October 5, 2021

10:10

Cassandra Castro – from Cenarium

BRASILIA – The Senior Citizens Statute completed 18 years of age, last Friday, 1st, but, despite its “adulthood”, there are still many challenges ahead, such as the very ignorance of the Law no. 10.741, from October 2003. For the president of the State Council of the Elderly in Amazonas, Kennya Mota Brito, the rights contained in the Statute are still little known by the elderly themselves, their families, and society.

“What is missing to guarantee the rights, the citizenship condition of the elderly population, is precisely knowledge”, says Kennya, who is also a social worker and has a PhD in Biomedical Gerontology, also pointing out the need for a multi-sectorial dialogue to deal with issues directly related to this population.

Even with the barrier of the lack of knowledge about the Elderly Statute, this population, in Manaus, has a structure that is privileged to some extent, assesses Kennya. “There are living together centers, police stations, an integrated center for the protection and defense of the elderly, and the FUnATI [Fundação Universidade Aberta da Terceira Idade], which is the only one in Brazil with a structure totally focused on aging”, she points out.

Kennya Brito also comments on another difficulty imposed by the geography of the State of Amazonas: the difficult logistics and the access, often precarious, to the internet.

For the federal lawmaker José Ricardo (PT/AM), the care for the elderly should be an absolute priority, as determined by law. The parliamentarian criticized last week the reduction of resources in the Union Budget, in the area of Social Assistance, which serves actions and projects aimed at this population: in 2019, it was R$ 1.7 billion, but, in 2021, it went to only R$ 1.3 billion.

José Ricardo views with concern the lack of more inclusive public policies for the elderly population in Brazil. “The aging process requires quality of life, as proposed by the UN, but this requires municipal, state, and federal public investments in the areas of health, sports and leisure, and even income generation, to complement retirements and pensions,” he concluded.
Violence

In the first four months of this year (January to April), in Manaus, the most populated capital city of the Amazon, the crimes committed against the elderly reached a register of 2,929 occurrences, which represented an average of 24.4 cases of violence per day, according to a survey done by CENARIUM. The data were from the Integrated Center for Security Operations (Ciops) of the Amazonas Secretary of Public Security (SSP-AM).

According to SSP-AM, the number of cases in the first four months of 2021, although high, is still lower than the amount recorded last year, when 2,998 occurrences involving violence against the elderly were recorded, that is, 69 more cases than in the same period this year.

Still according to the folder, in these first four months of 2021, 478 cases of theft were registered having elderly people as victims. The other occurrences vary from theft, threat, insult, stelion, bodily injury, discrimination, mistreatment, among others.

In numbers, theft records account for 478 cases; loss/loss occurrences for 196 cases; robbery for 170 cases; threats for 169 cases; and insult for 133 cases. There are also episodes of swindling (110 cases); cybercrimes (52); bodily injury (41); discrimination against the elderly (25); and mistreatment (12), in addition to other facts reported by the Integrated Public Safety System.

In comparison with 2019, however, the data from the SSP-AM of 2020 and 2021 are greater. This is because the folder recorded, in the same period two years ago, the total of 2,443 occurrences of violence to the elderly.