The objective was to understand the social representations of violence and abuse against the elderly, disseminated by the printed communications media from São Paulo and Paraíba. Documental research was carried out with 126 documentary news reports from Folha de S. Paulo and O Norte (Paraíba), whose texts were analyzed by Hierarchical Ratings Descending and Ascending, processed by the software Alceste. The spread of social representations of violence against the elderly found themselves polarized between the two newspapers: the one from Paraíba highlighted the themes of rights and public policies, the one from São Paulo emerged the occurrence of violence, the elderly as victims and their abusers, in a police perspective. It is inferred that the production and dissemination of knowledge through the newspapers reveal the hegemonic social representations of society in order to print a strain on social subjects, demanding psychosocial interventions in various segments of society, expecially when dealing with a phenomenon extremely complex which is the violence against the elderly.
Printed communications media; violence against the elderly; social representations
