GENERATIONAL CONFLICT AS A MOTIVATION FOR VIOLENCE AGAINST OLDER PEOPLE IN BRAZIL

Abstract

Violence against the elderly has among its main reasons generational conflicts, resulting from divergences between people from different generations, with different social, cultural and economic values. This study aims to analyze aspects of violence against the elderly motivated by generational conflict. This is a cross-sectional, analytical study, with data on notifications of interpersonal and self-inflicted violence from the Diseases and Notification Information System, in 2019, in Brazil. Poisson regression analyses were performed, with robust variance, to estimate the crude and adjusted Prevalence Ratio (PR), with a 95% Confidence Interval (95%CI) between violence motivated by generational conflict and the victim's sociodemographic profile, types of violence, ties/kinship with the aggressor, and suspicion of alcohol use by the aggressor. The significance level was set at 5%. There are records of 23,698 notifications for violence against people aged 60 to 120 years, 24.3% of which were motivated by generational conflicts. This motivation was lower in prevalence for elderly people with secondary education (PR = 0.967) when compared to those with or without complete primary education; and was associated with physical (PR = 1.069), psychological (PR = 1.066) and financial (PR = 1.064) violence. An association was also observed with the aggressors children (PR = 1.089) and with suspected alcohol use (PR = 1.055).  A lower prevalence of violence due to generational conflicts was found among adult aggressors (PR = 0.847) and elderly people (PR = 0.900) compared to those up to 19 years of age. Violence motivated by generational conflicts against the elderly was perpetrated more frequently by children, followed by suspected alcohol users and children/adolescents. The high occurrence of violence associated with generational conflict suggests the need to break this public health problem. Generational conflicts are subject to modification, and it is considered that health education in the family environment could contribute to the promotion of peaceful coexistence between different generations, children/adolescents and the elderly.