Violência contra pessoas idosas em uma área metropolitana de Brasília, Paranoá - Distrito Federal

Abstract

Phenomena associated with aging, such as senescence and senility, may influence the occurrence of acts of violence against the elderly, associated with sociodemographic conditions, such as gender, education, income, housing conditions, support network and protection, and functional capacity and cognitive. The overall objective was to characterize the elderly as the sociodemographic, health, and personal information and its relationship with the nature of psychological, physical, financial, abandonment, neglect, self-neglect and sexual violence and specific objectives were to analyze the prevalence of cases of violence, according to the situations of violence, identifying the relationship between the functional and cognitive capacity of the elderly and the presence of violence and characterize the type of offender and the frequency of acts of violence suffered by the elderly. It is a descriptive population-based study, where instruments were applied to assess the situations of violence and the relationship between sociodemographic data, functional and cognitive ability. Data collection was performed in a health unit in Paranoá, Federal District, where were carried out face-to-face interviews, and the elderly as the interlocutor of situations of violence. Were used violence assessment instruments, functional capacity of Katz and Lawton, and the mini-mental state examination. The sample consisted of 237 elderly people, aged 60-93 years (mean 70.25, SD 6.94), mostly female (69.9%), white (48.1%), married (38% ), illiterate (44.3%), Catholics (62%), low income (46%), who were living with at least one family member (89%). As the prevalence, 64.97% of seniors reported having experienced at least one type of violence after completing 60 years. In the relationship between the variables, it was observed that the types of psychological, physical, neglect, self-neglect and financial abuse obtained levels of statistical significance of p <0.05, with a significant association between the occurrence of abuse and sociodemographic variable like sex, have children and use alcohol. Be dependent in basic activities of self-care and suffer physical violence were statistically significant (p = 0.02). In the relation between cognitive assessment and violence, there was no significant statistical relationship, however, the most frequent cases of violence were identified in groups of elderly people with lower education levels and poorer performance on mental test. Regarding the type of offender, the children, followed by spouses were the most mentioned as perpetrators of violence. Abandonment was the type of violence which the elderly reported to suffer more frequently. The results showed that sociodemographic and evaluation of functional capacity and cognitive variables are related to the violence and the abuser is a family member. Epidemiological studies such as this, may help to raise awareness of both professionals and the society, on the characteristics of cases of abuse among the elderly, which are not reported, and provide and demonstrate the causality of risk factors, which can promote the development of more accurate and viable targets for intervention and violence prevention among older people.