The name of this newspaper contains a word worth pausing on. A monitor is someone who watches — who notices, who keeps attention trained on what others might miss. It is a precise description of the person this field most urgently needs to recognize.
On June 2, at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, practitioners and advocates from across New England will gather for the Northern New England Regional Financial Abuse Specialty Team Conference on elder abuse and exploitation.The conference is called “Hear Their Voices.” I will be the keynote speaker. My argument will be that the voices the field most urgently needs to hear are the ones it has not yet learned to recognize.
Not the voices of older adults who have been exploited — the field hears those, imperfectly but genuinely, and has built real infrastructure around them. The voices I mean belong to the people standing beside them. The neighbor who noticed the unfamiliar car in the driveway for the third week in a row. The friend who called twice and got no answer. The adult child who read the bank statement and could not account for what she found. These people — I call them concerned persons — are the most effective protective resource the field has. They are also the most systematically overlooked.
I know something about this from personal experience. In 2006, I petitioned a New York court to place my grandmother, Brooke Astor, under guardianship after she had been financially exploited by the person holding her power of attorney — my father. I was the concerned person in that case. The legal system eventually worked. But it worked despite its design, not because of it. I had no formal standing in the proceeding I had initiated. For the millions of older adults whose exploitation happens quietly, without public attention, that exclusion is even more consequential.
Elder financial exploitation costs Americans an estimated $28.3 billion annually, according to a 2023 AARP report. A landmark New York State study found that for every reported case, 44 go unreported. The gap between harm and recognition is not primarily a problem of awareness. It is a problem of architecture. The system was designed around two parties: a victim and a perpetrator. The concerned person — the most likely to detect harm before it becomes irreversible — has no recognized place in that design.
New Hampshire has already taken one important step in recognizing the neighbor as a legal actor. Under RSA 161-F:46, every citizen — not just professionals, not just licensed providers — is mandated to report suspected abuse, neglect or exploitation of a vulnerable adult. That is a genuine and consequential commitment. But the mandate ends at the report. The concerned person who files it has no continuing role in what follows — no right to notice, no right to be heard, no standing to raise concerns if the investigation stalls or the situation worsens. The law has recognized the neighbor’s duty to speak. It has not yet recognized their right to be heard.
New Hampshire’s State Plan on Aging reflects the same partial recognition. On of the goals — to ensure the rights, safety, and dignity of older people and prevent their abuse and exploitation — calls for strengthening outreach to those in regular contact with older people: mail carriers, bank clerks, hairdressers, health care workers, senior center staff and volunteers. That list is a portrait of the concerned person. The infrastructure is present. What it lacks is the rights framework that would give these monitors a recognized legal stake in the outcome. By 2040, one in three New Hampshire residents will be over 65. The Plan’s concern is well-placed. Its architecture needs to match it.
The conference title, “Hear Their Voices,” is exactly right. But hearing is not enough. What the concerned person needs is not to be heard only in a conference room. They need standing — the legal recognition that gives them a seat in the protective proceeding, the right to raise concerns and the assurance that those concerns will be adjudicated rather than dismissed. The difference between being heard and having standing is the difference between a courtesy and a right.
The next iteration of New Hampshire’s State Plan on Aging is an occasion to name concerned persons explicitly — not as informal helpers at the margins of a professional system, but as supporting actors with recognized standing and enforceable rights, working alongside older adults who remain the lead actors in their own lives. Prevention requires rights, not just awareness. The neighbor who noticed is already there. The question is whether the law is ready to let them in.
Philip C. Marshall is an elder justice advocate and the founder of BeyondBrooke.org. He is Professor Emeritus at Roger Williams University. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging.