We started June Violeta, a month dedicated to awareness and combating violence against the elderly, highlighting June 15 – World Day for Violence Awareness against the Elderly. Although the debate on aging should include the entire population, it is essential to recognize that gender inequalities make elderly women more vulnerable than men.
Therefore, it is necessary to give visibility to an issue that is often invisible: the struggle of older women to grow old with dignity, respect and autonomy. Aging being a woman is to face a lifetime a series of violence that accumulate and become time. It is, in many ways, an act of resistance!
Structural machismo, gender inequality, age prejudice (ethaismo) and social invisibility more intensely reach elderly women. Many of them, when aging, are marginalized, removed from the spaces of power, excluded from family and social decisions, neglected in their basic and affective needs, and often suffer physical, psychological, patrimonial and institutional violence.
Society still values youth as a synonym for beauty, productivity and relevance. Women, early on, are taught to associate their value with appearance and docility. As they get older, they face not only the limitations imposed by the body, but also social and symbolic erasure. They are less heard, less represented, less respected. Become invisible.
But there is a countercurrent. A growing group of women refuses this erasure and becomes, in the best sense of the word, subversive: they break with the patterns of silencing, submission and passive acceptance of aging as a decline. They are women who grow old, with projects, with fair anger and with the ability to indignate in the face of injustices – including those transvestite “care” that hide abuse.
June Violet is more than a prevention campaign: it is a call to the ability to indignate. Outrage against the normalization of abuses, against the erasure of women in the spaces of power, against the infantilization of the elderly woman, against the denial of her role in society. Also indignant against the silencing of their pains, desires and stories.
It is a month to recognize the strength of resistance of these women. In this respect, the struggle to grow old with dignity must be collective and political. It undergoes access to quality public health, safe housing, fair pension, the right to live without violence and freedom. Above all, it is the recognition that female old age is plural, active and full of power.
Valuing and listening to the elderly is an act of social justice. It is to ensure that they not only survive, but live fully, with respect and affection, breaking with the logic that female aging is a synonym of disappearance.
June Violet is an invitation to reflection, but also to concrete action. It is time to recognize the silent violence surrounding female aging-from institutional neglect to symbolic devaluation-and to combat them.
The ability to indignate is a right, but also a political force. Many elderly women, especially those who have already ways of feminist militancy, social or community activism, continue to denounce domestic violence, abandonment, ethaismo, erasure in spaces for power and inequality in public policies. They fight for decent pensions, access to health, safe housing and living spaces that value their history.
This indignation is not born of bitterness, but from the awareness that dignity is non -negotiable. And that there is no age limit to claim it!
Subversive women who grow old with dignity are not necessarily public or known figures. Many are in the neighborhoods, in conversation wheels, in the senior collectives, in the informal support networks. They are grandparents who create grandchildren with critical wisdom, retired teachers who continue to literate adults, community leaders who organize collective gardens, networks of affection and fight for rights.
Helcinkia Albuquerque
The struggle of subversive women for a decent aging is, in the end, a struggle for the valorization of life in all its phases. Because getting older is not losing power, it is just changing the way it expresses itself.
Subverting here is a gesture of self-esteem and solidarity. It is also a gesture of the future: aging with dignity today is to build a fairer tomorrow for all women to come.
That this June violet, indignation becomes an action. That society as a whole commit to the construction of a truly worthy, just and human aging for all women.
*HELCINKIA ALBUQUERQUE is a lawyer, professor, master in law, president of the National Association of Criminal Advocacy in Acre (Anacrim-AC), co-president of the National Union of Criminal Lawyers (UNA), vice president of the Brazilian Association of Legal Career Women-Acre Section (ABMCJ-AC).
