Older Women and Domestic Violence in Scotland

Acknowledgements Thanks to Nancy Lombard for her work on the literature review, Ruth Lewis for help with key points and to Dawn Cattanach for her design work. This report provides an update on literature published since an earlier research project, Older Women and Domestic Violence in Scotland, conducted in 2003-2004 and published in June 2004. The original project was commissioned by Health Scotland and carried out by a team from the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR). Since the conference, CRFR has been supported by Health Scotland to engage in a number of dissemination activities, including collaboration with Scottish Women's Aid and the Scottish Executive on trainings and seminars. 1. Older women are more visible on the domestic violence research agenda now than four years ago. Much of the recent research has been quantitative investigations of prevalence among older women, but an encouraging number of qualitative studies have also emerged. 2. Some of the key issues raised by the original project appeared again in the recent literature: prevalence, the effects of long-term exposure to trauma, the roles of dependency and shame, barriers to service and the conflation of domestic violence with elder abuse. 3. Other issues explored more fully in the newer research include: health outcomes of domestic violence in older women, cohort effects and new service provision models. 4. Evidence indicates that older women in need of services are more likely to be living with their abusers, and experience psychological/emotional abuse at high rates, than younger women. 6. Several recent studies offer interesting perspectives on service development and redesign to better meet the needs of older women, particularly those who do not leave their abusers. Appropriate interventions to address the impact of non-physical violence are also needed. 7. Review of the newer literature reveals a paucity of studies that focus on perpetrators, a significant gap. Also problematic are the varying definitions of domestic violence and older women used across the studies.