• Home
• About
  What is an EAFC? Need for the Center How the SFEAFC Started How the Center Works Contact Information
• Partners
  Funding Partner Agencies
• Resources
  Community Services Elder Abuse Agencies FAQs Publications Staff Resources
• News

Need for the Center

San Francisco has the highest percentage of seniors of any urban city in the United States (14.6% compared to the national average of 12.1%). Nearly one in three people age 75 or older in San Francisco lives in poverty.

Living longer means that elders are living with greater frailties:

• One in 8 persons age 65 and older (13%) have Alzheimer’s Disease
• Opproximately 20% of older adults suffer from some form of depression
• Only 4% live in nursing homes at any given time, so most elders live alone. Many are “unbefriended elders” and have diminished capacity and lack family or friends who can make needed financial or medical decisions.

The California Attorney General’s Office estimates that 200,000 seniors and dependent adults are abused in California every year (or, one every two minutes).

Reports of elder abuse in the City have increased by 43% over the past two years.  Last year, San Francisco’s Department on Aging and Adult Services Division of Adult Protective Services received almost 4,100 new reports of elder abuse, and between 2003 and 2006, the District Attorney prosecuted 52% more elder abuse cases.

The social, medical and law enforcement services needed to deal with this growing number of victims are scattered organizationally and physically across various City Agencies and Community Providers. This causes delays and gaps in service coordination, evidence collection and criminal investigation that can negatively affect the outcome for the victims of abuse.

Successful identification, intervention and prosecution of elder abuse requires a high level of coordination between legal, medical, and social services providers. When an Adult Protective Services (APS) worker, Law Enforcement Officer, or other first responder investigates a report of possible abuse, they are called upon to evaluate and triage a situation that is often fraught with complexity and subtlety.

These highly trained professionals are able to make a credible assessment of such situations but then must be able to coordinate efficiently with other experts to secure a satisfactory result. In the current environment this typically involves countless phone calls and scheduling across agencies to develop a coordinated plan of action, and even more time to implement it.