Like assault and confinement, these are crimes. Neglect is another kind of elder abuse. If someone abandons an older person or withholds food and health services, this is neglect. Sometimes neglect is the result of criminal negligence, a deliberate failure to give someone what he or she needs. If so, this neglect is a crime.
Elder abuse can also take the form of mental cruelty.
If someone humiliates, insults, frightens, threatens, ignores or treats an older person like a child, this is mental cruelty. Threatening to put an older person in a nursing home can be a form of mental cruelty. Under some circumstances, mental cruelty is a crime. Some victims of elder abuse live in their own homes or with relatives. Others live in institutions such as nursing homes, homes for the aged, and chronic care hospitals.