A man visiting his wife at her Sydney aged care facility was caught off guard when he found her in another resident’s room being, what he has described as, sexually assaulted by the male.
Distraught husband José said he has not been able to sleep properly since discovering the incident, and has blamed understaffing at the facility for allowing the alleged assault to happen. He also shared he was distressed by the description of the alleged incident as “cuddling” in the incident report.
According to José, 75, when he arrived to visit his 70-year-old wife – who is living with dementia – the two care staff on duty were busily preparing and serving lunch. After being waved through by the workers on duty, he heard his wife’s voice coming from another room.
“I saw my wife on the bed with a man. He was fondling her breasts, and he had his other hand inside her thighs. I just froze for a second and then I just screamed at her, ‘Get out of there!’ And my wife came out to me and she said, ‘That’s my husband’,” José told The Guardian Australia.
According to José, his wife Shannon calls men she doesn’t know her ‘son’ or ‘husband’.
The male resident that allegedly assaulted Shannon is also living with dementia, and was at the facility temporarily on respite. He has since returned home to the care of his family.
“There was CCTV in all corridors, and while rooms do not have CCTV, there are sensors in the bedrooms,” he explained.
“The right protocols were in place, but those protocols failed. And the reason they failed is because they were short-staffed. Two staff during lunch hour is not appropriate when one of those staff is in the lunch area preparing food to be sent out.
“This nursing home is short-staffed, and probably underfunded.”
So far, the home has allegedly failed to address its understaffing issues since the royal commission handed down their final report on March 1. The recommendations made within the report called for increased focus on the needs of those in care, rather than a focus on the funding requirements of aged care providers.
“Both residents presented with no signs of distress,” the report detailed. According to The Guardian Australia, they were both monitored closely and kept separate following the incident.
José didn’t receive a copy of the report until more than one week after the alleged assault, but felt unable to read it.
“Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to read it until a couple of days later, as I haven’t been sleeping for days and days after this happened,” he shared.
“When I read it, you know, I was flabbergasted. Cuddling? No, it was not cuddling. It’s much more. And he was grappling with her breasts, you know, and my wife has had breast cancer surgery on both breasts, so I was worried about her being hurt.”
They said that in response to the incident, the two people involved were relocated, and were “closely monitored each for any physical, emotional and psychological distress in addition to providing their usual care”.
The also said they had consulted the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and had followed their guidelines under aged care legislation.
“We place a high focus on the care of our residents and regret any distress caused. We continue to work closely with the family and doctor of the resident to ensure care is paramount and appropriately provided any emotional support required.”
This incident has caused aged care experts and stakeholders to question the reporting, the responses and the care shown to older people who may be experiencing sexual assaults in aged care, further highlighting what had already been highlighted by the royal commission back in October 2020.
However, according to a KPMG report conducted in 2019, in which 170 Australian aged care service providers were surveyed, staff at these facilities said that 58.1% of the 31 incidents categorised as rape or sexual assault resulted in “no impact”.
With many of the royal commission’s recommendations yet to be implemented across Australia’s struggling aged care sector, more needs to be done to protect and support the older and vulnerable members of our communities.
1800 RESPECT provides confidential sexual assault and family and domestic violence counselling via phone and webchat. Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Phone: 1800 737 732.
This is common in aged care facilities. The CMs and RNs downplay what actually happens. Alot of this is due to a culture in aged care that has been allowed to continue unabated forever. How dare they not respect this woman’s husband and progress appropriately. You may ask why AINs are handling and preparing meals on the floor! Because they won’t hire more staff in all areas of aged care facilities when they can get AINs to pick up the slack in all areas of Nursing homes! Laundry, catering, Diversional Therapy, cleaning and spot cleaning due to covid. Even asking staff if they would be able to fill in at reception. This means that the elderly cannot possibly be getting the time and cares they should be. So many staff filling in for sick days doing double shifts all the time. AINs are treated like servants. And I can imagine how management get the big bonus check and big Christmas party at the end of the year. All at the expense of the AINS and the elderly. Yeah it looks like there are heaps of staff at lunch time to impress the likely new residents and their families. But they need to ask how many staff to each ward. How many kitchen staff are there to give out meals and actually serve the residents. How many cleaners on every day. God forbid an outbreak of Covid 19 happens. Visitors should stay during meal times especially on the weekends when there are no bosses around to pretend they are all on board! AINs , RNs and CMs don’t really don’t have a voice since most are on visas and their culture is such that they will not speak out. This is the Australia we live in. Disgraceful.
