(Photo by David Pereiras via Burnett Medical Center/CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED)
Note: This article addresses elder neglect, illness, and untimely death. The term “neglect” is used here to describe systemic outcomes resulting from policy and resource gaps, not to assign blame to individual family members or informal caregivers—many of whom provide care under severe financial and emotional strain.
Public debate rarely addresses aging unless a crisis forces it into the spotlight. In recent years, elderly people have become visible in the news through scandals in nursing homes, mass deaths during the coronavirus pandemic, fatalities during heatwaves, and more. Each tragedy briefly exposes the fragility of elderly care and health systems across Europe. Yet, once the headlines fade, elder neglect slips back into the margins of public concern.
Part of this invisibility takes root in the way the media and governments frame the issue. Despite the vulnerability that comes with age, they rarely present the elderly as an active group of society. Instead, public discourse focuses on demographic challenges or the budgetary burden they allegedly represent for healthcare and pensions systems. This cost-based narrative shifts attention away from social justice questions and allows neglect to continue without scrutiny.
Across Europe, elder neglect is present in both institutionalized and non-institutionalized care environments. The progressive privatization of institutional care homes has placed profits over autonomy and dignity. Others age outside these systems and face poverty, isolation, and the lack of access to essential public services. While these pathways may look different on the surface, they come from the same ideology that manages old age out of public view, and put aside rights, accountability, and social inclusion.
Institutional Care: Harmful Protection
Policymakers and care systems often present institutional care, through long-term care facilities, as a solution to vulnerability and declining independence in old age. Public authorities have historically provided and regulated much of this care across Europe. Yet, facing the lack of public investment and rising demand, authorities have become increasingly reliant on private providers, which now dominate the long-term care sector in several European countries.
As social care funding becomes scarcer, many of these private institutions operate on tight budgets, creating incentives for cost-cutting measures. In France, the 2022 Orpea scandal exposed systemic abuse in private nursing homes, including rationed food, untreated pain, and limiting care to reduce costs. The investigations revealed practices deeply rooted in elder care, with little oversight by public authorities and chronic understaffing. Elder care became a cost-saving exercise rather than a human responsibility.
The coronavirus crisis further exposed failures in the elderly care sector, contributing to thousands of deaths in nursing homes across Europe. Even Sweden, a country that spends one of the highest shares of gross domestic product on elder care, has shown serious failures in protecting elderly residents during the pandemic. As French care home director Valérie Martin declared: “It’s taken a global catastrophe for people to realize what’s really going on in nursing homes. And that is a lack of means, a lack of funds, a lack of staff, and a lack of recognition of our trade.”
Even where abuse is not overt, daily life in these institutions often further reduces elderly people’s autonomy with strict schedules, limited mobility, and little access to the outside world, turning them into passive receivers of care. Compliance enforcement mechanisms are weak, inspections are superficial, and the lack of alternatives often discourage families from questioning conditions.
Non-Institutional Care: Abandonment of Responsibility
For millions of elderly people across Europe, neglect does not take place behind institutional doors but in private homes, insecure housing, or social isolation. If aging outside institutions often represents independence, it frequently means abandonment.
In recent years, Europe has seen “increasing poverty rates among older persons,” with nearly 20% of elderly inhabitants at risk of poverty. In Bulgaria, where elderly people suffer from the highest risk of poverty and social exclusion in the European Union (EU), low pensions combined with rising living costs have pushed many into material deprivation. Distance, cost, and digital barriers limit access to healthcare, especially in rural areas. In such contexts, aging at home is less a choice than the absence of an alternative.
The EU has sought to reduce the “costs of institutionalized care” by promoting home care and community care options. In practice, however, these services remain insufficient, unevenly distributed, and under-resourced. Elderly people living alone often rely on unpaid family care or overstretched local services. When these supports are unavailable, neglect takes the form of malnutrition, untreated health issues, unsafe housing, and extreme loneliness. Limited financial resources, the absence of oversight or verification of family support, and inadequate housing conditions further aggravate these risks.
The consequences of this neglect, similarly, become visible during crises, such as the increasing heatwaves affecting Europe. Unsafe housing, without air conditioning, as well as the lack of social ties, put older people living outside care institutions at a higher risk of heat-related distress. In 2025, approximately 85% of related deaths consisted of those 65 years of age and older, amounting to 20,716 people across Europe. Authorities have faced criticism for inadequate protective strategies, including the lack of age-appropriate accessibility, poor outreach, and a lack of inclusive communication for vulnerable populations during extreme heat events.
