BY ABBY FOX

Elderly people who are being abused either financially or physically now have a local place for assistance and care.

St. Elizabeth Home, the East Greenwich branch of the Saint Elizabeth Community for seniors, announced Tuesday morning the launching of a “safe haven” where older people who need a refuge from abuse can stay for as long as 30 days. (Elderly they define as someone 60 years or older.)

Planning for the program started two years ago when St. Elizabeth Community CEO Steve Horowitz learned about the first program for abused elderly in the country, at the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Center in New York, during a National Conference on Aging. He decided then and there to set up a similar program in Rhode Island and now the Saint Elizabeth Haven is the first of its kind in the state and the fourth such haven in the country, he said at a press conference Tuesday morning at St. Elizabeth Home.

The Saint Elizabeth Haven has been incorporated into the Saint Elizabeth Home in East Greenwich, the Saint Elizabeth Manor in Bristol and the Saint Elizabeth Court in Providence, giving seniors around the state several “haven” options. The primary cost to establish these havens was in staff training, he explained afterward, because the facilities were already there.

Sgt. John Carter of the East Greenwich police, the local advocate for abused seniors, was at the conference to welcome Saint Elizabeth Haven, and said East Greenwich has had “issues in the past,” and remembered one recently where a son financially abused his father and was prosecuted.

Having an elderly abuse “resource” is vitally important because Rhode Island has the ninth highest elderly population in the United States, said Deborah DeBare, Executive Director of the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence. 14 percent of the state’s population is over 65, she said. Of the thousands of people her organizations helped last year, more than 300 of them were over 60 years old, she said: not a large number, but because of their particular needs as a result of being older and dependent on others to survive and get around, a typical shelter doesn’t have the means to service them.