recognized as having a stake in it at all?

The legal answer, for most of American history, has been narrow — and narrow in two compounding ways. First, it excluded victims entirely. In Linda R.S. v. Richard D., 410 U.S. 614 (1973), the Supreme Court held that a private citizen has no cognizable interest in the prosecution or non-prosecution of another. Victims of crime had no standing. No court-recognized interest. They were nameless and faceless — the President’s Task Force on Victims of Crime’s 1982 characterization of a condition the movement existed to reverse.

The victims’ rights movement changed that. VOCA (1984), VAWA (1994) — which crossed from criminal into civil protective proceedings for victims of domestic violence, establishing the first precedent for civil standing in a protective context — and the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (2004), which created federal standing, enforceable rights, and a mandamus mechanism ensuring non-discretionary appellate review. These are genuine achievements. The movement built the architecture of recognition in criminal proceedings.

But the second narrowness has proven more durable: even as the law expanded to recognize primary victims, it left the concerned person — the family member who watched, the neighbor who tried, the professional who reported and was turned away — largely invisible. And it left civil protective proceedings — guardianship, conservatorship, the proceedings that determine the conditions of life for the most vulnerable older adults — largely untouched.

Lynne Henderson’s 1985 analysis — published the year after VOCA, the same year California enshrined victims’ rights in its constitution — was prescient in ways the field took decades to absorb. Writing from inside the movement’s moment of triumph, Henderson argued that the procedural standing the victims’ rights movement had won was not incidental to the crime control agenda: it was instrumental to it. The victim, in Henderson’s account, had been recruited as a rhetorical figure — the innocent counterweight to the guilty defendant, the human face that justified the expansion of prosecutorial power, mandatory minimums, and the erosion of due process protections. The victim’s pain was real. The policy it was made to authorize was not designed in the victim’s interest. Henderson wrote from the experience of having been raped, of having prosecuted cases and defended them, and of watching a movement she supported be captured by interests that had nothing to do with victims and everything to do with punishment. Her core observation was structural: the VRM had secured procedural standing for victims within criminal proceedings, but that standing was discretionary, unenforceable, and dependent on the continued goodwill of the very prosecutors it was meant to check. A right the government grants as a matter of grace is not a right. It is a gesture. The mandamus mechanism of the 2004 Crime Victims’ Rights Act was a partial answer to this — for the first time creating an enforcement mechanism that did not depend on prosecutorial cooperation. Henderson’s critique is the reason that mechanism matters.

The word victim itself warrants a pause. Its Latin root — victima — refers to a sentient creature killed as a religious sacrifice. It is a word of finality, not agency. This essay proposes a distinction: victim as legal threshold (necessary, useful, and expanding) versus victim as identity (inadequate, sacrificial, to be transcended). Concerned persons may cross that threshold to access services and standing, then move through and beyond it. The goal is not permanent victimhood. It is recognized standing — the foundation from which people can act.

Douglas Beloof spent a career documenting what happens when the victims’ rights movement wins the argument but loses the enforcement. A right without standing is an aspiration. A right without remedy is a promise the government can break without consequence. A right without non-discretionary review is discretion in disguise — each trial court becomes the final arbiter, no doctrine develops above them, no check operates below them. That is where crime victims were before the CVRA. That is where the concerned person in a civil protective proceeding is today.

The Uniform Guardianship, Conservatorship, and Other Protective Arrangements Act (UGCOPAA), adopted by the Uniform Law Commission in 2017 and enacted in nineteen states, requires that persons who routinely assisted the respondent in the six months before the petition be identified and given notice of the hearing. That is real progress. The concerned person is acknowledged. They are not empowered. Notice is not standing.

Christie named this structural dispossession in 1977: the victim in a modern criminal proceeding loses twice — first to the offender, and then, often more cripplingly, to the state, which takes the conflict and reduces the victim to, in Christie’s phrase, the triggerer-off of the whole thing. The concerned person in a civil protective proceeding experiences a structurally identical displacement — and then a third loss Christie did not anticipate: exclusion not merely from a proceeding they triggered, but from one opened precisely because of their relationship to the person harmed.

