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Storying older women’s immobilities and gender-based violence in the COVID-19 pandemic

In June 2021 the United Nations produced a report on the rise of violence and abuse towards older people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, older people in care homes across the world faced an increased risk of ‘neglect, isolation and lack of adequate services’. The report also highlighted the increase in gender-based violence (GBV) against older people whose mobility was further restricted due to lockdowns (extensive restrictions on movement and measures to promote social distancing that were imposed to control the spread of COVID-19). While numerous studies from around the world have found that the more intensified living spaces produced by the lockdowns have led to an increase in GBV (Hourglass, 2020; Peterman et al., 2020), the higher incidence of GBV amongst older women has not received adequate attention due to the wider invisibility of GBV stories written or spoken by older women. Importantly for our project, as well as being constrained in terms of their own movements and contact with others, the immobilities of the pandemic also made visible injustices that had already existed. This chapter highlights the absence of older women in stories of GBV during the pandemic. We argue that the ‘invisibilising’ of older women in accounts of GBV not only diminishes our understanding of GBV overall but creates a new injustice. The chapter thus makes a plea for storytelling as a tool for producing knowledge in research seeking to make visible the lives and experiences of this historically overlooked group.

During quarantine, my son and daughter-in-law began to neglect my needs. Previously, I did not notice their behaviour, but since all family members must stay home, I started feeling their bad attitude to me. They don’t give me food and medicine on time, and they don’t even talk to me. Sometimes my daughter-in-law yells at me. I feel like a burden to my family. (Older woman, Kyrgyzstan; Williamson et al., 2021: 28)

In June 2021, the United Nations produced a report on the rise of violence and abuse towards older people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, older people in care homes across the world faced an increased risk of the ‘neglect, isolation and lack of adequate services’ (UN, 2021: n.p.) that the above quotation describes. The report also highlighted the increase in gender-based violence (GBV) against older people whose mobility was further restricted due to lockdowns (extensive restrictions on movement and measures to promote social distancing that were imposed to control the spread of COVID-19). Here we define GBV as ‘a range of “harmful acts” that result from a culture of misogyny, including physical, emotional and sexual violence, rape, stalking and harassment, and are perpetrated over a continuum of mobile spaces’ (Murray et al., 2023: 553). The term ‘mobile space’ refers to the production of space through the movement, or suggestion of movement, of people and things. Studies of GBV during the pandemic (or indeed before the pandemic) do not tend to disaggregate victimisation according to age (Dlamini, 2021). However, evidence suggests that older people can be particularly exposed to GBV perpetrated by their intimate partners, their children and/or their carers, exacerbated as their mobilities are often particularly constrained through societal marginalisation (Murray, 2015). While numerous studies from around the world have found that the more intensified living spaces produced by the lockdowns have led to an increase in GBV (Hourglass, 2020; Peterman et al., 2020), the higher incidence of GBV among older women has not received adequate attention due to the wider invisibility of GBV stories written or spoken by older women.

This chapter draws from a research project that focused on the immobilities of GBV in the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Central to this project was the concept of ‘immobilities’ (Murray and Khan, 2020) to make sense of the range of impacts on physical and imagined movement associated with the pandemic – from the enforced physical restrictions of the COVID-19 lockdowns to the changing sensing of freedom and potential escape, as well as imprisonment, that the intensities of the COVID-19 lockdowns presented. Im/mobilities is a key term in conceptualising the intermittent freedoms and limitations of movement and the control of others’ movements – the ways in which movement is privileged. It is particularly relevant in differentiating mobilities, not only according to gender but also to generation (Murray and Robertson, 2016). Conjoining the concepts of generation and mobilities (Murray, 2016) helps us to understand the uneven impacts of the pandemic. COVID-19 is generationed: older people are more likely to feel the impacts of both the disease and the means of controlling the disease by restricting the movements of populations (Age UK, 2021). During the pandemic, people were warned not to visit their older relatives as this would place them at risk. Indeed, in September 2020, the then Secretary of State for Health in England, Matt Hancock, attempted to ensure that young people observed social distancing rules with older people by warning, ‘Don’t kill your Gran’ (The Times, 2020: n.p.). In turn, older people were advised to stay at home as much as possible as they were seen to be ‘clinically vulnerable’ due to their age, regardless of their individual risk (House of Lords Library, 2020).

