Rowan Williams uses final speech in House of Lords to decry society’s attitude to older people
Oliver Wright , Kevin Rawlinson THE INDEPENDENT. UK
Saturday 15 December 2012
Old people in Britain are too often treated with “contempt and exasperation” by the rest of society creating a climate in which “elder abuse” is rife, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.
In his final speech in the House of Lords before he steps down, Dr Rowan Williams said too many old people were now thought of as a “problem” and waiting to die in a country “frenetically oriented towards youth”.
He warned that such attitudes were contributing to abuse ranging from patronising and impatient behaviour to actual physical mistreatment.
And he called for elderly people to be viewed as “participants” in society rather than “passengers”.
Dr Williams, who hands over to the Bishop of Durham Justin Welby at the end of this month, said: “Too often we want to rush children into pseudo-adulthood; too often we want older citizens either to go on as part of the productive machine as long as possible or to accept a marginal and humiliating status, tolerated but not valued, while we look impatiently at our watches, waiting for them to be ‘off our hands’.”
He said that the “extremes of human life” – childhood and old age – were both being sidelined because of an “eccentric idea” that only those in the so-called prime of life could make a contribution.