ABSTRACT
Despite more than four decades of domestic violence and sexual violence research, there remains an important gap in relation to older women, who have been almost entirely absent from research, policy and practice developments. Self-report surveys, for example the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), report young women aged between 16 and 30 are the most common victims of both domestic and sexual violence. However, the CSEW does not currently capture the experience of people aged 60 and over (although this is currently under review – see Office for National Statistics, 2017). For older women, domestic and sexual violence have usually been considered under the ‘elder abuse’ paradigm (Penhale and Porritt, 2010; Jones and Powell, 2006) and have lacked a thorough gender-based analysis.
