Safeguarding Adults in Lithuania: Protection, Rights and Organisational Responsibility

An older person is being pressured by a relative for money. A disabled adult depends on somebody who also controls their communication and access to services. A resident in social care is repeatedly spoken to in a degrading way. A person receiving support at home has unexplained injuries but appears frightened when workers ask what happened. These situations do not belong neatly to one organisation or one legal process, yet each raises a question about protection, rights and responsibility.

In Lithuania, there is no direct equivalent of the adult safeguarding architecture familiar in England. Protection is distributed across social services, municipalities, police, healthcare, criminal law, domestic-violence arrangements, accredited victim-support organisations, disability-rights mechanisms and the responsibilities of individual providers. The wider system within which those protections operate is explored through the Lithuania Ageing, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub.

This distributed model makes terminology important. Not every concern about an adult who needs support becomes a formally defined “safeguarding enquiry” in the way an English reader might expect. Depending on what has happened, the response may involve police action, a domestic-violence protection measure, social services, healthcare assessment, victim support, provider investigation, licensing or quality oversight, or several of these at once.

The central operational challenge is therefore coordination. Lithuania needs professionals and organisations to recognise harm early, understand when responsibility moves beyond their own service, protect the person without unnecessarily removing autonomy and ensure that recurring concerns become visible at municipal and national level. As community-based services expand, that requirement becomes more rather than less important.

Safeguarding in Lithuania is a network of protections rather than one process

The English phrase “adult safeguarding” is useful for an international reader, but it should not be used to imply that Lithuania has copied the same statutory structure. Lithuania protects adults through several overlapping legal and administrative mechanisms.

Where behaviour may constitute a criminal offence, police and criminal-justice processes are relevant. Where violence occurs within a domestic relationship or household, Lithuania's Law on Protection against Domestic Violence provides specific protective arrangements. Where somebody needs social services because their safety is threatened, municipalities and social workers can become involved. Where the person is receiving regulated social care, the organisation has direct responsibilities and the Department of Supervision of Social Services can have a quality or licensing role.

People harmed by criminal acts can also obtain support through a national framework for assistance to victims of crime. Lithuania's Law on Assistance to Victims of Crime provides for support based on individual need, including circumstances where criminal proceedings have not started. Accredited organisations provide assistance within that framework.

This architecture means that the first professional who notices harm may not be the organisation ultimately responsible for investigating or controlling it.

A home-support worker, nurse, neighbour, social worker or personal assistant may first identify the concern. Their responsibility is not to solve every legal question personally. It is to recognise the risk, respond proportionately to immediate safety needs, preserve relevant information and ensure that the concern reaches the appropriate route.

The principles behind incident response, protection and escalation are therefore particularly relevant. Effective protection depends on recognising when an ordinary service issue has crossed into possible abuse, crime, coercion or significant neglect.

Abuse can take forms that are difficult to see

Physical assault is among the clearest forms of harm, but adults who depend on other people can experience abuse in less visible ways.

Financial exploitation may involve pressure to transfer money, misuse of bank cards, manipulation around property or control of benefits. Psychological abuse can involve threats, humiliation, intimidation or deliberate isolation. Neglect may arise where essential food, hygiene, medication, healthcare or support is withheld. Sexual abuse and exploitation can occur in families, relationships, institutions or community settings.

Organisational abuse can be more difficult to recognise because individual actions may appear routine. Excessively rigid regimes, degrading treatment, unnecessary restrictions, lack of privacy or repeatedly ignoring people's choices can become normalised within a service culture.

The purpose of understanding different forms of abuse is not to attach a label prematurely. It is to make professionals less dependent on visible injury as the trigger for concern.

Adults with intellectual disabilities, dementia, communication difficulties or psychosocial disabilities can face additional barriers to disclosure. A person may communicate distress behaviourally, withdraw from a worker they previously trusted or become unusually anxious around one particular individual.

Professional curiosity is therefore essential. An explanation should be considered, not simply accepted because it is convenient.

Domestic violence has a specific protection pathway

Violence within families and intimate relationships is one area where Lithuania has developed a clearer national protection structure. The current Law on Protection against Domestic Violence is designed to enable rapid intervention, prevention and specialised comprehensive assistance.

Police can apply a domestic-violence protection order where the legal conditions are met. The measure can require an adult posing a danger to leave the shared residence temporarily, stay away from the person at risk and refrain from approaching or communicating with them.

