Making Older Women Visible: Reflections from Dewis Choice Contribution to NGO CSW Geneva's Moving Forward B+30 Review

Making Older Women Visible: Taking Violence Against Older Women to Geneva Reflections from Dewis Choice on contributing to NGO CSW Geneva’s Moving Forward: UNECE Civil Society B+30 Review and B+35, in collaboration with Aberystwyth University and Wales Assembly of Women.

From 12–14 October 2026, we travelled to Geneva to take part in NGO CSW Geneva’s

Moving Forward: UNECE Civil Society B+30 Review and B+35, joining civil society organisations, UN partners and other stakeholders to consider progress since the Beijing Platform for Action and the work still needed to achieve gender equality.

Across three days of workshops, presentations and working-group discussions, one message became increasingly clear: if the international community is serious about ending violence against women and girls, older women cannot remain invisible.

Women do not age out of their right to live free from violence

There are an estimated 664 million women aged 60 and over worldwide, a figure expected to rise to more than 1.1 billion by 2050. Yet older women continue to be overlooked within data, policy, funding and systems of protection. As part of the Violence Against Older Women Working Group, Dr Rebecca Zerk, Director and CoLead of Dewis Choice at Aberystwyth University, presented alongside working-group co-chair Mary Adams of FAWCO. Their starting point was simple: women do not age out of their right to live free from violence.

Violence against older women cannot be understood only in terms of physical violence. It may encompass abuse, exploitation, neglect and abandonment, and can undermine women’s liberty, autonomy, dignity, safety and equal participation throughout later life.

Three interconnected spheres of harm

The working group is exploring three particularly important and interconnected areas. Technology-facilitated abuse can involve monitoring, harassment, impersonation, threats, isolation and financial exploitation. While digital technologies can increase independence and social connection, they can also be weaponised as tools of coercion and control.

Adult family abuse includes abuse by adult children, grandchildren and other relatives. Older women may experience psychological abuse, coercive control, intimidation, neglect and economic exploitation within relationships in which loyalty, dependency, responsibility and care can make abuse particularly difficult to recognise or disclose.

Institutional abuse requires us to look beyond individual perpetrators and consider how neglect, discrimination, restrictive practices and failures within health, care, social welfare and justice systems can undermine older women’s rights and prevent access to protection and redress. Across all three areas, violence may be intensified by the intersection of gender inequality, ageism, disability, dependency, poverty and social isolation.

“ Women do not age out of their right to live free from violence."

The data gap is not evidence that violence is absent

A central focus of the presentation was the continuing lack of evidence about violence experienced by older women. For decades, much of the international evidence base on violence against women concentrated on women aged between 15 and 49. Although international indicators increasingly seek to encompass women across the life course, older women remain substantially under-represented in the evidence.

This creates a dangerous cycle. What is not measured is less visible in policy. What is less visible in policy is less likely to receive sustained funding. And what is not recognised or funded is less likely to result in effective prevention, protection or justice.

An absence of evidence must never be mistaken for an absence of violence. If international commitments such as SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 1 on poverty and SDG 16 on peace, justice and strong institutions are to apply equally to women of all ages, older women must be explicitly included in research, age-disaggregated data, policy development, international instruments and sustainable financing.

“ What is not measured is less visible in policy. What is less visible in policy is less likely to receive sustained funding. And what is not recognised or funded is less likely to result in effective prevention, protection or justice."

Seeing violence across the whole life course

Alongside the plenary presentation, Elize Freeman, Policy and Practice Director for Dewis Choice, led a workshop examining adult family abuse through a life-course lens. The session challenged participants to consider a problem that is often created by the way services, policy and research categorise violence.

We may describe childhood abuse, intimate partner violence and adult family abuse as separate forms of victimisation. They may involve different perpetrators, different relationships and occur decades apart. But for the woman experiencing them, they form part of one life.

As Elize explained: trauma does not begin again each time the perpetrator changes. The fear, loss of trust and trauma associated with one experience do not disappear simply because that period of a woman’s life has ended. Harm may accumulate and compound over time, influencing later relationships, help-seeking, perceptions of safety and interactions with services.

Different perpetrators. Different relationships. One woman’s life.

The workshop illustrated this through the anonymised experience of an older woman who came into contact with services at the age of 63. She had experienced abuse and abandonment during childhood. She subsequently lived through more than four decades of high-risk intimate partner abuse, including physical and sexual violence, coercive control, emotional abuse and economic abuse.

