no hot just mess

Your Breakthrough

But one of them has been quiet for a while, speculation runs wild, perhaps they went on some epic quest, maybe another god smote them in a fit of jealousy

Reality is, they fell in a hole and have been stuck for a couple hundred years

Mary Jo Bang, from A Film in Which I Play Everyone: Poems; “Hotel Incognito”

Tdlr; Rates of violence and homocides against older women (notable grandmothers) rising, a dual issue of children of and partners being domestically abusive, most notably sons. Mothers are less likely to call authorities on their own children for domestic violence or threats, which impacts this grizzly development. Warned "matricide of older women" and lack of awareness. Article from Australia but this issue is stated to be global.

Fourteen women over the age of 55 were allegedly killed in domestic violence-related homicides last year, according to a tally kept by the online feminist group Destroy the Joint. When the Australian Bureau of Statistics releases its data for the year, this number could well increase.

In 2023, according to ABS data, there were 28 women over the age of 55 allegedly killed in domestic violence related homicides, roughly a third of all such alleged homicides. Experts have called it a “silent crisis”: older women who are killed by family violence but whose deaths rarely get as much attention as those of younger women, and whose experiences do not figure sufficiently in government responses to violence against women. “There’s a matricide of older women [and] people aren’t even noticing, there’s no outcry. There’s silence,” says Catherine Barrett, director of Celebrate Ageing. “It’s just being missed.”

A Guardian analysis of government data has found that in the 10 years to 2023, nearly 200 women over the age of 55 were allegedly killed in family violence related homicides, suggesting older women could be at dual risk – from partners and from their children, especially their sons.

The rate of alleged domestic homicides in Australia has more than halved in the past 30 years, from 0.71 deaths per 100,000 in 1992-93, to 0.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2022-23. However, the rate at which older women are allegedly killed in domestic homicides has not fallen consistently. In the past 10 years, the rate of women aged over 55 killed in family violence homicides has reached 0.7 deaths per 100,000 (the same rate for all women 30 years ago) three times – in 2017, 2018 and 2023.

The problem is a global one. In England and Wales, the number of women killed by sons has risen since 2016, after remaining stable for decades. There was also a rise in the number of grandmothers killed by their grandsons, according to the Femicide Census, co-founded by Clarrie O’Callaghan and Karen Ingala Smith.

Lee says that while every family violence homicide is a tragedy, some deaths are given more attention than others, with the media and general public often focusing on the deaths of younger, attractive white women, while the deaths of “women who are marginalised … don’t get highlighted”. “The invisibility and the marginalisation of First Nations women [and] older women means that they remain invisible even when they’re killed.”

One of the main factors, Lee says, is that domestic violence is often considered primarily a problem for younger women so services are often geared towards them. That means older women may not see a family violence service as one that can help them.

“When we talk about violence against women, it’s always a younger woman fleeing with two little kids hanging around her knees. You rarely see any commentary about all the women who grow old with violence, who live with, maybe, sons who are violent. They are really invisible.”

Barrett says sometimes, after a violent relationship breaks down between a man and his partner, the man will move back in with his parents – particularly if he has mental health or addiction problems – and continue to perpetrate violence there. The problem has only increased, she says, in light of the cost-of-living crisis.