My mother was physically assaulted and then she claimed that a male resident had tried to get into bed with her thinking that he was her wife. I actually caught this man in her room and re-directed him out because he was clearly suffering from Dementia. I reported the physical assault to the local police who refused to follow up because my mother had Dementia and then rang the alleged perpetrator and told him that he was ‘okay’. These experiences are just demoralising. I would advise anyone who thinks their parent has been assaulted to not bother with the police or Aged Care Complaints because the police are not interested and Aged Care Complaints will just keep you running like a hamster on a wheel going nowhere.
In aged care, particularly for those living with Dementia, it is very hard for their loved ones to see them seeking and receiving comfort and intimacy from a person, deemed to be a stranger. It is, as we are instructed, a branch of the resident’s rights to intimacy. Husbands, wives and children understandably struggle with this and use terms such as Sexual abuse, which may be an incorrect assumption. so hard for everyone, but mostly we need to look into the eyes of the resident, is she happy?
Well said Kathy, facilities operate inside the rules imposed by the Government. Some of these rules are just unworkable, dignity, respect, freedom and risk are paramount in accreditation but there is a major gap between family and government expectations.
If a lady decides to hold the hand of a man, forming a bond, a relationship, what of it?
Are facilities expected to put chastity belts on people and still respect their dignity?
How do you do that? Where is the abuse if there is consentual? Is dementia excluded from consent, who’s happy and who’s unhappy? Who do facilities look after? Should families accept that their mum or dad has changed, has found something else to make them happy?
Again, not straight forward.
In training sessions I have conducted in aged care facilities, I try to get staff to think of the world through the lens of those they care for – residents, that is. We, as staff, spend so much time observing residents, and documenting their behaviour that often we forget the role our behaviour plays in difficult situations, episodes of challenging behaviours and so on. We document everything residents do – imagine if residents documented everything care staff did. Progress notes would be much different!
Not surprising is it? We all have very different perspectives on the world. We see the same thing differently. I wonder then what the lady in this scenario thought. Perhaps something like; here I am kissing and cuddling with my husband and this crazy man charges in, screams at me (screams that is – a very confronting and aggressive thing to do) and drags me out of the room.
Another way of approaching this issue is to ask; who has the problem here? Not the lady or the man in the room, and not the staff (although they certainly have a big problem now). No, the person with the problem is José. He intrudes into someone else’s room, catches his wife (apparently) happy kissing and cuddling, and he is outraged. And now of course it becomes not just two people happily being with each other; now it is sexual assault, now it is ‘inappropriate behaviour’, now we have victim and perpetrator; now we have criminality and shame; now we have more talk about CCTV invading personal space; now we have a nursing home’s worst nightmare.
There surely has to be a better way to handle the inevitable consequences of dementia than this.
I believe José witnessed alot more than just a cuddle! Next you’ll be advocating free sex for all with dementia. He saw the male resident touching her breasts and had his hand between her legs. The male resident must have thought it was Christmas! Opportunist? You bet! There should have been more staff on as this lady was confused as alot mistakingly believe staff and/ or residents are their children or husbands/wives. We can only hold the facility to blame here. A lack of staff numbers putting residents at risk.Holding hands or having a hug is one thing. The other? Well most half smart people can tell the difference. I believe the husband saw something more. Let us hope that your mum or sister or wife doesn’t end up with this horrible affliction of Dementia and mistake another man for her husband. Most actually believe they are young again.