Australia has a detailed framework for addressing violence against women, but older women are largely absent from it. AAWAA has just submitted to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, documenting Australia’s failure to protect older women across five interconnected domains. The submission draws on CEDAW General Recommendation No. 27, which recognises that discrimination experienced across a woman’s lifetime has a severe and compounded impact in old age. What we found is that the conditions producing that impact are not incidental: they are structural, and they are largely invisible to the systems meant to address them.
Economic disadvantage is the foundation of vulnerability
The economic conditions in which older women arrive at old age are both a direct product of lifelong structural disadvantage and the primary mechanism by which other forms of violence are enabled and sustained. Women retire with significantly less superannuation than men, face markedly higher rates of poverty in old age, and are the fastest-growing group experiencing homelessness in Australia. No state or territory has a dedicated housing strategy for older women. The government’s own National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022–2032 names older women as the fastest-growing group at risk of homelessness, yet contains no dedicated housing strategy or funding stream for this cohort.
Financial abuse is among the most prevalent forms of elder abuse in Australia, and older women are its primary targets. A specifically Australian dimension of this is the weaponisation of self-managed superannuation funds as instruments of coercive financial control by male partners — women are coerced into joint SMSFs whose assets are then drained or controlled by an abusive male partner. Current superannuation law compounds this further: a woman who has been subjected to domestic violence may find that, upon her death, her superannuation passes to the very man who abused her, because eligibility for death benefits is determined by dependency status, not conduct. The superannuation sector has called for urgent legislative reform, both major parties have indicated support in principle — but no reform has been legislated, and older women remain exposed.
We have also documented what we term ‘administrative violence’: a 2026 Auditor-General report found that deficiencies in age pension administration produced an estimated $5 billion in incorrect payments over three years, including significant underpayments to recipients entitled to more. Women constitute a clear majority of age pension recipients, yet neither the audit nor Services Australia reports sex-disaggregated data on payment accuracy or service quality. The qualitative evidence we gathered documents patterns of dismissal, intrusive questioning, and repeated documentation demands that women describe consistently, but which cannot be measured or remedied without the data that does not exist.
Male violence takes multiple forms — and all of them are under-reported
The 2021 National Elder Abuse Prevalence Study found that one in six older Australians living in the community experienced abuse in the preceding year. Women experience higher rates than men and are subject to more serious forms: every spousal sexual abuse report was made by a woman, and men are the predominant perpetrators of both physical and sexual abuse.
In residential aged care, the Royal Commission heard evidence of approximately 50 incidents of unlawful sexual contact per week nationally — with women as the substantial majority of targets and men significantly overrepresented as aggressors. The Commission was told explicitly that this was an underestimate, because assaults by residents with dementia were exempt from mandatory reporting under the then-applicable framework. Reports to the NSW Ageing and Disability Commission about older people more than doubled between 2019 and 2024 and continue to rise — with women consistently constituting the majority of those reported on.
For many older women, intimate male partner violence in old age is the continuation of long-term abuse. Care dependency compounds this acutely: women who rely on an abusive male partner for care, housing, or financial management face losing all three upon disclosure. Domestic violence refuges are largely inaccessible to older women, and specialist aged care supports are not permitted in crisis accommodation. DFSV Commissioner Micaela Cronin has acknowledged that current family violence services do not adequately meet the needs of older women. The gap between the domestic violence system and the aged care system — each treating the other as responsible — is a known and unaddressed policy failure.
Male perpetrators are being made invisible
A precondition for accountability is visibility. In Australia, the sex of perpetrators is systematically absent from policy language, government communications, and administrative data. Formulations such as ‘people who use violence,’ ‘people experiencing violence,’ ‘people killed by violence,’ and ‘elder abuse’ name neither the sex of the typical victim nor the sex of the typical perpetrator. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s guidance document on gender-based violence contains no language addressed to perpetrators at all.
Sex self-identification laws have compounded this, producing measurable corruption in crime statistics: ABS data show an increase in recorded ‘female’ offenders for sexual assault and related offences following their introduction. The evidentiary foundation for policy on male violence against women is being corrupted at the point of collection.
What needs to change
Our submission calls for five concrete changes: naming male perpetrators in official communications; mandating sex-disaggregated data collection across aged care, elder abuse, and pension administration; establishing a statutory right for older women to receive intimate personal care from female workers; designating older women as a distinct priority group in national violence against women plans; and mandating coordinated referral protocols between domestic male violence and aged care systems.
Australia’s failure to protect older women is produced and sustained by the same conditions across every domain we examined: perpetrators erased from the language of policy, data absent or corrupted, and systems that treat ‘older Australians’ as a sex-neutral population. These are not oversights. They are governance choices — and they can and should be changed.
Read our full submission, below.
