About the project
There is an urgent need to address different forms of violence and strengthen violence prevention strategies across the long-term care continuum. Violence can lead to physical and psychological harm, emotional exhaustion, and burnout for carers while being regarded as violent, aggressive, or difficult can have a direct impact on older adults’ sense of self, care relationships, and quality of care. What is missing from current research on violence and aging is in-depth understanding of the environments and circumstances that enable or inhibit violent interactions across settings of care. The overall goal of this research is to identify how and why features of care environments (social, physical, cultural and organizational) influence violent actions among older adults and carers and to inform the development of more effective violence prevention strategies across structures, settings and relations of care.
Research Objectives
Document how differing settings of care (home care and residential care) shape experiences of and responses to violence among older people and carers;
Scan and assess the overall effectiveness of specific individual, regional and organizational strategies for limiting violent situations and promoting safety; and
Develop an anti-violence policy framework in partnership with knowledge user collaborators.
Interested in participating in the project? Learn more here, or contact us for more information.
Defining violence
Violence within settings of care for older adults has been called abuse, challenging behaviors, behavioral disturbances, aggression, responsive behaviors, and violence. Each of these terms include actions—including verbal, physical, relational, and sexual acts—that can cause physical, emotional, or psychological harm to another person. Most of these terms focus on individuals’ actions. When people use these terms, they often forget to consider the impact of social practices, institutional culture, and environment on these actions. The term ‘responsive behaviour’ has helped shift attention to the situations and environments within which violent actions occur (for example, the layout of care facilities, congestion, noise, and social relations), to address stigmatizing labeling practices toward people living with dementia, in an attempt to remove the focus from dementia as the “cause” behind the behavior. However, in practice, even the use of the term ‘responsive behaviours’ can sometimes reinforce the stigmatizing views it was meant to address.
For the Safe Places for Aging and Care project, we use a broad definition of violence, which includes behaviors that may result in social, emotional, sexual, and/or physical harms, which ultimately inhibit individual self-development and self-expression. Although violence may be the result of certain relationships or situations, it is influenced by a broad range of forces that impact victims’ experiences and responses to violence across different spaces. These forces can be meso-level (such as organizational and community culture) or macro-level (such as government policies). For this project, our definition of violence emphasizes the importance of context and processes in understanding experiences, interpretations of, and responses and adaptations to violence.