Importantly for our project, as well as older people being constrained in terms of their own movements and contact with others, the immobilities of the pandemic also made visible injustices that had already existed. The stories that were surfacing during the pandemic told of GBV across lifetimes (Murray et al., 2023). Stories emerged during the pandemic due to the particular conditions in which people were living. Nevertheless, despite the expanse of lives in which older women are more likely to experience GBV, their stories are often obscured in both life-writing and in fiction writing, including works which focus on GBV (Ettorre, 2005). Our research highlights the absence of older women in stories of GBV during the pandemic. We argue that the ‘invisibilising’ (Priyadarshini et al., 2021) of older women in accounts of GBV not only diminishes our understanding of GBV overall, but creates a new injustice. The chapter thus makes a plea for storytelling as a tool for producing knowledge in research seeking to make visible the lives and experiences of this historically overlooked group.

The invisibilising of older women’s experiences of gender-based violence

As Bows (Roberts 2021: n.p.) points out: ‘When you look at police data on abuse, rape and murder, older women aren’t there. If a crime is looked at, at all, it’s treated as a safeguarding issue, gender neutral, “elder abuse” with no perpetrator’. Historically, the ways in which knowledge is produced to make sense of gender-based violence have marginalised older women’s experiences. For example, a report by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2013: 1) found that a ‘lack of agreed definitions’ contributes to the invisibility of older women in domestic abuse evidence. More specifically, older people’s experiences of victimisation are excluded from the annual Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW) as it does not report participants aged 74 years and over1 and is restricted to participants who live in the community. This is demonstrated in a question put to the House of Lords (2021) by Baroness Gale on 29 July 2020 during an item of business on domestic abuse:

Question: To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to ensure that any data collected on domestic abuse includes the abuse of people over the age of 74.

Response: My Lords, the Government recognise that the over-74s can be victims of domestic abuse, and we are committed to supporting all victims. The Crime Survey for England and Wales collects data on victims of domestic abuse, and the most recent assessment of data collection methods did not support raising the age limit for respondents above 74 due to a lower response rate. However, ONS will continue to review the upper age limit. (House of Lords Library, 2021: n.p.)

The omission extends to the important self-completion module on the CSEW, which is designed to ensure victims’ privacy when disclosing experiences of domestic abuse, sexual assault and stalking. This exclusion of older people from our national crime survey may contribute to assumptions about older people being at ‘low risk’ of such violence, when in reality, they are never counted.2 While police-recorded offences that are flagged as ‘domestic-abuse related’ do not have the same age-related cut-off, such data are much more susceptible to under-reporting when compared to the CSEW because of victim concerns about stigma, guilt, fear, mistrust and discrimination. Until 2017, the upper age limit for recording of GBV against women was 59 and so there are little historical crime data (Bows, 2019). Nevertheless, recent data indicates that the proportion of violence against the person offences flagged as ‘domestic-abuse related’ is significant for older women, accounting for 40 per cent of such offences against women aged 75 years and over, and actually increases with age for male victims, accounting for 30.3 per cent of such offences against men aged 75 years and over (ONS, 2020). However, most academic research has historically focused on younger people’s experiences of GBV (Bows, 2019), with few studies focusing on older people and, in particular, on how gender, class, race and dis/ability intersect with age to produce unique contexts in which gender-based violence can operate.

The little research we do have indicates that older women’s experiences of GBV take place within their own unique contours. For example, in their analysis of clients who use MARACs (Multi-Agency Risk Assessment Conferences) to support them through domestic abuse victimisation, SafeLives (Giles, 2016) report that, in cases where the victim is aged 60 years or older, the primary perpetrator is much more likely to be an adult family member (in 44 per cent of cases, compared with 6 per cent of cases involving younger victims); while victims are likely to have experienced a longer period of abuse (6.5 years, compared with 4 years for younger victims) and are much less likely to have attempted to leave the perpetrator (27 per cent of victims over 60 years, compared with 68 per cent of younger victims).

This systematic invisibility in research is mirrored at a conceptual level. Common forms of gender-based violence such as domestic abuse, stalking and harassment tend to be constructed as a ‘younger woman’s issue’, usually falling under the policy directive of ‘violence against women and girls’. In contrast, interpersonal violence against older women tends to be conceptualised as ‘elder abuse’ which, as Holt (2019: 166) has argued elsewhere, ‘tends to be framed in the context of institutional care and/or in the context of a care-giving relationship, with the perpetrator in the role of caregiver’. Thus, the gendered and generational contours of GBV against older women tend to be obscured, ‘with its characteristics tending to be attributed to the advancing age and associated support needs of the older person, rather than to other dimensions of power that intersect across the life course’ (Holt, 2019: 166). This is evident in a recent survey carried out by Hourglass, the safer ageing charity (2020), which found that 30 per cent of respondents did not consider hitting older people as ‘abuse’, a term that intrinsically acknowledges the role of power within relationships.

Within this context, it is understandable that older women’s stories of GBV are missing from women’s writing about their own experiences of GBV, whether real or imagined. Their recurrent marginalisation from our national crime survey, in the conceptualisation of GBV and in public understandings of GBV, represents a pre-written story of absence, which can potentially be countered through the self-storying of their own lives by older women.

Storying (older) women’s lives

The majority of social groups (and most notably those with intersecting social characteristics) are marginalised in society by the well-established narratives – or pre-written stories – that differentiate them. The pre-writing, in these imagined narratives, of the older female self precludes the storying of their own lives by older women who have experienced, and continue to experience, GBV. This manifests in various ways, including in how older women are positioned in relation to GBV. Emotionally expressive writing has been studied to investigate its beneficial impact on people’s ability to deal with emotional and physical stress (Pennebaker and Beall, 1986). A meta-analysis suggests that writing about emotional topics and life events can lead to significantly improved health outcomes, such as improvements in physical health and wellbeing (Baikie and Wilhelm, 2005). Storytelling can help us make sense of chaotic and confusing events and has often been thought of as central to qualitative research (Gilbert, 2002). Bringing elements of experience, thought and feeling together on one page or text can help researchers identify a central theme or themes that can give clarity to the previously unclear or obscured, and this has obvious benefits for both readers and writers of such texts (Polkinghorne, 1995).

Harvey et al. (1995) identify storytelling as a tool for dealing with loss and trauma among Second World War veterans, evidencing the clear therapeutic benefits. Ellis and Bochner (1992) co-authored a text about their joint decision to have an abortion that helped them to detail and value their individual experience of this shared event, while also using their writing to make connection and better (or differently?) understand what they had been through. Working in this way, storytelling can potentially connect people via shared experiences while also maintaining respect and valuing individual stories and experiences that might not have previously been identified in research. However, despite the life stories that older women may have available to share, there is an absence of such stories, including an absence of autoethnographic accounts. Ettorre (2005) suggests that this is in part related to the ways in which older women’s bodies and the older self is more broadly constructed. We acknowledge that asking people to share stories in qualitative research can be difficult at best and retraumatising at worst (Rosenthal, 2003) and that a sensitive, ethical and thoughtful approach to working in this way (as detailed in Parks et al., 2022) is essential.

Plummer (1994) argues that people tell life stories which are not only personal, but which also form part of larger cultural and historical narratives. Narrative puts the personal and the social in the same space, in an overlapping, intricate relationship (Speedy, 2007). Narrative portraiture, building a picture of something through storying, involves working qualitatively with data emerging from interviews, focus groups, observations or other sources that involve people’s narratives and can add to the existing field of narrative research by placing the research participants at the centre of the research (Rodríguez-Dorans and Jacobs, 2020). This is highly relevant in relation to experiences with GBV as there are fewer stories about older women – especially autobiographical accounts (Sharratt, 2021). Sharratt points out that Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life (1989) argues that women’s experience is often reduced to normative assumptions of femininity and gendered roles. Looking back at centuries-old stories, she points to The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436–1438) that tells a story of a mediaeval woman escaping from an abusive marriage by walking the pilgrims’ trails. The suggestion is that these associations relating to ‘how a woman’s life should be’ prevail in contemporary narratives (Sharratt, 2021: n.p.). Nevertheless, as will become clear later, it is of paramount importance that we listen out for the stories of older women – particularly around gender-based violence and particularly in the context of the immobilisations of the pandemic.

Storytelling is a method in qualitative research that can address gaps in research in relation to experiences with GBV and seeks to include a diverse range of women, including women aged over 50. Tedlock argues that ‘women’s ethnographic and autobiographical intentions are often powered by the motive to convince readers of the author’s self-worth, to clarify and authenticate their self-images’ (Tedlock, 2000: 468). This is, Tedlock argues, a feminist issue. We suggest that storying oneself can offer the necessary detachment that is sometimes needed when seeking a viewpoint from which to examine one’s lived experiences, and value this as a meaningful contribution to qualitative research (Moriarty, 2017). This distance can provide a space for reflection that can trigger meaning-making and offer powerful insight into one’s own identity. This process can offer women – including older women – a method for authenticating their self-image and recovering feelings of self-worth, allowing for a more expansive sense of self that is able to critique and resist oppressive cultures.

Storytelling in qualitative research, and specifically autoethnography, can provide spaces where the ‘weaving of the visual, poetic, and prose narratives is a creative, intuitive, and imaginative process, allowing the body to speak in her own terms’ (Metta, 2010: 32). The emphasis on creative stories and lived experiences as research and as a method of valuing research partners means that it offers an appropriate lens through which to view stories of GBV told by women and to value these as equal to traditional academic research. There is some disciplinary divergence here that cannot often be resolved in a transdisciplinary project and so there is a need to sit with the tension. Rather than necessarily analysing these stories, autoethnography in the humanities is more often concerned with valuing the stories and mix of writing styles and acknowledging the individual voices within the research instead (Dundar et al., 2003). Combined with the more analytical autoethnographic approach more common in social science (e.g., Denzin, 2013), we argue that autoethnography is a highly suitable approach for working with and including women of any age who have experienced GBV. Its outcomes can sit alongside more formal analytical approaches or become part of a broader, more formal analytical strategy. The key point here is that storytelling and autoethnography are sources of knowledge that should not be subjugated.

This chapter seeks to encourage conversations in relation to the visibility of older women who have experienced GBV, and to use these conversations to ensure that their experiences are less obscured. We suggest that storytelling, and specifically autoethnography, offers a method of producing research that aspires to needed cultural and social change. We acknowledge the potential tensions within this method, not least between disciplines, and a duty not to reproduce the polarised discourses/representations that already characterise women’s ageing; namely, those that reduce women to frail, unproductive, burdensome and readily-invisibilised bodies, or the ‘relentless buoyancy’ (Segal, 2013: 179) of privileged bodies, whom Stephen Katz (2005: 188) defines as those who grow old without ageing. Rather, we seek to use stories devised by women over 50 years old to raise awareness and increase understanding, making these bodies and their experiences visible and valued.

Storying the im/mobilities of gender-based violence in COVID-19

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) issued a call for transdisciplinary projects offering insights into experiences of lockdown and recommendations for supporting people during this extraordinary time. An aspect of GBV that soon rose to public consciousness during the pandemic was the terrifying rise in domestic abuse, with a 700 per cent increase in helpline calls reported by the UK’s largest domestic abuse charity, Refuge. A separate helpline for perpetrators of domestic abuse seeking help to change their behaviour also received 25 per cent more calls after the start of the COVID-19 lockdown (Townsend, 2020). The Immobilities of Gender-Based Violence project was awarded funding by the AHRC and sought to offer people who had experienced GBV dedicated time, a safe and supportive space and methods and techniques to tell their autoethnographic experiences of the pandemic in a variety of ways. The project was structured in several stages. After the initial literature review of existing work in the field, the team devised a new collaborative storying method, ‘trans/feminist collaborative autoethnography’ (Murray et al., 2022) to include and value the participants as co-authors in disseminated work. We then planned and ran a series of workshops led by writers and artists that would support people who had experienced GBV in lockdown to tell and share stories in a supportive online space. In tandem, we collected 120 existing stories of GBV which were in the public domain. They were gathered from campaign group websites, newspaper reports, magazine stories, policy reports and online blogs. Finally, we analysed the stories collected and made recommendations to inform and change social policies via a series of policy advisor workshops with representatives from the police, health, charities and academia.