Non-institutional neglect operates through exclusion rather than confinement. This form of neglect is less visible, but no less political. The invisibility minimises public responsibility for aging populations while shifting care responsibilities onto families, charities, and the elderly themselves.
Ageism: The Politics of Invisibility
Beyond budgetary issues, elder neglect is linked to a bigger phenomenon called ageism, meaning cultural assumptions, institutional norms, and policies framing older adults as frail dependents rather than individuals. Ageism is based on stereotypes and shapes societal decisions about aging populations. This systemic prejudice has consequences on several levels, including economic exclusion, marginalization, and resentment between generations, to cite a few.
In the public discourse, the media and policymakers often describe older people as fragile, costly, or incapable. Demographic debates frequently rely on alarmist language, warning of a so-called “silver tsunami” or an aging “ticking time bomb”, as baby boomers approach retirement and begin to rely on strained welfare systems. These metaphors frame longevity as a threat to welfare systems rather than as a collective social achievement. Likewise, policy debates often focus on related budgetary aspects, rather than human rights concerns.
The ageist narrative became especially visible during the coronavirus pandemic. The advocacy group HelpAge International noted a rise in ageist comments in the public discourse while researchers at Columbia University identified the spread of explicitly hateful language on social media, including the hashtag “#BoomerRemover.” In many European countries, the governments presented older people as inevitable casualties of the virus and excluded them from shaping community protective measures. HelpAge International documented how age-based assumptions influenced pandemic responses, such as blanket isolation policies or healthcare triage decisions.
Ageist narratives have reinforced the idea that older lives are less valuable. Politics of invisibility normalize the exclusion of older people from public life, portraying them as passive receivers of care rather than fully participating subjects. Thus, ageism allows neglectful policies to continue without any challenge.
The Unequal Burden of Aging
Aging does not affect everyone equally. It depends on many variables, including gender, social class, disability status, and migration status. These intersecting factors determine who is most at risk of poverty, isolation, and institutional violence.
Across Europe, neglect and precarity disproportionately affect elderly women. While women’s life expectancy is on average longer than men’s, they are consequently more likely to face periods of chronic illness, isolation, and dependency. Lifelong gender inequalities in employment and wages exacerbate the issue by translating into lower pensions and savings, leaving them financially vulnerable and exposed to inadequate resources. Despite requiring support themselves, older women often continue to carry the burden of care, as caregivers for spouses, relatives, or grandchildren, sometimes at the expense of their own health.
Older people with physical or cognitive impairments face heightened barriers to accessing services. In a 2020 report, the United Nations found the lack of home and community support often lead to the institutionalisation of older people with disabilities, even when unnecessary, reducing their autonomy. Migrant and racialized elderly populations face other obstacles, including language barriers, precarious legal status, and limited access to contributory welfare systems. In this context, structural inequality shapes aging as a political experience because national policies fail to capture these specificities by treating older people as a homogenous group.
Aging with Dignity: Reclaiming Rights and Recognition
Today, Europe’s approach to aging reveals a deep contradiction. While societies celebrate longevity, they also fuel the politics of invisibility. Policymakers and the media only make older people visible during crises, pushing them back into silence. Their lives, contributions, vulnerabilities, and rights remain outside of the mainstream social and political agendas.
In this view, elder neglect is not accidental. It reflects a deeper structural choice, placing cost above rights-based responsibilities. The same logic applies to both institutional confinement and non-institutional abandonment: public policies treat older adults as passive receivers of care rather than as active citizens entitled to dignity, autonomy, and participation.
Reversing this logic requires policy and public discourse to shift the “burden” narrative. As the French care home director, Valérie Martin said, “the elderly are not a burden, they are our memory.” She challenged the dominant narrative that reducing aging to cost and underlined that older people play an important role in society and are a collective responsibility.
Recognizing older adults as active persons means giving them a voice in decision-making, strengthening accountability mechanisms, and investing in care systems that protect autonomy rather than contain dependency. Until then, Europe’s promise of equality will remain conditional for those whose experiences shaped its present.
Edited by Emma Webb
