Practice Tools
The following is part of our project “Increasing Access to Justice for Older Adult Victims of Sexual Assault: A Capacity Building Approach”, funded by the Justice Canada Victims Fund.Learn more about this project or consult the full list of resources
''This module is adaptable for:
- Seniors and volunteers in the community
- Health-care professionals working in hospitals, community-based agencies,or individuals’ homes
- Retirement Homes
- Long-Term care staff
- Front-line responders
It includes the following:
- Guiding Principles
- Overview and Definition(s)
- Risk factors and Warning Signs
- Assessment Questions
- Interview Strategy
- Safety Planning
- Reporting and Legislation
- Case Studies – Discussion Questions, Fact Boxes, Decision-Trees to assist with navigating supports and interventions
- Provincial Resources/Services
Source: Elder Abuse Ontario
"On World Health Day, April 7, 2018, Battered Women’s Support Services launched the #SomeMenBreakMoreThanHearts initiative, designed to raise awareness of violence against women in intimate relationships, and provide resources to family physicians throughout B.C.
The campaign includes an information and resource kit for general practitioners throughout B.C.. It’s designed to help practitioners better identify and respond to women who may be experiencing violence in an intimate relationship; and offer resources that are available to support women, including immediate safe places to go, crisis support, and ongoing counselling.
The medical community plays a key role in early detection, intervention, provision of specialized treatment and effective referral of survivors of violence in intimate relationships helping alleviate the physical, sexual and emotional consequences."
Source: Battered Women Support Services
"This toolkit is meant to help people and organizations host effective meetings to exchange ideas and respond to the social isolation of seniors in their communities. It contains tools, templates and support resources for hosting an ideas exchange event.
Ideas exchange events:
- help people and groups to share knowledge about the social isolation of seniors
- build and strengthen relationships in communities
- create opportunities for working together to address the social isolation of seniors in the community
For an overview of social isolation of seniors in Canada, consult Social Isolation of Seniors - Volume I: Understanding the issue and finding solutions
"Engaging Older Women in your Community is a promising practices tool developed as an outcome of the Older Women’s Dialogue Project (OWDP). The publication is intended to support your agency to anticipate and address structural barriers to the participation of older women in community initiatives aimed at legal and policy change. We include key questions to explore, tips for enhancing organizational capacity to include older women, and examples from our experience throughout the OWDP. All of the ideas contained in this resource reflect what we learned through our work with older women living in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The quotations are the words of older women who shared their experiences with us. (...)
This guide identifies strategies for engaging older women in meaningful, older womenled volunteering as a method to combat systemic inequalities against older women, and support the leadership potential of older women. The guide will be useful to staff working in the women’s sector, seniors sector, and volunteer organizations, and also to practitioners working in research, community development, program development, policy, and law reform, and in general, for anyone working with older women in Canada."
Source: Canadian Centre for Elder Law
The following resource is part of the Family Violence Initiative, funded by the Department of Justice Canada. Find similar tools by searching for the FVIF tag or consult the list of available resources.
A Handbook for Service Providers on Working with Abused Older Women in British Columbia and Yukon
"Spousal abuse of women over fifty is often relegated by academics and administrators into the all-enveloping category of Elder Abuse rather than understood as being part and parcel of the whole spectrum of violence against women and their children. Some of the challenges faced by service providers are not new. They are the old challenges newly recognized by an ageing generation.Contributing to the lack of knowledge and understanding for service providers on the issue of detecting violence and abuse of older women versus elder abuse is the reluctance of women to disclose, coupled with the expectation that older people are expected to decline in their later years."
Jill Hightower and M.J. (Greta) Smith
Source: B.C./Yukon Society of Transition Houses, 2005 (now B.C. Society of Transition Houses)
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