We were involved in all aspects of the project, and our research identified that many of the characteristics of the pandemic and its associated lockdowns are risk factors for different forms of GBV – for example, increased stress (and self-medication to manage this), periods of protracted and close proximity with family members and shifts in work and leisure patterns. In particular, many forms of GBV inherently involve ‘locking down’ – for example, the monitoring involved in coercive control, the surveillance involved in stalking, the lack of passers-by that enables street harassment and sexual assault to go unchecked, and the increased use of digital spaces that enables online forms of abuse to thrive.

We were struck in our research by a number of findings, but three in particular that relate to older women. First is the absence of accounts of older women among the hundreds of stories of GBV in the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. We analysed these stories ourselves and only two were written by older women. These were both in a report by AGE UK, which focused on critiquing the upper age limit for domestic abuse in crime statistics (as discussed above). Both stories are about experiences of GBV, but not necessarily stories of GBV during the pandemic, which is the second of our findings that relates most perceptibly to older women. Many of the stories that we analysed were not specific to the pandemic, but became visible or tellable in the context of the pandemic. As discussed elsewhere (Murray et al., 2023), the pandemic and lockdowns forced a series of resets – including social and cultural. There were changes in the practices of everyday life, as illustrated below by Grace and Sylvia, which meant that women experiencing GBV were subject to a different set of controls and this often allowed them to acknowledge the previous ones – to imagine something different. The changing social, cultural and spatial dynamics of the lockdowns also opened up possibilities for women to physically escape and this in itself then made their stories more tellable.

As the report (Age UK, 2021: 11) says, the stories are ‘based on genuine, lived experience – some names and details have been changed to protect the people involved’. The report goes on to say that ‘Some of the stories are also an amalgamation of one or more personal stories shared with us by older people’. This is key for us in that it reflected our third suggestion that stories are always a patchwork of recollection, incomplete and partly imagined (Murray et al., 2022). They are always in transition, transforming through the myriad ways in which they are read. Here Age UK became the authors of a new story, one that is the amalgamation of different accounts and echoes their own experience of GBV. The evolution of stories in this way does not detract from their telling of experience. We consider the two stories that we included from Age UK here. First, Grace who is 81 years old and has endured 57 years of physical and sexual abuse and financial and emotional coercive control by her husband, George.

I was born in 1938 – the eldest of four children. When father returned from the war he would have rages. We were regularly beaten and made to go to bed without food. It wasn’t a happy home.

I put my energy into my studies and started my nurse training. I loved my job and it meant I could leave home.

When I was 22, I met George. He was handsome and charming. He showered me with compliments and made me feel wonderful. We had a small wedding and went on to have three children. Although I enjoyed my job I was thrilled to be at home. I never returned to nursing.

George provided for us financially. However, he controlled every penny and decided what I wore and how I arranged my hair. I lost contact with my friends from work, but he allowed me to chat with the other mothers at the school gates.

George liked routine: evening meal at 5pm, children in bed by 7pm. He had high expectations of what a wife should be and there was no discussion about what I may or may not want.

The only change was on a Thursday. George would go to the races and the children and I would watch Tops of the Pops. For years I lived for those Thursdays – laughing and dancing together in the front room.

George would return smelling of whiskey. If he’d won at the races we’d dance, and he’d treat me to a bottle of port. If he’d lost, he’d treat me to a beating. The bruises carefully administered to areas on my body that wouldn’t be seen.

When the children left home, George allowed me to have a part-time job. I started to gain confidence and spoke to a friend at work. She helped me realise this wasn’t like all marriages, as I’d been told by George. I could stand up to George and say no to his demands.

I began putting money aside for a rainy day. George noticed the change in me and began treating me differently – paying me compliments and taking me out for meals. He even bought me a cat. I adored Misty and she followed me everywhere. I began to believe George had changed and was the man I had met all those years ago.

But one evening, after too much whiskey and a loss at the races, George whispered in my ear what he would do to Misty, if I ever left him. He repeated that threat hundreds of times over the coming years.

