Secret is out: elderly women are abused too

By Amy Welch

Managing Editor, Florida State Times

An old woman lies on the floor until someone comes to move her.

Some of her bones are broken. Her body is bruised.

Her husband has abused her.

Their daughter denies the abuse, saying they like each other's company.

Though scenes like this happen every day, elder abuse is one of the nation's dirty little secrets.

Most of us don't know or don't accept it.

Linda Vinton, an associate professor of social work at FSU, is working to expose the truth.

For her work, she has won this year's Governor's Peace at Home Award for Domestic Violence Research.

Vinton is "one of the only people in Florida, and in the nation, who is doing work on this subject," said Sharon Maxwell, an FSU professor and member of the Governor's Task Force on Domestic Violence.

By studying shelters for abused women, Vinton found that in 1992 only 8 percent of responding shelters in Florida had programs for abused women over 60. Her follow-up study in 1995 showed that 22 percent of the shelters had these programs.

It's difficult to show the nation that the abuse is going on, and it is even harder to persuade women to leave married lives, Vinton said.

The country is in denial, but no more than we have been in the past, she said.

"We refused to believe there was child abuse until the 1950s, how ridiculous," Vinton said. "Then we had the '60s, and, thank God, we wouldn't think about women being abused if we didn't have the '60s. ... Then all of a sudden, in the '70s, we had the shelter movement, and that was because of the 1960s. ...then it took, really, Claude Pepper in the '80s to say, 'Look here, we have another problem.' "

"We have the young and middle aged; we have old people too in this situation," she said. "We just beat the hell out of everybody."

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, states began to pass elder-abuse laws. But, according to Vinton's research, domestic violence shelters didn't really start doing anything to solve the problem until the early 1990s.

There is a movement within the social-work community to help solve the problem, but it is a slow-moving project, Vinton said. The main solution is awareness, she said.

The American Association of Retired Persons called the first forum on elder abuse in 1992 after the president read an article by Vinton, "Abused Elders or Older Battered Women?"

As a result of the article, more than 400 women wrote letters to the AARP describing their abuse. Most said they had nowhere to go, they were scared, and when they tried to get help, they lost everything.

One woman, who didn't want her identity revealed, said she had been abused for 23 years by her husband. When she divorced him, he left her nothing, even though she thought he made more than $150,000 a year.

The woman wrote:

"Yes, I am angry, I am angry at the law, the court, the judge, for allowing those two attorneys and the CPA for getting by with what they did to me. Since my livelihood had depended on that marriage, the judge was responsible to see that I was adequately provided for. Something needed to start when I was 65, not end."

Vinton also found that the most typical abusers are spouses and sons. Daughters tend to be more neglectful. She proposes to send caregivers, who are about the same age as the women, to their homes.

"If I were 28, I don't think I'd want a 60-year old as my peer counselor. But, if I were 60, I also wouldn't want a 28-year-old," Vinton said. "So, you know, we have to shift now and think that way."

As the younger generation grows up accepting that older people are abused, Vinton said, women who are bed-ridden and pushed around by their husbands might get the help they need.

"Florida can do better. That's my answer to this," Vinton said. "Florida has a wonderful network already in place, as far as peer support in the domestic violence shelters across the state. And that's a great start. ... We're not going to react 10 years after we know that women in that age group are being abused."

Send a letter to the Editor: fstimes@unicomm.fsu.edu

Copyright © 1997 Florida State Times