The UN's Warning: Violence Against Older Women Is Invisible

On Thursday, the United Nations put a spotlight on a form of abuse that rarely makes headlines. Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, delivered a new report to the General Assembly examining violence against older women as its own distinct problem, rooted in the interaction of sex-based discrimination, ageism, and inequalities built up over a lifetime. "Women should not lose their right to live free from violence because they grow older," she wrote in the report, according to UN News. Too often, she argued, ageism and sexism combine to make that violence invisible, tolerated, or treated as simply part of getting old.

The numbers behind the warning are difficult to brush aside. The report estimates that six hundred sixty-four million women were aged sixty or older in twenty twenty-five, and projects that figure will reach one point one three billion by mid-century. That means the population most at risk of this kind of abuse is on track to nearly double within a generation. Alsalem called for urgent action by states to name and address violence against older women, insisting that a woman's right to live free from violence does not diminish with age, and that older women are rights holders, knowledge bearers, and active members of society whose age must never be used to diminish their dignity, autonomy, or protection.

The many forms the abuse takes

According to the report, violence against older women follows many patterns, not just one. The document identifies physical, psychological, sexual, and economic violence, alongside coercive control, neglect, abandonment, and technology-facilitated abuse.

Older women may also face exploitation of their pensions and property, digital exclusion, the denial of health care or assistive devices, and steep barriers to reporting abuse or obtaining justice. The violence can occur in homes, communities, care institutions, prisons, and crisis and conflict settings alike. One finding stands out for how little attention it receives: sexual violence against older women remains deeply under-recognised, and older women are routinely excluded from both the services designed to protect women and the data that shapes those services. When health systems already dismiss women's pain, as reporting on doctors failing to believe women has shown, the consequences for older patients who are less likely to be heard at all become even sharper.

The digital side of the problem deserves its own attention. The report lists technology-facilitated violence among the harms older women face, and the gap is easy to see in practice: people who did not grow up with smartphones and social platforms are easier to scam, isolate, and silence online. Tech-enabled abuse of women is already a growing crisis for younger generations, and the UN's findings suggest older women are absorbing the same harms with fewer defences. Digital exclusion can cut off the only path to help.

Who is most at risk

Alsalem's report is blunt about where the danger concentrates. According to the document, widows, migrant and stateless women, rural women, women with disabilities, women in institutional care, and women affected by conflict and humanitarian crises face the greatest risk. The common thread is dependence: where an older woman lives with poverty, disability, isolation, or reliance on others for care, the pressures that shape the choices available to her can turn quietly coercive. In each case, the report argues, violence against older women thrives where no one is required to look for it. "No woman should be made to feel that her continued life is a burden simply because she has reached an advanced age or requires support," she wrote in the report.

That framing matters because it challenges how societies tend to process elder abuse. A fall in a care home gets recorded as an accident. A daughter who takes control of a mother's pension gets filed under family business. A woman in her eighties who says she was assaulted gets asked whether she misremembered. The report argues that none of this is inevitable, and that treating it as inevitable is exactly the mechanism that keeps the abuse going. The invisibility is the problem itself.

What the UN wants governments to do

The report does not stop at diagnosis. Alsalem urged states to explicitly recognise and address violence against older women in laws, national strategies, and violence prevention and response programmes. She called for the collection of age and sex-disaggregated data, so that older women stop vanishing from the statistics. She pressed for stronger, more accessible reporting, protection, justice, and redress, and for training for law enforcement, judicial, health, and social service professionals who are often the first point of contact when abuse is discovered.

The timing is not accidental. The report arrives as the UN's human rights machinery is under unusual strain, with sessions like the one that renewed the Sudan probe showing how hard it is to keep any single crisis in focus. Alsalem's answer to that strain is structural: write older women into the laws, count them in the data, train the people who meet them at the worst moments of their lives. The full report, numbered A/81/133, is published through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN's own coverage of the release is available on UN News. With the population of women over sixty set to approach one point one three billion, the question is no longer whether this violence exists. It is whether anyone is set up to see it.