His memory has started to fail now. He gets frustrated and angry. Thankfully, problems with his hip mean he can’t manage the stairs anymore so he sleeps downstairs and allows me to sleep upstairs.

Night-time is my favourite part of the day. I can rest knowing he can’t get to me and feel safe for the first time in years. I lie in bed and my thoughts are completely my own.

And here we are – 57 years of marriage.

‘Congratulations, what an achievement!’ people say.

If only they knew. (Age UK, 2021: 14)

The importance of this story – and why it needs to be heard – is not just because it voices older women’s experience of GBV in the UK, though of course that is important. It is because of the unique vantage point of an older woman’s experience of intersecting forms of GBV throughout a lifetime, a story that is likely to have remained unseen and unheard if the pandemic had not created the opportunity. We do not know what this opportunity was, but based on our analysis of other stories, can surmise that, as above, the societal changes associated with the immobilisations of lockdown produced breathing spaces that enabled reflection on past lives (Murray et al., 2023). Also, it may be that the spotlight on GBV presented Age UK with the opportunity to gather stories on GBV, which meant that older women necessarily connected with their past lives. Grace was a young woman when she met George, who would go on to physically assault her for the next six decades. Grace’s story tells the tale of the immobilities of GBV, perhaps not during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is a story that emerged during it. Grace was controlled by George, who dictated how she managed their money and how she dressed and did her hair. She remembers that he was ‘charming’ and made her feel ‘wonderful’, an insight into years of gaslighting and coercive control, including not being allowed to work until their children had left home. If all went well for George, he returned from his day out at the races and they danced, a mobile freedom that did not endure. Grace’s newfound freedoms in her workplace, both physical and emotional, appear to have provoked George into threatening the life of her pet cat, which she ‘adored’, as a form of indirect violence or violence by proxy which, as Campbell (2020) has documented, has also increased during the pandemic

It was ultimately George’s immobility that had brought a significant change to Grace’s GBV experience. As he can no longer climb the stairs due to a physical mobility problem, Grace can segregate herself upstairs. She does, however, say that George ‘allows’ her to sleep upstairs so he still exerts a level of control on her mobility. Her poignant words about night-time being her ‘favourite part of the day’ suggest that George continues to perpetrate GBV, with the suggestion that he is still controlling her movements and thoughts. Grace’s story illustrates the cumulative effects of GBV. It also suggests the usefulness of the concept of generation in framing the intersections of the spatial and temporal in producing GBV. Each generation does not sit in isolation in time and space, but is produced relationally by other generations. We move through from one generation to another, from being part of a younger generation, as Grace was when she first experienced GBV, to an older generation, retaining traces of our generational journey. Grace has absorbed the shared cultures of time and space through the course of her life – she has lived through not only her own experience of GBV, but through the changing socio-cultural constructions of GBV over time. She tells a story of all of those times – from the 1960s to the 2020s. Her own current experience of GBV is determined by her past experiences and how they are remembered and re-remembered. Her new experiences are encumbered with all of these past experiences as we imagine all of our past experiences. And this makes the storying of these life experiences all the more germane. The immobilisations of older women experiencing GBV, which have been illuminated by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns and by their stories, include not only older women being burdened by their lifetime of experiences, but being invisibilised in the present.

The second story from the Age UK report, again told during rather than about the pandemic, is of Sylvia, who is 80, and alongside her husband, Arthur, ‘being physically, verbally, financially and emotionally abused’ by her adult daughter Paula. They called Age UK’s advice line, desperate for help:

Our daughter was diagnosed with an illness nine years ago which meant she was struggling to cope and had built up lots of debt. She’s our youngest daughter so even though it was difficult for us we wanted to help and care for her. She sold her home to pay off her debts and moved in with us.

We’re relieved Paula’s health is better now but our lives have become unbearable.

Paula tells us she can’t cope with living alone. She’s demanded money from us – almost £30,000. She’s stopped us seeing our friends and other relatives so we’ve gradually lost all support and feel so alone.