This matters because protection does not necessarily require the person experiencing violence to leave their own home.

Police also transfer relevant contact information to a specialised comprehensive assistance centre, and a person can approach such a centre directly. These centres provide specialist assistance to people experiencing or at risk of domestic violence.

For adults who require social services, another operational consideration arises. Lithuania's social-service arrangements recognise exceptional circumstances in which a person experiencing physical or psychological violence, or whose physical or emotional safety is threatened, may seek certain social services from a municipality other than their municipality of residence.

This flexibility is significant. A residence-based administrative rule should not become an obstacle when remaining in or returning to the usual area could undermine immediate safety.

Scenario: an older woman is at risk in the home she owns

An 82-year-old woman lives in Vilnius with her adult son. She owns the apartment. Over several months he becomes increasingly controlling, demands money and threatens her when she refuses. She tells a home-support worker that she has fallen, but the worker notices bruising inconsistent with the explanation and observes that the woman becomes visibly anxious when her son enters the room.

The worker does not confront the son alone or attempt to investigate the case personally. She speaks with the woman safely, establishes whether immediate emergency assistance is required and escalates the concern through the appropriate organisational route.

Where the circumstances indicate domestic violence or another possible criminal offence, police become relevant. The woman can also be connected with specialised comprehensive assistance. Her need for social support is reviewed because the immediate protection response does not resolve her ongoing practical needs.

The important feature is that ownership of the home does not mean she should automatically be displaced from it to create safety. Applicable domestic-violence measures can instead restrict the person posing the danger.

Her preferences remain important throughout. She may feel conflicted because the alleged perpetrator is her son and may worry about what will happen to him. Protection therefore requires careful communication rather than assuming that reluctance to pursue a particular action means the harm is insignificant.

The scenario demonstrates why adult protection frequently requires legal, social and relational responses at the same time.

Crime victim support creates another route into protection

Not every adult experiencing harm is already known to social services, and not every victim needs long-term social care. Lithuania's victim-support framework therefore provides an important wider layer of protection.

Under the Law on Assistance to Victims of Crime, people harmed by criminal acts can receive assistance based on the nature of the offence and their individual needs. The framework is designed to support people before, during and, where necessary, after criminal proceedings, including circumstances where proceedings are not initiated.

Accredited support organisations operate within this system, with accreditation overseen through the social-protection framework.

This matters for adults who may need information, emotional assistance, practical support or help navigating services after abuse, violence, exploitation or another crime.

The distinction between criminal investigation and victim support is important. The police process concerns whether an offence has occurred and what enforcement response is required. Support should not disappear merely because prosecution is uncertain, evidence is insufficient or the person does not fit neatly into a long-term social-service category.

For organisations working with adults who may be vulnerable, knowledge of these routes forms part of effective prevention and early intervention. The quality of the first response can determine whether a person remains engaged with help.

Capacity, consent and protection cannot be collapsed into one decision

One of the most difficult safeguarding questions in any system concerns a person who appears to be making a decision that others consider unsafe.

A disabled person may choose to remain in a relationship that professionals dislike. An older adult may continue giving money to a relative despite concerns about exploitation. Someone with a mental health condition may refuse a particular form of support.

Risk alone does not establish that the person is unable to make decisions.

Lithuania's disability reforms increasingly emphasise participation, individual rights and assistance with decision-making. This direction is particularly relevant where intellectual, psychosocial or cognitive disability affects communication or understanding.

Support may require accessible information, additional time, communication assistance or involvement of a trusted person where appropriate. The aim should be to understand the person's will and preferences as fully as possible rather than moving automatically from vulnerability to substitute decision-making.

At the same time, consent should not be used as a reason to ignore coercion. A person who appears to agree while being threatened, controlled or economically dependent may not be exercising meaningful free choice.

The principles of capacity, consent and decision-making in safeguarding therefore require careful distinction between autonomy, impaired understanding and coercion.

Protection in social-care organisations begins with culture

Formal controls are essential in residential care, group living homes, day services, community support and home-based care. Staff need clear procedures for reporting concerns, managers need escalation routes and allegations involving workers require appropriate organisational and external responses.

Yet safeguarding cannot be secured through procedure alone.

Closed cultures develop when staff become accustomed to behaviours that would look unacceptable to an outsider. Speaking disrespectfully to residents, entering bedrooms without sufficient regard for privacy, controlling access to possessions or routinely making decisions for people can become normalised if leadership does not challenge them.

