The UK’s first dedicated service for older domestic abuse victims is calling for education to prevent abuse in future generations.

Dewis Choice research centre at Aberystwyth University established the first UK specialist support service for older abuse victims after finding people over 60 were falling through support gaps.

This White Ribbon Week, to campaign for the end to gender-based violence, the team is calling for more education to stop future abuse by “taking a lifespan approach”.

The pledge to help end violence against women and girls - with Elize Freeman, Deputy Director and Co-Lead of Dewis Choice, Professor Jon Timmis, Vice-Chancellor Aberystwyth University, Bayanda Vundamina, President of Undeb Aber and Jess Jackson, Anti-harassment and Violence Coordinator at Aberystwyth University Student Services.
The pledge to help end violence against women and girls - with Elize Freeman, Deputy Director and Co-Lead of Dewis Choice, Professor Jon Timmis, Vice-Chancellor Aberystwyth University, Bayanda Vundamina, President of Undeb Aber and Jess Jackson, Anti-harassment and Violence Coordinator at Aberystwyth University Student Services. (Aberystwyth University)

Elize Freeman, co-lead of Dewis Choice, said: “We’ve got our young students coming in - we want to tackle gender-based violence by empowering young people to call out abuse.

“Domestic abuse is an issue across life-course - with the oldest victim we’ve worked with being 93.

“We need to tackle it early with education, carrying learning right through to older age groups.

“By catching it early, older people in 50 years won’t have to suffer.

“Education is prevention.”

In 2015 when Dewis Choice was set up they found older abuse victims were often not being supported by domestic abuse services.

This is despite many older abuse cases being high-risk - 27 per cent of domestic homicides involving a victim over 60.

Elize said: “Older victims were invisible to services - they were being failed.

“It wasn’t seen as a domestic abuse issue.

“Older victims don’t always identify themselves as a victim and are often not reflected in domestic abuse services due to lack of inclusive terminology and imagery in campaigns.”

This prevented older victims from getting access to the same multi-agency responses that other cases get, getting risk-assessed, or receiving recovery support: “One of the longest cases we’ve seen involved 63 years of coercive control.

“Coming out of that, the trauma, suicide ideation and mental health impacts were huge.”

Their research now focuses on the ‘underdeveloped areas’ of older domestic abuse in LGBTQ+ relationships, adult family abuse and abuse in dementia: “Research is often focused on abuse from an intimate partner within younger heterosexual people.

“This doesn’t translate that well into support for other victims.

“Many have tried to seek help from family or informal networks when they were young and received negative responses.”

To help bridge this gap, Dewis Choice’s team of six has trained up 25,000 people across the UK to support older victims and set up a specialist support service for older victims in Carmarthenshire, identified as “essential” by Dyfed-Powys police.

They’ve also written academic papers, given evidence to the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, created practitioner guidance, a dementia toolkit, films, and podcasts to raise awareness and share their research from working directly with older abuse survivors.

To mark White Ribbon Week, Dewis Choice and Aberystwyth University took posters with a pledge to “never use, excuse or remain silent about men's violence against women and girls” to be signed in the Senedd, and are placing these posters across campus as part of 16 days of activism.