Violência contra mulheres velhas e as expressões da necropolítica: um estudo sobre as denúncias efetuadas no Ministério Público do Estado da Bahia

Abstract

The growing aging population, changes in the family and the fact of living longer have increased the need for care, reinforced by the Covid-19 pandemic. This scenario is installed in a neoliberal sociocultural and political context, marked by the withdrawal of rights, ageism, familism, reprivatization of old age and necropolitics, generating violence permeated by class, gender, race and generational oppression. In this sense, neoliberalism feeds and is fed by necropolitics, transforming rights into services, making individuals responsible for the way they age and their families for not being able to assume the responsibilities that would belong to the State, such as the right to care and social protection. As a result, women are doubly penalized, especially black and poor women, either because they are the ones who take on the role of care, sometimes growing old caring for more than one generation, or because they grow older alone and more fragile, not counting on care for themselves. your condition. Not indiscriminately, the most recurrent type of violence against old age is neglect and older women are the most affected. Thus, the research had the general objective of analyzing the expressions of necropolitics in violence against old women, during the Covid-19 pandemic in the city of Salvador, based on the cases reported to the Public Ministry of the State of Bahia. To achieve this objective, we set out specific objectives to identify cases of violence against old women that reveal themselves as expressions of necropolitics; understand the specificities of violence against older women such as necropolitics and gender inequality during the Covid-19 pandemic; as well as verifying the referrals given by the agency to reported cases and their developments. To this end, we used the qualitative approach of documentary research on administrative procedures that deal with violence against old women, whose complaints were forwarded to the MPBA and directed to the actions of CATI/CAODH, in the interval between March 2020 and May 2023, the period of Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. The documentary research was based on an ethnography of documents through a critical, gerontological and feminist understanding of this material, finding as results that necropolitics in old age is expressed in different ways, such as in the denial of rights, in the obstacle to their social political participation , in social devaluation, in the responsibility of individuals and families for the way old age is experienced, in the lack of support for caregivers and in the different types of violence against long-lived people, especially black and poor people. The findings also indicate that judicialization has been configured as a route to access rights and that violence against older women is related to the neoliberal, ageist, patriarchal, racist and necropolitical context that defines which lives matter and that fuels violence in the private sphere, therefore This cannot be analyzed separately from structural violence.