The Abused: Older Women Raise Voices in New Research

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"There was a joke about a couple. The man was 105 and his wife was 95 and they decided to separate after 70 years of marriage. When they were asked why they had waited so long to separate, they said they were waiting for the children to die. . . . Well, in some ways that joke demonstrates that people in older generations did not so much not separate because of domestic abuse, but it was more like they didn 't have a concept of separation. It is really rare to hear of an older couple separating, very rare, because, well, if you spend 50 years together, why not pass the next 30 years together too? I think that violence, fights and arguments must exist, but it is harder to make the decision …