ABSTRACT
In October of 1976, the National Center for the Prevention and Control of Rape (National Institute of Mental Health) awarded a one-year grant to the Philadelphia Geriatric Center to prepare a report on the sexual assault of elderly women. In the resulting report, Davis and Brody (1979) observed that, “There was virtually no information about rape and older women, nor had specific programs been developed.” What is more remarkable is that — after twenty years of progress identifying the precursors, the course, and the treatment of sexually aggressive and coercive behavior — nothing more is known today about the sexual abuse of the elderly than was known in 1979 (Crowell and Burgess, 1996). Indeed, the decade of the nineties catapulted sexual assault from relative obscurity to high profile in the legal and public health arenas (Goodman, Koss, Fitzgerald, Russo, and Keita, 1993; Koss, 1993; Prentky and Burgess, 2000). Despite the considerable attention given to the diversity and ubiquity of sexual assault, one of the most vulnerable groups of victims — the elderly — remains in obscurity. Although the reasons for our failure to tackle the problem of elder sexual abuse are unclear, we can certainly posit two explanations: (1) the incomprehensibility, and hence rejection, of claims of sexual assault of the elderly, and, perhaps most importantly, (2) ageism — generalized, negative attitudes, if not outright hostility — toward older people (Butler and Lewis, 1973; Davis and Brody, 1979).