This is particularly relevant as Lithuania continues moving away from large institutional care towards smaller community settings. A smaller building reduces some structural risks but does not automatically remove institutional behaviour.

The wider principles of safeguarding culture and leadership therefore matter at provider level. Managers influence what staff report, what they challenge and whether speaking about poor practice is perceived as professional responsibility or disloyalty.

Recruitment, induction, supervision, observation and incident review all contribute to protection. So does workforce stability. Services relying heavily on unfamiliar or overstretched staff may face additional risk where workers know less about individual communication, routines and subtle signs that something has changed.

Scenario: degrading practice becomes visible only when incidents are viewed together

A community-based home supports several adults with intellectual disabilities. There are no major reported safeguarding incidents. Documentation appears satisfactory and staffing levels meet the service's requirements.

During supervision, however, one worker reports discomfort about how a colleague speaks to residents. The colleague frequently mocks people when they need help and threatens to cancel outings if residents do not cooperate with household routines.

No physical injury has occurred, and some staff initially describe the behaviour as a personality issue rather than abuse.

The manager reviews the concern more carefully. Individual records show that two residents have recently become more reluctant to request assistance when the worker is on duty. One relative has also complained about an unusually dismissive interaction.

The organisation treats the pattern as a protection concern rather than waiting for a more serious incident. Immediate action is taken in relation to staff practice, residents are spoken with using communication approaches appropriate to them, and the organisation examines whether supervision and leadership allowed the behaviour to become normalised.

The important governance question extends beyond the individual worker. If several colleagues observed the behaviour but did not report it, the service has a cultural as well as a personnel problem.

Learning therefore addresses expectations, reporting confidence and management visibility, not only the allegation itself.

Social-care licensing and oversight form part of the protective architecture

Article 18 of this series examined Lithuania's social-care quality framework in depth. For safeguarding, one feature is particularly important: regulated social care operates within licensing and supervision arrangements rather than relying solely on provider self-regulation.

The Department of Supervision of Social Services under the Ministry of Social Security and Labour licenses social-care activity and oversees compliance with applicable requirements. Municipalities also have important responsibilities for organising social services and quality within their areas.

This creates routes through which concerns about organisational practice can become visible beyond the individual service.

Not every complaint warrants national licensing intervention. Providers need to investigate and resolve many issues themselves, while municipalities have local oversight responsibilities. Serious or persistent concerns, however, should not remain trapped inside an organisation whose own practice is being questioned.

The concept of external visibility is central to safeguarding. Abuse becomes harder to sustain where residents have relationships beyond the service, families and advocates can raise concerns, workers have independent reporting routes and oversight bodies receive enough information to recognise patterns.

Organisations examining comparable systems can use the Governance Maturity Assessment to structure questions about accountability, escalation and oversight. It is not a Lithuanian regulatory framework; the transferable question is whether serious concerns can move beyond the level at which they originated when local handling is inadequate.

Home-based support creates safeguarding risks that are less visible

Lithuania's expansion of home care, integrated assistance and other community services has significant benefits for independence. It also changes where potential harm occurs.

Large institutions are physically visible to managers and regulators. Home support is dispersed across hundreds of private environments. Workers may spend much of their day alone, and relatives or other household members may be present.

This creates several different safeguarding dimensions.

A worker may discover abuse occurring within the household. The person receiving support may behave abusively towards staff. A family member may interfere with care, control finances or prevent private communication. Alternatively, the worker themselves may exploit the privacy of the home.

Managers cannot observe every visit, so assurance depends more heavily on records, supervision, continuity, complaints, unexplained changes, missed visits and professional curiosity.

Home-based care also requires sensitivity to privacy. The fact that somebody receives publicly funded support does not make their home an organisational environment in which professionals can monitor every aspect of life.

Safeguarding therefore needs proportionate controls rather than institutional surveillance transplanted into the household.

Financial exploitation requires particular attention

Financial harm can be highly significant for older and disabled people because dependence, social isolation and unequal relationships can make exploitation difficult to challenge.

The perpetrator may be a stranger, acquaintance, family member or someone in a position of trust. Harm can range from repeated small withdrawals to pressure over property, debt or legal arrangements.

