Grant: Summer Program in Aging

Despite the heavily documented association between natural disasters and other forms of interpersonal violence including child abuse and intimate partner violence, there remains a significant gap in assessing how natural disasters influence elder abuse prevalence (Seddighi et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2025). My current research proposal intends to begin to fill this gap by assessing whether extreme weather events and natural disasters such as earthquakes affect elder abuse prevalence, likely as a result of contextual stress (Weissberger et al., 2022). My proposed methodology is a quantitative analysis using pre- and post-climate event data to compare the prevalence of elder abuse cases as reported to local and provincial authorities such as the Public Guardian and Trustee and VictimLink BC in the context of the 2021 BC heat dome. I will then focus on developing an elder abuse disaster-response strategy, similar to the child abuse framework that has been proposed by Agrawal & Kelly (2020).