When she eventually left that relationship, she was living with significant trauma and complex PTSD. Seeking safety within her family did not, however, bring an end to abuse. She later experienced emotional and financial abuse within a relationship with her adult son and daughter-in-law. Viewed through conventional categories, these experiences might be recorded separately: childhood abuse; intimate partner violence; adult family abuse. A life-course perspective asks something different: what happens when we see the whole woman?

What changes when we see the whole life?

Workshop participants were asked to consider: “What do we see differently when we look at this woman’s whole life, rather than each experience of abuse separately?”

This question goes to the heart of one of the challenges facing those working in women’s rights, domestic abuse, safeguarding, research and policy. Our systems often require experiences to fit within categories. Those categories can be necessary for policy, commissioning and data collection, but they can also fragment women’s experiences.

If we focus on one relationship and one stage of life, we can inadvertently lose sight of accumulated trauma. Relationships can change, forms of abuse can change, and perpetrators can change, but each experience of trauma is not lived in isolation. Trauma can accumulate across the life course.

The workshop therefore invited a wider question for everyone working in women’s rights, policy, research and advocacy: are our evidence, policies and responses capable of seeing that accumulation? Or do the categories we use sometimes mean that we see individual experiences of violence but lose sight of the whole woman?

“ Different perpetrators. Different relationships. Different stages of life. One woman carrying the cumulative impact."

Adult family abuse must be part of the conversation

Our discussions in Geneva also coincided with International Child-to-Parent Abuse Awareness Day, creating a particularly important opportunity to draw attention to abuse within family relationships.

Child-to-parent abuse is often discussed in relation to younger children and adolescents, but abuse by adult children can continue, emerge or change as parents grow older. Through Dewis Choice’s work with older victim-survivors, and our partnership with PEGS – Parental Education Growth Support, we continue to highlight the importance of understanding child-to-parent abuse, including adult children as part of a broader continuum of violence.

Older parents may face coercive control, threats, violence and financial exploitation from adult children, sometimes alongside caring responsibilities, the perpetrator’s mental health or substance use, financial dependency, housing dependency and complex feelings of love, responsibility and loyalty. These dynamics can make adult family abuse particularly difficult to name and can create significant challenges for professionals attempting to balance safeguarding, autonomy, family relationships and risk.

Ensuring this form of violence is visible within international violence against women agendas is therefore an important priority.

Non-state torture, older women and the case of Violet

The workshop also benefited from the contribution of Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, who shared their incredible work on non-state torture. Their contribution drew attention to severe and sustained forms of violence that can be obscured or minimised when abuse is framed too narrowly.

Through the case study of Violet, an older woman, Jeanne and Linda highlighted the long-term and profound impacts of non-state torture across the life course. The case illustrated why language and recognition matter: naming the severity and nature of women’s experiences is essential if systems are to understand the harm, respond appropriately and provide meaningful routes to protection and redress.

Their contribution reinforced the wider message of the workshop: older women’s experiences cannot be understood in fragments. Violence may take different forms and occur within different relationships and settings, but the cumulative consequences are carried by the same woman across her life.

Seeing the whole woman

Making older women visible within violence against women agendas is not simply about adding older age as another category. It requires us to think differently about violence across the life course.

A life-course perspective helps us recognise that childhood abuse, intimate partner violence, adult family abuse, technology-enabled abuse, institutional harm and non-state torture should not automatically be understood as disconnected experiences. Different forms of abuse can intersect, accumulate and compound. Earlier experiences may shape later help-seeking, perceptions of safety, relationships and engagement with services.

The message we wanted participants to take forward was that making older women visible is about more than counting women over a particular age. It is about being able to see the whole woman, across the whole of her life.

“ Trauma does not begin again each time the perpetrator changes."

Taking the work forward

The value of our time in Geneva was not simply in presenting what we already know. From the workshops on Monday, through presentations at the International Labour Organization, to the working-group updates on the final day, the event created a space for civil society organisations from different countries and disciplines to challenge one another, share evidence and identify priorities for action.

But the most important work happens beyond the conference room. It lies in the months of collaboration that brought people together in Geneva and in what participants take back to their organisations, communities, research and advocacy afterwards.

For Dewis Choice, the visit reinforced the importance of continuing to build an international evidence base around violence against older women and to ensure that adult family violence, technology-enabled abuse, institutional harm and non-state torture are not treated as peripheral issues.

We were proud to contribute this work in collaboration with Wales Assembly of Women and Aberystwyth University, and alongside colleagues from across the NGO CSW Geneva network and the Violence Against Older Women Working Group.

The message we took to Geneva — and the message we bring home — is straightforward:

“ Rights do not expire with age. Ending violence against women must mean all women, at every stage of life."

To achieve this, we must be able to see the whole woman, across the whole of her life.