Financial exploitation also illustrates why professionals need to distinguish unusual decisions from abuse. An adult may choose to give substantial financial support to a relative. The role of services is not to decide how competent adults should spend their money merely because professionals disagree.

Concern becomes stronger where there is evidence of deception, intimidation, control, sudden unexplained changes, inability to access one's own money or dependency that appears to be exploited.

Lithuania's 2026 interministerial work to strengthen the protection of socially vulnerable people and disabled people facing debt pressures illustrates a broader recognition that financial vulnerability can intersect with rights and access to assistance.

For frontline services, the practical response begins with observation and communication. A recurring inability to buy food despite known income, sudden anxiety about money or another person insisting on being present during every financial conversation can warrant further exploration.

Financial safeguarding is strongest when it protects people from exploitation without unnecessarily removing control of their own resources.

Scenario: a relative's help gradually becomes financial control

A 76-year-old man with early cognitive difficulties receives home support in a regional municipality. His niece has begun helping with shopping and bills. Initially, the arrangement works well.

Over several months, workers notice that the man has less food available and has stopped attending a paid community activity he previously enjoyed. He says he cannot afford it. The niece tells staff that she now manages his finances because he is becoming forgetful.

The workers do not assume that family involvement is abusive. Equally, they do not treat the niece's explanation as sufficient simply because she is a relative.

The man is spoken with privately using communication appropriate to his level of understanding. Staff establish what he believes is happening with his money and what assistance he wants. Concerns about possible exploitation are escalated through the organisation, with external involvement determined by the circumstances and severity of the evidence.

His cognitive difficulties are relevant but do not make every financial decision invalid. The central questions are whether he understands the arrangements sufficiently, whether his wishes are being respected and whether another person is using dependency or impairment to gain control.

The scenario demonstrates why financial abuse often requires patient assessment rather than an immediate binary judgement between independence and incapacity.

Information sharing needs a purpose and a route

Adult-protection cases frequently involve information held by several organisations. A healthcare professional may know about injuries. A social worker may understand household dynamics. Police may have attended previous incidents. A provider may have observations about behavioural or financial change.

No single piece of information necessarily establishes abuse.

At the same time, privacy and confidentiality remain important rights. Information should not be shared simply because a person is considered vulnerable.

The operational requirement is purposeful information exchange within the applicable Lithuanian legal framework. Professionals need to understand when consent should normally be sought, when immediate safety or legal obligations justify another course and what information is actually necessary for the recipient to act.

The principles of safeguarding information sharing, confidentiality and disclosure are especially relevant where several services contribute to one response.

Good information sharing is also directional. Sending information does not guarantee that anybody has accepted responsibility. A referral or notification should reach a defined organisation or professional, and the referring service should understand what immediate responsibility it retains.

Safeguarding concerns are particularly vulnerable to failure where everybody believes somebody else is handling them.

Healthcare services can identify harm that social services never see

Doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals may encounter adults who do not use formal social services but are experiencing abuse or neglect.

Unexplained injuries, repeated emergency attendance, malnutrition, medication problems, anxiety around relatives or delay in seeking treatment can all raise concern. None is proof of abuse in isolation.

Healthcare has an additional role where neglect may be difficult to distinguish from disease progression or self-neglect. An older person losing weight may have a medical explanation, inadequate support, cognitive impairment or several interacting causes.

The appropriate response therefore requires clinical assessment alongside curiosity about living circumstances.

As Lithuania develops more integrated long-term-care and community models, closer relationships between healthcare and social services create an opportunity for earlier identification. Integration should not mean that every medical concern becomes a social-services referral. It should mean that professionals know how to involve the other system when the person's safety cannot be addressed within their own remit.

Self-neglect requires a different safeguarding response

Some adults experience serious harm without another identifiable perpetrator. They may live in dangerous conditions, stop eating adequately, neglect essential healthcare or become unable to manage medication and personal care.

Self-neglect can arise through dementia, mental illness, substance dependence, physical disability, trauma, social isolation or a combination of factors.

It is particularly difficult because the person may refuse assistance.

A rights-based approach does not begin by assuming that professionals can override refusal whenever living conditions appear unacceptable. The person's decision-making ability, understanding, wishes and the seriousness of the risk all matter.

At the same time, repeated refusal should not become an administrative reason to stop noticing deterioration. Services may need to build trust over time, offer different forms of assistance and coordinate healthcare and municipal social support.

