Intersectional Harms: Discriminatory Abuse of Older LGBTQ+ Adults in Long-Term Care

Discriminatory abuse (harm motivated by a person’s identity characteristics, including sexual orientation, gender identity, race and sex) remains under-addressed in mainstream “elder abuse” scholarship. This commentary argues that silence in scholarship and absence in data, concepts and regulatory frameworks produce a form of structural invisibility that leaves older LGBTQ+ people in long-term care vulnerable to harm that is neither recognised nor addressed. Drawing on the case of Noel Glynn, a gay man with dementia subjected to homophobic abuse in an English care home, it calls for discriminatory abuse to be more fully recognised conceptually, empirically and within adult protection practice.