The population aging process brought emerging themes, including abuse of elderly people. Because of its bio-psycho-social character, the issue claims deeper research and urgent solutions. The lack of information about the various sides of elderly abuse contributes to the perpetration of those acts of violence. Facing this situation, this paper aims to produce a wide up-to-date review on the literature though describing the categories of abuse, the typology of offenders and victims, most frequent places where those offences happens and indexes, epidemiology, instruments for detection and proposals for addressing this concern. It was based mainly on data collected during recent years of scientific research (from 2001 to 2008). Different obstacles were faced, such as absence of updated epidemiologic data which could reveal the real dimension of the problem, besides the short scientific exploitation on the various sides of this sort of violence. The paper also intends to emphasize the need of future scientific production on this issue, since a better understanding and research will allow better conditions for prevention, detection and suitable behavior to address violence against elderly population, either by institutions and professionals, from the healthcare area or not, or by the elderly themselves, who need more support and orientation.
Elder Abuse; Violence; Aged; Domestic Violence; Data Collection; Investigation Resources