Vitiello’s 2023 critique of the victims’ rights movement names what standing without social justice produces: the false promise of closure. When justice is framed as a private psychological resolution — participation at a sentencing hearing, a victim impact statement read into the record — the question asked is only whether the victim felt heard. It does not ask whether structural conditions have been addressed, whether the concerned person has institutional support, or whether society has assumed response-ability. Vitiello demonstrates that “closure” carries no accepted psychological meaning, and that the procedural frame’s answer to a social justice question is, at best, aspirational and, at worst, counterproductive. A right to speak is not a right to be changed by speaking.

VI.  From Dyad to Triad: The Language We Are Stuck In

The phrase “elder abuse” was born in 1978, in a congressional hearing chaired by the late Representative Claude Pepper. It needed a term that would land, that would command attention and open the door to legislation. It worked. But language shapes what we see. And what we see shapes what we do.

As Julie Schoen, Deputy Director of the National Center on Elder Abuse, has observed, we tend to construct elder abuse as a relationship between a “perpetrator and a victim,” and in doing so, we “typically cast older people as powerless and vulnerable — reinforcing stereotypes of older people as passive, vulnerable beings.” That is the dyad. Perpetrator. Victim. Two parties. A closed frame.

The dyad has three compounding costs. It erases everyone else — the neighbor, the friend, the professional, the community. It locates the problem in a relationship rather than in social conditions, foreclosing the structural analysis that prevention requires. And it may reinforce the very ageism it claims to address, by consistently positioning older adults as the passive objects of a sentence rather than as rights-holders whose dignity the entire social enterprise is obligated to protect.

The Victims’ Rights Movement — the closest analogue to an elder justice field in criminal law — built its political power on precisely this image. As Aya Gruber has documented, the victim figure that drove the VRM was specific and narrow: innocent, passive, devastated, defined entirely by a single moment of harm, and positioned against a clearly monstrous offender. That image served the movement’s political purposes. It also entrenched the dyad as the only morally legible frame. The concerned person — the neighbor who watched for months, the friend who gathered the documents, the professional who reported and was turned away — does not fit that image. They are too present, too active, too compromised by relationship to occupy the position of pure victim. The dyad frame does not merely fail to see them. It has no place for them.

Cohen and Felson’s Routine Activity Theory provides the structural correction: crime requires not two parties but three conditions — a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian. That third element is the dyad’s missing party. It is the neighbor, the friend, the professional, the community. And its absence is not accidental. Bad actors do not merely find an absent guardian. They manufacture one.

VII.  Capable Guardians: The Closest Are the Most Excluded

Cohen and Felson named the capable guardian as the most neglected element in sociological research on crime. Forty-seven years later, the observation holds — not merely in research, but in the legal and policy architecture of elder justice.

The formal system — law enforcement, adult protective services, courts, prosecutors, financial regulators, healthcare institutions, Area Agencies on Aging, legal services organizations — carries authority. But it is not closest. In the geography of a person’s daily life, the entity most likely to observe the first signs of harm is not a caseworker or a detective. It is the concerned person already in relationship with the vulnerable adult.

Marcus Felson’s responsibility hierarchy confirms this. He ranked guardianship effectiveness by level of responsibility: personal — family and friends — at the apex, descending through assigned, diffuse, and general. Personal guardians are, by the theory’s own logic, the most effective. The legal system’s treatment of concerned persons in protective proceedings inverts this hierarchy entirely. The Inversion — the displacement of the most effective guardian by the least relational — is not a procedural technicality. It is a structural guarantee of worse outcomes.

Setterlund and colleagues’ empirical application of Routine Activity Theory to financial elder abuse in families (2007) confirmed this precisely: when asset managers had sole responsibility and no one else watched them, and when older adults lacked the capacity to monitor their own finances, the opportunity structure for exploitation was complete. The variable was not capability. It was accountability.

VIII.  Bystanders and Concerned Persons: A Distinction That Matters

There is a body of social psychology research on bystander behavior worth naming here, precisely to set it aside.

The bystander effect, identified by John Darley and Bibb Latané in 1968, describes how the presence of multiple observers of an emergency reduces the likelihood that any single observer will intervene — diffusion of responsibility, collective inaction produced by social ambiguity. The research is real and important. But the bystander frame does not describe concerned persons.

Bystanders witness from outside the story. Concerned persons are already in it.

A concerned person is not a stranger who happened to observe an incident. They are a daughter managing her mother’s medications while noticing money disappearing. They are a neighbor who has watched a so-called caregiver arrive daily and seen the older adult grow thinner and more fearful. They are a professional — a banker, a social worker, a physician — who recognizes the signs of exploitation and faces a system that offers no clear pathway for their concern.

