‘Ellen Louise Pence (April 15, 1948 – January 6, 2012) was an American scholar and a social activist. She co-founded the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project^, an inter-agency collaboration model used in all 50 states in the U.S. and over 17 countries. A leader in both the battered women’s movement and the emerging field of institutional ethnography, she was the recipient of numerous awards including the Society for the Study of Social Problems Dorothy E. Smith Scholar Activist Award (2008) for significant contributions in a career of activist research.’ (source: Wikipedia)

Ellen’s Power and Control Wheel is a powerful visual tool outlining forms of power and control that leads it (is) abuse.

The video (below) from 2009, is a powerful short intrroduction to Ellen’s work on domestic violence, and discusses living with a perpetrator. She talks about the tactics of perpetrators, and how the isolation creeps in. I have personal experience of domestic violence, including needing a Domestic Violence Restrainig order. It was a truly traumatic experience, and the legal process was almost as dicfficult as the abuse!

The topic of power and control is highly relevant to the known abuse of people with dementia, as the ‘system’ that is meant to care and support people with dementia, is set up in a way that enables the abuse.

As abusers behave towards those they abuse in a domestic setting, the way those in power continue to fight to retain their power over ‘what is best for people with dementia’, and in this way, have themslves inadvertently (maybe intentionally) become ‘abusers’ of anyone who speaks up against them, or against the systems and policies they hang onto.

Institutional accomodation settings for people with dementia are coercive and harmful, and are a hub for abusers who are rarely made accountable. It is partly why I am pleased to have worked on the Dementia Justice research project with with Linda Steele, which produced an evidence based set of Dementia Reparations Principles for peole with dementia who are harmed in care.