The purpose is neither abandonment in the name of autonomy nor automatic control in the name of safety.

Organisations navigating comparable situations can use the Positive Risk-Taking Planner to structure consideration of the person's goals, risks, safeguards and review. It does not determine Lithuanian law or decision-making authority; its relevance lies in making the balance between autonomy and protection explicit rather than allowing restrictive responses to become automatic.

Safeguarding adults with disabilities requires accessible routes to protection

At the end of 2025, Lithuania recorded approximately 268,700 people with disabilities under its current statistical methodology. Disability does not inherently make a person unsafe, but particular barriers can increase exposure to abuse or make seeking help more difficult.

A person may rely on the alleged perpetrator for personal care, communication, transport or money. Someone with an intellectual disability may not understand conventional legal language. A person with a hearing impairment may need interpretation. Someone with psychosocial disability may worry that disclosure will be dismissed as a symptom of illness.

Protection systems therefore need accessibility as well as availability.

This means communication in forms the person can understand, opportunities to speak without the suspected perpetrator being present, physical access to services and professionals who do not equate disability automatically with lack of credibility or decision-making ability.

The wider principles of safeguarding, consent and human rights for disabled people emphasise that protection and autonomy are not opposing objectives.

Lithuania's disability reform creates an important supporting context because it places greater emphasis on participation and rights. Safeguarding practice needs to reflect the same direction.

Digital technology creates new forms of both protection and harm

Technology can strengthen safety. Personal alarms, communication tools and accessible digital services can reduce isolation and make it easier to seek help. Shared information systems can also improve coordination where appropriate.

Technology can equally enable abuse.

A controlling partner can monitor location, messages or banking. A family member can control access to online accounts. Fraud and financial scams may particularly affect isolated adults. Monitoring technology within care services can become unnecessarily intrusive where consent, purpose and access are poorly defined.

Digital safeguarding therefore requires more than cyber security.

Services need to understand who controls devices, who can see data and whether technology is increasing the person's independence or another person's control over them.

For adults dependent on digital public services, exclusion itself can also create vulnerability. If the person cannot access accounts or applications without relying on somebody else, that helper may gain substantial practical power over finances and services.

Technology should therefore be assessed relationally: who benefits, who controls it and what happens if the person no longer wants the arrangement?

Organisational safeguarding should turn incidents into patterns

A single safeguarding incident requires an appropriate response to the individual. Governance has another task: determining whether the event reveals a wider problem.

Several medication omissions may indicate weak workforce competence. Multiple financial concerns involving one worker may reveal exploitation. Repeated incidents at the same time of day may expose unsafe staffing. A cluster of complaints about disrespect may indicate service culture.

This is where safeguarding audit and assurance moves beyond checking whether individual reports were completed.

Useful governance evidence can include:

• the types and locations of protection concerns being identified;
• immediate actions and external referrals or notifications where applicable;
• repeat concerns involving the same person, setting or worker;
• workforce, supervision and training factors associated with incidents;
• complaints and feedback that may reveal lower-level or emerging harm;
• whether people affected were involved appropriately in decisions; and
• whether corrective action reduced recurrence.

The objective is not to interpret a high reporting rate automatically as evidence of poor care. Organisations with stronger reporting cultures may surface more concerns than services where staff remain silent.

The Quality Dashboard Builder can help organisations examining comparable data bring incidents, workforce, complaints and quality indicators together. It is not an official Lithuanian safeguarding system; the methodological value lies in identifying relationships that individual case files may not show.

Scenario: repeated low-level concerns reveal an organisational risk

A provider operating several home-support teams across a Lithuanian municipality records a small number of concerns about workers accepting gifts and borrowing money from people they support. Each case is handled separately and none initially appears to involve a large financial loss.

During a thematic governance review, managers notice that most concerns involve one locality and that supervision there has become irregular following management vacancies.

The organisation expands the review. Staff knowledge about financial boundaries is inconsistent, people using the service have not been given accessible information about what workers may accept, and one serious allegation that originally appeared isolated now sits within a wider pattern.

Immediate protection and employment actions are taken where required, but the response goes further. Supervision is restored, workforce boundaries are reinforced, people receiving services are informed about how to raise concerns and historical records are reviewed for missed indicators.

The municipality is informed through the appropriate quality relationship because the issue affects confidence in the service rather than only one personnel case.