Concerned persons are not passive by disposition. They are obstructed by structure. The question Upstandership addresses is not how to overcome the bystander effect. It is how to dismantle the structural barriers that block people who are already motivated to act.

IX.  VOCA, the CVRA, and the Proof of Concept

The most promising development in elder justice in recent years is not legislative. It is administrative — a creative use of existing federal funding that has quietly expanded the legal and practical recognition of concerned persons as victims in their own right.

The Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), enacted in 1984, established the Crime Victims Fund and has since become the primary federal funding source for victim services across the country. VOCA explicitly names elder abuse as a priority area. VOCA-funded services reach older adults who have been financially exploited, physically abused, and neglected. In some jurisdictions, VOCA funding supports services to concerned persons as secondary victims — family members and close associates who have themselves been harmed by the exploitation of an older adult they love and tried to protect.

VOCA established the funding. The Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004 established the model.

Congress has already recognized, in federal law, that the incapacity of a primary victim does not extinguish the rights of those who care for and about that person. The Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004, at 18 U.S.C. § 3771(e), provides that when a crime victim is under 18, incompetent, incapacitated, or deceased, family members and other suitable persons may assume the victim’s rights in federal criminal proceedings. The mechanism exists. It has been tested. It works.

The gap is not architectural. It is jurisdictional. The CVRA’s transfer of rights upon incapacity applies to federal criminal proceedings. It does not apply to the civil protective proceedings — guardianship, conservatorship — where the incapacity of the older adult is precisely the condition that triggers the proceeding in the first place. In the domain where incapacity is most consequential, where the stakes are total, where the older adult has lost the legal capacity to speak for themselves, the law provides the concerned person nothing.

That asymmetry is not constitutionally required. It is not historically inevitable. It is a legislative choice that has not yet been made — and that the elder justice field has not yet demanded loudly enough. The architecture exists. Congress built it when it chose to. The reform target is not the invention of a new framework. It is the extension of an existing one into the domain where it is most needed.

CEASe — the Center for Elder Abuse Solutions, formerly the New York City Elder Abuse Center — represents the field’s closest current approximation of formal recognition for concerned persons. Through the New York State Office of Victim Services, VOCA funding has supported a helpline for concerned persons since 2017: family members, friends, and neighbors worried about the mistreatment of an older adult in their lives. This was not a workaround. It was a precise application of the statutory framework to a population the field had structurally excluded.

The empirical foundation for this extension is established in the peer-reviewed literature. A nationally representative study found that nearly 30 percent of American adults knew a relative, friend, or neighbor who had experienced elder mistreatment — extending, when projected to the adult population, to approximately 73 million adults with personal knowledge of a victim, and approximately 44 million who became involved in helping. Two-thirds of those who knew a victim reported personal distress at the highest levels of measurement. Critically, assuming a helping role was associated with significantly higher distress than not helping — the act of assisting the victim compounds the harm to the helper. The study’s authors concluded that professionals typically do not provide assistance tailored to the needs of concerned persons, and that the resulting disengagement by distressed helpers would further isolate and imperil the primary victim (Breckman et al., The Gerontologist, 2018). Concerned persons are not merely witnesses. They suffer measurable emotional harm as a direct result of the crime. That is precisely what VOCA’s harm definition already reaches.

The mechanism for VOCA eligibility flows through the secondary victim classification — the operational reading that New York State OVS applies to extend direct service funding to individuals who are not themselves the primary victims but whose stability and capacity to support the primary victim are essential to that victim’s safety and recovery. That reading is both the proof of concept and its limitation: durable enough to fund the CEASe helpline, not yet durable enough to guarantee that the next state agency, or the next administration, will read the framework the same way. That administrative recognition also sidesteps a structural barrier embedded in many victim compensation statutes: the requirement that claimants cooperate with law enforcement. The concerned person who calls the CEASe helpline does not need to be a complainant, a witness, or a cooperating party in a criminal proceeding. They need only be someone who has suffered harm.

The gloss needs to become law. The concerned person’s eligibility needs to be written into statute rather than depending on the continued generosity of a single administrative interpretation. If VOCA funding already reaches concerned persons as secondary victims, standing doctrine can recognize them as parties with cognizable interests. The funding arrived first. The doctrine needs to follow.

