‘I’m a vulnerable adult,’ said my husband when I asked him why he was shouting the other morning. He had spilt some water from the hot kettle on his slippered foot. Unlike Achilles, his vulnerability extends beyond the pedal extremities. But I shouldn’t like it to be thought that he was making fun of anyone who is called vulnerable. Their numbers seem to be growing.
When that policewoman was jailed last week for talking to the News of the World, the judge said he would have put her down for three years had she not been in the process of adopting a ‘vulnerable child’. I thought all little children were vulnerable, but the judge made it clear that this one had made ‘a disastrous beginning in life’. There has also been consideration of whether Criminal Record Bureau checks should disclose small offences from long ago when someone applies to work ‘with children or vulnerable adults’.
It seems to me that vulnerable has drifted into a slot previously occupied by words such as disabled, handicapped, or even with special needs, but that at the same time it has retained its meaning of ‘defenceless’. The Daily Telegraph reported the case of a confidence trickster who had ‘preyed on a vulnerable young woman and deceived her at every turn.’ In that case, vulnerability seemed to be mainly emotional.
In 2006, Sir James Munby, now President of the Family Division, explained in a law case that a vulnerable adult was ‘someone who, whether or not mentally incapacitated, and whether or not suffering from any mental illness, or mental disorder, is or may be unable to take care of him or herself, or unable to protect him or herself against significant harm or exploitation, or who is deaf, blind, or dumb, or who is substantially handicapped by illness, injury or congenital deformity’. In the educational world vulnerable has been used in that sense for decades, which the Oxford English Dictionary caught up with only last year. The earliest example it could find came from 1947, from the Journal of Educational Sociology (an American publication), which made reference to ‘“vulnerable” children, those who need extra care, extra protection’. But now is it slipping into overuse and loss of meaning.
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