HOW TO MANUFACTURE AN ‘EVERY 36-MINUTES’ HEADLINE
“A disabled adult is abused by a caregiver every 36 minutes in Massachussetts.”
That is an alarming headline. It is also one we manufactured.
Here is how: A state audit reported that Massachusetts’s Disabled Persons Protection Commission received 13,310 reports requiring investigation in fiscal year 2022 and 16,043 in fiscal year 2023. Add the reports together, divide the minutes in those two years by the total, and the result is one report about every 35.8 minutes.
Then remove the words “report,” “requiring investigation,” and “about.” Collapse two years into a single dramatic clock. Put the most frightening interpretation in the headline.
See what we did?
It is essentially the same maneuver used to transform a composite Massachusetts Hospital Association (MHA) statistic—covering physical assaults, verbal threats, and other abuse—into the claim that a healthcare worker is “assaulted every 36 minutes.” The arithmetic may be correct while the sentence is not.
The difference is that we are showing our work.
The Commission, renamed the Commission for the Protection of Persons with Disabilities (CPPD) in June 2026, protects Massachusetts adults with disabilities ages 18 through 59 from abuse or neglect by caregivers. Under state law, a “reportable condition” involves serious physical or emotional injury resulting from abuse, including nonconsensual sexual activity. These are serious allegations. They should not be minimized.
But an allegation accepted for investigation is not the same as a completed investigation finding that abuse occurred. Nor do the audit totals tell us, by themselves, how many reports concerned physical injury, emotional injury, sexual abuse, neglect, or repeated reports about the same person or event. “Every 36 minutes” makes those distinctions disappear.
That is precisely the point. If this kind of presentation is misleading when it describes harm to healthcare workers, it remains misleading when it describes harm to disabled people. A worthy cause does not make weak statistical practices stronger.
What research shows about violence against disabled people.
Rejecting a sensational headline does not mean rejecting the underlying harm. And in fact, we at Roots Up are hearing about abuse, rights violations and neglect on a regular basis. Broad research also reflects this issue.
Federal victimization data show that disabled people face violence at dramatically higher rates than non-disabled people. From 2017 through 2019, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that disabled people accounted for 26 percent of nonfatal violent-crime victims while representing about 12 percent of the population. Their violent-victimization rate was nearly four times that of non-disabled people. People with cognitive disabilities had the highest rate among the disability groups measured.
The same report found that only 19 percent of rapes or sexual assaults against disabled people were reported to police, compared with 36 percent of those against non-disabled people. Even the numbers we have therefore describe only part of the problem.
This matters when psychiatric patients and disabled people are discussed primarily as sources of danger. Disabled people experience violence at disproportionate rates, and many depend upon the very people or institutions potentially harming them for housing, medical care, communication, movement, and other fundamental needs.
Complaints, restraint and seclusion in Massachusetts psychiatric facilities
The most relevant Massachusetts research located so far examined complaints, restraint, and seclusion in inpatient psychiatric facilities from 2008 through 2018. Researchers obtained the records through public-records requests—a fact that itself says something about how accessible patient-safety information is.
Across those years, the dataset contained 17,962 complaints. Nearly half of the complaint categories were related to safety, and 19.9 percent were related to physical, sexual, or verbal abuse. It also contained 92,670 restraint and seclusion episodes: 73,927 restraints and 18,737 seclusions.
Those numbers do not prove that staff committed 17,962 acts of abuse. Individual complaints could be assigned multiple categories, and only 8.3 percent of the complaints in the dataset were recorded as substantiated. At the same time, the researchers warned that complaint data likely understate harmful experiences because many incidents never become formal complaints. Patients may fear retaliation, may not know the process, may lack private access to a telephone or advocate, or may reasonably doubt that a facility will fairly investigate itself.
The study also found large differences by facility type. Larger, freestanding psychiatric hospitals—including longer-term state facilities as well as private acute-care psychiatric hospitals—accounted for 57.3 percent of patient days but 91.6 percent of complaints. Even after accounting for patient days, their rates of overall complaints, substantiated complaints, safety-related complaints, and abuse-related complaints were all significantly higher than those of psychiatric units in general hospitals and smaller psychiatric facilities.
Harm from care is broader than intentional abuse
Harm caused by medical care should not be quietly folded into an abuse statistic either. In a national review of 770 hospitalized Medicare patients, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General found that 25 percent experienced harm during their hospital stays. Twelve percent experienced adverse events involving outcomes such as prolonged hospitalization, permanent harm, life-saving intervention, or death; another 13 percent experienced temporary harm requiring intervention.
These findings concern harm associated with medical care or failure to provide needed care—not proof that one quarter of patients were assaulted or abused. Presenting all of it as “violence by healthcare workers” would reproduce the same distortion we are criticizing. Different forms of harm require different responses, but none should disappear from the discussion simply because it does not fit the preferred narrative.
The fragmentation is part of the story
Massachusetts does not maintain one transparent public dataset showing how often patients are injured, threatened, neglected, restrained, sexually harmed, or otherwise mistreated by healthcare workers and caregivers.
Instead, responsibility is divided by age, disability status, setting, profession, and type of allegation. CPPD covers caregiver abuse or neglect involving many adults with disabilities ages 18 through 59. Elder Protective Services covers people 60 and older and also receives reports involving self-neglect and financial exploitation.
Meanwhile, the Department of Public Health receives complaints about emergency departments, other non-psychiatric hospital departments, and long-term-care facilities. The Department of Mental Health handles complaints about programs it operates, licenses, or contracts with. Professional licensing boards receive complaints about individual clinicians. Other incidents may go to police, civil courts, hospital grievance systems, accrediting bodies, or nowhere at all.
That fragmentation makes a sweeping frequency claim impossible to substantiate. It also makes patterns harder to see. The public cannot easily answer basic questions: How many allegations involved paid staff rather than family members? How many involved physical injury? How many were substantiated? How many patients were injured during restraint? How often were race, disability, communication barriers, or prior psychiatric diagnoses a potential influencing factor? How often did facilities correct the conditions that contributed to harm?
When advocates for healthcare workers describe incomplete reporting as evidence that official workplace-violence counts are underestimates, that concern deserves to be taken seriously. The same principle must apply to patients. Fear, dependency, isolation, disbelief, trauma, and institutional control can all suppress reporting by people receiving care.
Counting both directions changes the policy question
Healthcare workers deserve accurate data about the violence, threats, and abuse they experience. Patients deserve the same seriousness when they report force, neglect, abuse, or preventable injury.
The lesson is not that one alarming clock should replace another. It is that lawmakers should stop building policy around slogans created by groups who combine unlike events while withholding the underlying breakdowns.
If lawmakers are told how often healthcare workers are harmed but not how often patients are harmed, they are not seeing the whole safety problem. If hospitals may keep the underlying data private while patients’ diagnoses and behavior become the public rationale for punishment, the imbalance is even sharper.
We could use Massachusetts’s caregiver-abuse reports to announce that a disabled person is abused every 36 minutes. We could use hospital adverse-event data to declare that one in four older patients is harmed by healthcare workers. Both statements would attract attention. Neither would faithfully describe the evidence.
Patients are harmed. Healthcare workers are harmed. The answer is not to manipulate either group’s experience into a weapon against the other.
The answer is to count honestly, disclose fully, and change the conditions that produce harm.
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This article is a part of the Spotlight on the Workplace Violence bill.
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