She shouts terrible things at Arthur and I can see his health deteriorating under the pressure. He has diabetes and breathing problems and all this stress is making him so much worse. I wish I could take it all away for him. (Age UK, 2021: 17)

This story features a very hidden form of GBV, known as child to parent violence. It is only relatively recently that child to parent violence has been recognised as a form of GBV. It made its first policy appearance in the UK Government’s action plan A Call to End Violence against Women and Girls (HM Government, 2014) and, since that time, has been recognised as an important part of the tapestry in our understandings of how different patterns of domestic abuse emerge across the life course. Yet even within the field of child to parent violence, experiences of adult child to parent violence – which is the form most likely to be experienced by older women – are incredibly marginalised. Even in cases of domestic homicide, where age leads to an increased risk in older women, and where older women are as likely to be killed by their sons or grandsons as by their partner, attention in research, policy and practice continues to focus on such violence engaged in by children and adolescents (Bows, 2019; Holt, 2019). The story features a female perpetrator, which is unusual in stories of GBV. Of course, such stories are sparse because most GBV is perpetrated by men (UN Women, 2022). Nevertheless, some women do engage in GBV, often in tandem with male perpetrators and often in cases of so-called honour-based violence, in which violence occurs within a family context in order to ‘restore a societal construction of honour’ (Gill, 2008: 246). Sylvia’s story also illustrates the complexities of gender roles, particularly in terms of caring, with Sylvia placing her husband Arthur as the central character in their shared GBV experience.

Conclusion

Many important research projects developed very quickly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but very few of these projects focused specifically on older women’s experiences of GBV. Instead, the storying of older women’s experiences of GBV was left to organisations such as Age UK and Hourglass. This has meant that older women have, on the whole, been invisibilised, particularly those experiencing intersecting forms of marginalisation, compounded by the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. We do not know much about Grace and Sylvia’s demographic characteristics and whether these have compounded their experience. But we do know that they live in the UK. The first words of this chapter are the story of the older woman from Kyrgyzstan, a country in Central Asia where poverty is high and gender equality is low (World Bank, 2022). Her experience of GBV is both culturally specific and shared across cultures – illustrating the power of storytelling to transcend borders.

Although the stories discussed here do not relate directly to the pandemic, it is the vantage point of the pandemic that is important here. The stories illustrate that GBV does happen to older women and it does happen across lifetimes. We include them here for this reason; they were the only stories about older women in the 120 stories that we analysed during our research. This, in itself, suggests that there is something missing, that older women are being invisibilised from societal accounts of GBV in the same way as they are removed from official crime reporting such as the CSEW. But it is in these rich accounts of lives that we begin to see the temporal as well as spatial patterns of immobilities related to GBV. It is imperative that we find ways to include older women’s stories alongside those of other generations.

Moving beyond the lessons of the pandemic, we argue that research which values storytelling should be viewed as equal to conventional academic research. Research that encompasses storytelling, including but not only autoethnography, can address part of the challenge and resistance to dominant and dominating male narratives that are synonymous with traditional academic research. Metta (2016) suggests that telling stories can change dominant and gendered discourses. Working in this way, we hope that, based on the vantage point that the pandemic provided in creating the conditions for more people to tell their stories of GBV, we can create spaces in which older women can articulate their stories beyond it. Appreciating the opportunities of this period of resetting and reflection provides understandings that can be applied to future scenarios, beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is a significant gap in knowledge in our understanding of GBV, the repercussions of which are exacerbated by dominant narratives that are both gendered and generational. Supporting older women to share and tell their stories of GBV can contribute to meaningful societal change around GBV, and this work can be used to inform social policy, improve healthcare services, evolve curriculum design, further democratise research and enhance the lives and experiences of all women who experience GBV. We can then begin to make visible the lives and experiences of older women who experience GBV and reduce any stigma, shame and lack of understanding that have oppressed and invisibilised older women for far too long.

Notes

1 Until 2017, the CSEW excluded participants aged 59 years and over.
2 The most recently available data (ending March 2020) from CSEW suggests that, of people aged 60–74 years, 4.4 per cent of women and 1.9 per cent of men have experienced domestic abuse in the past year (ONS, 2020). The reason that this is the most recently available data is because this module was paused during spring 2020 when the CSEW was moved to a telephone survey because of the lockdown restrictions, thus removing a vital measurement of GBV during COVID-19.

References

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Knowing COVID- 19

The pandemic and beyond

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