The scenario illustrates why safeguarding maturity depends on aggregation. A system that closes each incident once immediate action is complete can repeatedly solve symptoms without recognising the underlying control failure.

Municipalities need visibility of adult-protection pressures across services

Because Lithuanian municipalities organise substantial parts of the social-service system, they occupy an important position in adult protection even though they are not equivalent to English safeguarding authorities.

They may receive applications for support, assess needs, organise services, oversee accredited provision and interact with police, healthcare and community organisations. They therefore see parts of the local risk landscape that individual providers cannot.

The challenge is turning those observations into service planning.

If several adults experiencing domestic violence require emergency social support, is suitable capacity available? If financial exploitation appears frequently among isolated older residents, could preventive information or community outreach be strengthened? If people leave unsafe homes but cannot access appropriate accommodation, protection planning may be undermined by housing capacity.

Safeguarding intelligence therefore has strategic as well as case-level value.

The information should not become a database of personal vulnerability used without justification. Aggregated patterns are often sufficient for planning while individual information remains protected under applicable rules.

Local learning can then influence workforce development, purchasing, community services and inter-agency protocols.

Prevention depends on reducing dependency and isolation

The strongest safeguarding system is not simply one that responds efficiently after abuse occurs.

Many risk factors can be reduced through wider social policy. Reliable personal assistance can lessen dependence on one relative. Accessible transport can reduce isolation. Community services can create relationships outside the household. Stable home support can make changes more visible. Financial advice can reduce vulnerability to exploitation. Respite can reduce pressure within families providing intensive unpaid care.

None of these interventions guarantees protection, but together they reduce conditions in which abuse can remain hidden.

Community participation is especially important. Adults who interact with several people outside their immediate care relationship have more opportunities to disclose concerns and more people able to notice changes.

This is another reason why deinstitutionalisation and independent living should not be understood simply as relocation. A person living in an ordinary apartment but almost completely socially isolated may remain highly vulnerable.

Protection and inclusion therefore reinforce one another when community services are designed well.

What other countries can learn from Lithuania's distributed model

Lithuania's adult-protection arrangements are shaped by its criminal law, municipal social-service structure, domestic-violence legislation, disability reforms and regulated social-care system. Countries with a single statutory adult safeguarding framework should not assume that identical institutional arrangements exist.

The comparison nevertheless offers several useful principles.

First, adult protection does not require every form of harm to be processed through one organisation. Distributed systems can work when responsibilities and interfaces are sufficiently clear.

Second, domestic violence, crime, social-care quality and individual vulnerability overlap but are not interchangeable. The response should match the nature of the harm rather than forcing every concern into one procedural category.

Third, protecting adults requires attention to rights. Vulnerability should not become a justification for routinely removing autonomy, privacy or ordinary risk.

Fourth, community-based support changes visibility. Moving away from institutions can strengthen rights while requiring new assurance methods for dispersed home and community services.

Finally, organisational learning matters as much as case handling. One incident may concern one individual; recurring patterns can reveal workforce, culture, financing or service-design problems requiring a different level of intervention.

The transferable lesson lies less in Lithuania's particular agencies and more in designing protection so that harm can move across organisational boundaries without responsibility disappearing between them.

Conclusion

Safeguarding adults in Lithuania is best understood as a network of protections rather than a single statutory process. Police, domestic-violence measures, victim-support services, municipalities, healthcare organisations, social-care providers, disability-rights mechanisms and national social-service oversight can all become relevant depending on the nature of the harm. That distributed architecture reflects Lithuania's own legal and administrative system and should not be translated inaccurately into a UK model.

The central strategic challenge is making the interfaces reliable. Adults experiencing abuse, neglect, exploitation or coercion should not need to understand which institution owns each part of their situation before protection becomes possible. Frontline professionals need to recognise concerns, respond to immediate danger, respect autonomy and know when information or responsibility must move beyond their organisation.

As Lithuania expands home support, personal assistance and community living, safeguarding also needs to follow people beyond traditional institutions. Protection must become capable of detecting financial exploitation, coercive relationships, organisational cultures, self-neglect and technology-enabled harm without recreating institutional control in people's homes.

The strongest direction is therefore preventive as well as reactive: accessible support, reduced isolation, confident staff, meaningful community participation, clear escalation and governance capable of identifying patterns. Lithuania's adult-protection system will be most effective when safety and rights are treated not as competing priorities, but as mutually dependent conditions for dignified support.