When Protection Ends with Age: The Legal Abandonment of Older Women Worldwide -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

For instance, the global human rights system prides itself in protecting its women and girls, and The human rights system funds programs, drafts conventions, issues declarations, all in the language of equality and dignity. However, beneath this protective architecture lies an uncomfortable fact: as women age, once again the human rights system forgets them. Protection, it seems, is for the young only.

Violence against older women is not rare, it is simply not seen. Across several continents, older women are physically abused, economically exploited, and subjected to psychological violence and neglect by their families. However, their suffering rarely makes it into the headlines or legal reforms and is almost never the focus of policy debates. The problem is not that they are not suffering grievous harm, but a lack of recognition.

This invisibility is not random. It is produced by the intersection of sexism and ageism. An amalgamation, two kinds of marginalization leave older women without both social value or legal priority. They are no longer seen as economically productive, unable to defend themselves in traditional narratives of sexual assault, and politically irrelevant. To the logic of modern governance, they become unnecessary.

The law reflects this indifference. While international human rights instruments have embraced the langu- age of human rights, in practice they are selective. The Convention on the Elimination of All Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) speaks of ” all women ” but does not specifically take up the issue of older women’s special vulnerabilities. General recommendations are given in their special case, too-neat hierarchies of 20-year-olds politely defer to 65-year-old pensioners on how long they expect to work. It is there but not in a bindable form; protection exists totally in theory, not as something you can enforce.

This gap is not just a technical problem. It is a feature of the current structure. Legal frameworks the world over are constructed with visibility as their cornerstone issue. Those questions which elicit political importance violence against children, trafficking and sexual exploitation receive specific international instruments, funding and mechanisms for enforcement. Older women, by contrast, are gathered into general groupings with social risks diluted and protection for them is weak. Abuses in care relationships, financial manipulation and neglect being neglected.

Even worse, “care dynamics” is a blanket term that normalizes many different forms of violence against older women. Financial exploitation by members of the family is seen as nothing more than depending on them, psychologically bullying becomes generational differences in attitude to life, while being neglectful and physical generally means being too poor or short resources for adequate care and provision. The result is a system that not only fails to protect the most seriously vulnerable members in society yet also actively defines violence as something else.

There is no lack of capacity involved in this. It’s just that nobody wants to deal with it.

Governments all over the world know this. The global population is aging rapidly and women outlive men. This means that elderly women are one of the world’s fastest-growing groups and also one of its most vulnerable. But the response initiated by policy has remained fragmented, passive and largely symbolic. There is still no comprehensive international agreement on the rights and protection of older people especially women–let alone anything binding.

The results are tragic.

In the privacy of home, older women encounter violence from the people they rely on for support–their own family members, helpers, and institutions. Their economic assets are frequently managed by others. Mobility and social exclusion mean they are denied access to justice. Reporting violence is not easy, indeed it is dangerous, particularly when the perpetrator is also the provider of care.

Public systems are as bad. Medical services frequently overlook this kind of abuse. Legal institutions lack mechanisms that specifically address the vulnerability, as a result of aging, suffered by elderly women. The social safety net makes no provision for women enduring in old age not just poverty but gendered lifetime inequalities. The system means they are not just forgotten: it structurally handicaps them.

What gives the crisis its special horror is that it could have been foreseen. The violence against elderly women is not an accident in as much as predictable product of a society allergic to women, unless they’re young, economically active and in the public eye. When these conditions are no longer met so too does anything even remotely approaching protection.

This is an even deeper hypocrisy in the global human rights framework: It is allegedly universal, but indeed selective; It professes to stand for dignity, yet countenances poverty. It condemns violence of course, but is blind to many of its most ubiquitous forms.The problem is not with old women that they are difficult to protect, the problem is that they are easy to neglect.Honest recognition asks for something more than acknowledgment alone; it demands a structural shift. First, the international community needs to move past soft law and sign upm to a comprehensive treaty on the rights of older persons, one that explicitly acknowledges the gendered nature of growing old. Without there being binding commitments, what we have is mere lip service.Secondly, countries need to overhaul their national legal systems to include and penalize the specific kinds of abuse suffered by older women, particularly in care and institutional settings. That means redefining mistreatment beyond physical injury to include economic domination, neglect and psychological pressure.Third, how people access justice needs to be completely rethought. Legal structures need to pbe physically accessible, procedurally straightforward and dignified for those who are growing older. For without this, rights remain empty words. Finally, there needs to be a change in societal mentality. Older women are not mere passive recipients of care, they are rights-bearing humans. Until this is reflected in law, policies and the cultural climate on the ground, the vulnerability will continue.Older women are not different. Surely the world has the means to protect them. They are only protected when they are young . A human rights system that protects women only when they are young is no system of justice. Instead it is a system of favor: And a system which abandons women at the final stage of life does not simply fail, It betrays the principles on which it claims to be based. When protection ends with age, what is left is not neutral.It is neglect, sanctioned.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia