Utah officials are increasingly grappling with how to handle seemingly consensual sexual relationships between elderly adults in long-term care facilities and the unlicensed caregivers who often work in those homes.
In one instance, an 18-year-old high school student working at a nursing home reportedly began having sex with multiple residents and encouraged his friends to apply for jobs at the facilities, according to Fox 13.
The broadcaster noted two other incidents, one involving a nursing assistant who started a sexual relationship with a resident who was more than 50 years older than she was. In another, police found a physical therapy aide attempting to have sex with an 80-year-old woman who had been reported missing.
When police interviewed the assistant and asked him if he genuinely had romantic feelings for the woman, he reportedly said "No. But she wanted me to, and I was willing," according to Kaye Lynn Wootton, director of the Medicaid Fraud and Patient Abuse Division within the Utah Attorney General’s Office.
She recounted the above incidents to state lawmakers last year while discussing the increasingly common problem.
Wootton warned that these relationships, while not necessarily illegal, can create power imbalances between the residents and the people responsible for their care and well-being.
“Imagine when that relationship, if there was a real relationship, goes south,” she told the lawmakers. “Those same people have to bathe them and dress them. And it’s just inappropriate and puts these people in a very bad position.”
Non-consensual contact between staff and patients in long-term care facilities is illegal, and there are also professional conduct rules prohibiting licensed caregivers — such as doctors or nurses — from engaging in even consensual sexual relationships with patients.
Those same prohibitions do not extend to unlicensed staff, such as CNAs, housekeepers, or food service employees.
Utah state Sen. Jennifer Plumb — an emergency room doctor when she's not in the halls of power — sponsored a bill last year to make such relationships illegal. She told Fox 13 that while working on the legislation, she was told stories about “individuals who had jumped from one facility to another facility to another facility to another facility" and becoming entangled in relationships in each.
“I think this is happening frequently enough we probably need to look at what sort of standard we can set up and what sort of protections we can put in place," she said.
She said she would prefer to address the issue by introducing licensing but said there was "no way as a state that we could do that."
“That means there has to be a criminal penalty piece associated with it,” she argued. “Otherwise, we are not going to be able to track these and we are also not going to be able to disincentivize it.”
The Independent has requested comment from Plumb.
Nate Crippes, an attorney with the Disability Law Center, has argued against criminalizing the relationships because such a law would only punish one side of the consensual relationships.
"My colleague uses a wheelchair," Crippes told FOX 13. “And if each of us were to engage in sexual conduct with a nurse who was providing us care or something like that, it would be a crime for that nurse if she or he did that with him but not with me. And that really seemed discriminatory to us.”
He argued that if the unlicensed staff members who are engaging in these relationships are also regularly being fired from their jobs for doing so, then that suggests the accountability systems in place are working.
“If there’s a subset of the health care industry — you know, the CNAs or the techs or whatever they are — that are unregulated such that they can go around and engage in activity they shouldn’t, get fired, and then just go get another job, I don’t think the answer is to criminalize that,” he said.
