The second Sunday of Advent was Human Rights Sunday and the Catholic Times published an article on the aging of Korean society and the problems that arise. This whole week is a time for the Catholics to reflect on the social aspects of our spiritual life.
According to the government, Korea will enter a super-aging society around 2025. A super-aging society is a situation where the population aged 65 or older accounts for more than 20% of the total population. This figure is 18.7% as of September this year. In the Korean Church, all parishes have already entered the super-aging society index in 2021. Looking at last year's church statistics, the proportion of believers over 65 years old accounts for 26.4%.
Due to the rapid increase in the elderly population, various related problems such as poverty and people living alone are seen. Elderly abuse is also on the rise. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s ‘2022 Elderly Abuse Status Report’, the number of elderly abuse cases has increased every year over the past five years. The number of repeat abuses is also increasing. The place where it happens most is at home.
Recently, a 78-year-old man was handed over from the police to the Seoul Metropolitan Government Southern Senior Protection Agency. Mr. A, who had let his son live with him in a rented room, squandered the father's life savings and was kicked out by his son who didn’t want to support his father. His son changed the front door password so his father could not enter the house. Mr. A, who had not been able to eat, was severely undernourished and was found wandering the streets without shoes by a neighbor.
Mr. A lived in a shelter for three months with the help of an agency. He kept silent about his son's neglect and abuse during the administrative process of becoming a national basic welfare recipient.
These and similar cases show that even though the children abandoned their parents, parents could not let go of their grief for their child. The United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO) established June 15 as World Elder Abuse Awareness Day in 2006 to raise awareness of the seriousness of elder abuse.
Domestic abuse refers to abuse not only by family members living in the same household, such as spouses and adult children but also by other relatives, such as caregivers who do not live in the same household.
The reasons behind the increase in abuse include changes in household structure, the burden of care, and the stress of raising children. In particular, the number of single-family households for the elderly is rapidly increasing, life expectancy is getting longer, and ‘elderly care’, where the elderly care for the elderly, is also increasing. It increased from 36.2% in 2018 to 42.2% in 2022.
Even if they are spouses, there are physical and mental limitations in caring for the elderly, which leads to abuse. Until now, abuse by ‘sons’ was the most common, but from 2021, abuse by ‘spouses’ is taking up the largest proportion. According to the ‘Comprehensive Report on Human Rights of the Elderly’ published by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea in 2018, 51.5% of the elderly and 87.6% of the young and middle-aged answered ‘yes’ to the item— ‘Conversation between the elderly and young adults does not go well’.
In this situation, to prevent abuse of the elderly, ‘establishing a culture of empathy and respect between generations’ and ‘improving negative perceptions of the elderly’ are considered basic solutions. Experts say: “To create a culture of generational empathy and respect, efforts must be made to reflect this in the education process for children and youth.”
Specifically, because abuse has the characteristic of being concealed and repeated continuously at home, if circumstances of abuse are discovered, it must be immediately reported and the cycle of continued abuse must be broken through professional intervention.
In churches that have already surpassed the super-aging society index, active measures are requested to increase the proportion of the elderly in decision-making bodies such as pastoral councils, taking into account the proportion of the elderly. Although the situation varies from parish to parish, the reality is that there are not many organizations in which seniors can participate.
The article concludes with the words of a religious sister working with the elderly: "The spirituality of old age is to live so that aging is not a disability but a completion of life. The power that maintains the current church is the faith of the elderly, so pastoral methods that embrace the elderly need to be considered.
In addition, she added: "It is also important to enable the elderly to fulfill the role of transmitters of the faith through their experience and seniority, such as providing opportunities to tell stories of faith to the young."
