On November 18th-19th 2019, the kick-off meeting of the project MARVOW – Multi-Agency Responses to Violence against Older Women took place in Vienna. The project is funded by the 2018 Rights, Equality and Citizenship Work Programme of the European Commission. The project partners are the Austrian Women’s Shelters Network (AÖF), the WAVE Network, the European Network for the Work with Perpetrators of Domestic Violence (WWP EN), the Union of Women Associations of Heraklion Prefecture (UWAH), the University of Tartu (UT) and the Women’s Support and Information Centre (WSIC).

The MARVOW project will develop and implement a comprehensive multiagency cooperation model for working with elderly victims of abuse. It will do so by bringing together a wide range of stakeholders from relevant sectors of activity (eldercare, healthcare, protection and social services, judiciary and police among others) to identify the gaps that exist within current systems that hinder their ability to adequately serve older victims. MARVOW will also assist these actors in implementing direct interventions to support victims and work with perpetrators to try and break the cycle of violence. The model will be extensively evaluated and improved before being disseminated to a wide audience of policy makers and service providers in partner countries (Austria, Estonia, Greece, Germany) and throughout Europe for replication.

For more information on the project, feel free to conact Elena Floriani, WAVE Dissemination Coordinator for WAVE: elena.floriani@wave-network.org