The Reckoning

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. The language of rights began to appear alongside the language of safety.

And then, more recently, 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 guardianship.

Guardianship has been present at every stage of this evolution — as backdrop, as cautionary example, as an occasion for incremental reform. What it has not been, until recently, is the lens through which the field evaluates its own commitments. That is what this section proposes to make it.

Guardianship is the stress test. If dignity means anything, it must survive a diagnosis. If autonomy means anything, it cannot be extinguished by a brief clinical assessment and a court order issued in minutes. If the rights-based framework means anything, it must confront the system that operates most directly on the rights of the people it claims to serve — not as an outlier, not as a court matter for lawyers to resolve, but as a central accountability question for the field as a whole.

The essays that follow trace this evolution — from abuse response to elder justice to rights — and place guardianship at the center of the story at each stage. They ask what the field knew and when it knew it. They ask what was prioritized and what was deferred. They do not indict individuals or organizations. They ask a harder question: whether a field that has traveled this far, and built this much, is prepared to go the rest of the way.

That is the reckoning.

Image: Indian Creek, Manti-La Sal National Forest, UT