X.  Elder Abuse as Social Harm: The Zemiological Frame

The final step in this argument requires a shift in lens — from criminal law, which focuses on individual actors and discrete events, to social harm, which asks what happens when entire structures produce suffering that the law fails to name.

Zemiology — the study of social harm — contends that harm occurs when people are prevented, by social structures or individual actions, from meeting their needs (Canning and Tombs, From Social Harm to Zemiology, Routledge, 2021). The zemiological frame does not replace criminal law. It supplements it by making visible what criminal categories leave out. As Passas has argued, there is a need to recognize activities that are “lawful but awful” — conduct that produces serious harm without triggering legal sanction. Guardianship abuse is the paradigm case.

Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence (1969) provides the bridge. Structural violence is “silent” and “static” — it does not announce itself, but operates through systems and arrangements that prevent people from realizing their full potential. Elder abuse, understood through this lens, is not simply a series of individual crimes. It is a social harm, produced by structural conditions — ageism, isolation, inequality, inadequate oversight of protective systems — and experienced not only by the older adult but by everyone in their circle of concern. Society, in this frame, is itself a victim.

This is also the argument that Gleeson’s distinction demands. The victims’ rights movement secured procedural standing for primary victims. The social harm argument requires more: structural accountability for the conditions that produce harm, recognition of the full circle of those affected, and a theory of justice that extends beyond the individual to the social. Perelman’s foundational value must be argued at this level: not just that this victim was harmed, but that this harm is a social wrong, that the structural conditions producing it are unjust, and that society has an obligation — a response-ability — to address them.

XI.  Upstandership: Response-Ability as Societal Commitment

Upstandership, as a practice, is not defined by what it opposes. It is defined by what it affirms. It does not ask: why didn’t anyone act? It asks: what would a society look like that made it possible — that made it safe — for concerned persons to stand up for justice?

The answer requires more than encouragement. It requires structure. It requires that when a concerned person reaches out to a helpline, they are met by someone trained to help them — not turned away because they are not the “primary victim.” It requires that when a professional reports suspected exploitation, the system receives that report as authoritative, not as interference. It requires that when a family member attempts to access information about a loved one under guardianship, the law recognizes their stake rather than treating them as a stranger.

Response-ability — the genuine societal capacity to respond — is not a soft virtue. It is an infrastructure problem. When concerned persons assume responsibility to act, society must assume response-ability: the genuine capacity to respond, so that those who stand up for justice know they will not be left standing alone. The failure to build that capacity is not a passive condition. It is a feedback loop: when concerned persons act and find themselves unsupported, dismissed, or actively obstructed, the next person who might have acted learns, from watching, that the system will not have their back either. Inaction teaches inaction.

Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis holds that removing restraining forces produces more durable change than adding driving forces. The field has added driving forces for fifty years: awareness campaigns, professional training, public education. What produces durable change is the removal of the structural impediments that block people who are already motivated to act. CEASe is a restraining force removed. The VOCA secondary victim expansion is a restraining force removed. The Cause the Pause statute is a restraining force removed. Prevention requires rights. Not just awareness.

XII.  Justice Justified

Return, now, to the four meanings.

Justice will be justified — set straight on the page, running true from margin to margin — when the formal and informal networks of protection are working together: when the algorithm and the relationship, the statute and the social worker, the prosecutor and the neighbor are all in the room, each doing what the other cannot.

Justice will be justified — warranted, legitimate, meeting the standard of the claim — when the field acts on what it already knows: that elder abuse is a social harm, that society is a victim of it, and that the people who stand up against it deserve not charity but rights.

Justice will be justified — argued, reasoned, earned in Perelman’s sense — when the foundational value is no longer treated as arbitrary but claimed and defended: that older adults are rights-bearers, that concerned persons have standing, that the structural conditions producing elder abuse are unjust, and that society has the obligation and the capacity to address them. Not proof. Argument. The rational practice of making the case for a value that cannot be demonstrated but must not be abandoned.

Justice will be justified — historically, in the sense the pendulum demands — when the balance between individual and social harm is finally set. Neither the victim alone at the ragged right, nor society alone at the ragged left. Neither procedural standing without structural accountability, nor social justice claims without recognized individual rights. Both. The text running true.

The world needs to catch up. On hearing voices. On the distance between the rights the field has claimed and the systems the field has built. This essay is the argument. The practice is Upstandership. And the justification — the justifying — of justice begins when concerned persons stand up, and society stands with them.

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