Mean old girls: Seniors who bully

Bullying doesn't always end in high school — it also happens in retirement communities

By Diane Mapes
When Nancy Murphy moved into a retirement community near Portland, Ore., she didn't realize she'd actually traveled back in time.
"I came into breakfast one morning and this woman sitting at a nearby table sees me and says, 'Well, would you look at the new girl? She has WET HAIR!'" says Murphy, a 75-year-old retired schoolteacher. "She did this three mornings in a row. Then I found a flyer in my mailbox with a copy of the house dress rules. I know she tucked it in there."
Murphy, who's lived at the facility just under two months, says she ignores the woman's jabs — "I refer to her as Harriet High School" — but others at the nursing home have confided they're afraid of her.

"I had dinner with two gentlemen the other night and they said she terrifies them," she says. "That she's dictatorial, demanding, critical — classic bully behavior."
While much scrutiny and study has been devoted to bullying in grade school and high school these last few years, less attention has been paid to another category of bullies: those with gray hair, false teeth, hearing aids and canes. But according to experts, gray-haired bullies do exist and, as with their younger counterparts, their behavior can run the gamut from verbal intimidation to physical violence.
"It's kind of an institutional thing," says gerontology expert Robin Bonifas, an assistant professor at Arizona State University School of Social Work, who's currently researching senior-to-senior bullying. "It tends to take place in senior centers or nursing homes or assisted living facilities, places where they're spending a lot of time and need to share resources, whether it's chairs or tables or TV stations or staff attention."
Mary Noriega, a 64-year-old from Phoenix, says she has had run-ins with a group of "mean girls" at the senior complex where she and her husband moved a year and a half ago.
"I've endured a lot of bullying," she says. "There's a clique here of probably 20 women and they feel they control the property. I'm their kicking stone."
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Noriega says the women in the group gossip about her ("One piece of gossip that went around was that we'd been evicted from our last apartment," she says); spread lies about her; discourage other residents from befriending her and give her dirty looks whenever she tries to use community facilities, like the rec room.
"No one should have to deal with the harassment I've endured," she says. "The first six months I lived here, I used to sit in my apartment and just cry. I've never dealt with anybody like this before."
These days, Noriega is gathering evidence ("I've got a briefcase crammed full of information about the harassment I've endured") and is turning to outside agencies like the local city council and ASU's School of Social Work in order to get help for her — and other residents — with the bullying problem.
Age-old problem
This kind of problem is nothing new to Gina Kaurich, an executive director at FirstLight HomeCare, who previously worked as a director of nursing at an assisted living facility outside of Dayton, Ohio, for several years.
"There is, in some regard, a caste system among residents," Kaurich says. "There would be an elitist type of table in the dining room where you had people who could eat and drink and carry on conversations very well together. And if an individual who had trouble eating tried to sit with them, they would ignore them or say, 'Why do you always seem to drop your fork?' They'd speak meanly to them. It was like high school."
Kaurich says even fun activities like singing weren't immune from bully behavior.
"In the recreation room, if somebody didn't participate the way somebody else thought they should, you'd see them get into that person's face," she says. "They'd be literally shaking their finger and saying, 'How dare you call out Bingo when you don't have a Bingo!' or 'How dare you sing that hymn that way!' Even if the person was in a wheelchair, they'd be looking down at them, shaking their finger in their face."
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Doris Lor, a 76-year-old retired secretary, told the Arizona Republicthat when she moved to an age-restricted retirement community in Chandler, Ariz., her new neighbors yelled at her whenever she walked into the recreation center and refused to let her sit at the club's card tables or community pool.
The bullies were part of a "clique … that is meaner than mean," she says.
Estimated 10 to 20 percent of seniors bullied
There's little published research on elderly bullying, but Bonifas estimates about 10 to 20 percent of seniors have experienced some type of senior-to-senior aggression in an institutional setting, much of it verbal abuse.
Both men and women can bully, she says, but women tend towards passive-aggressive behavior like gossiping and whispering about people when they enter a room while men are more "in your face".
"With men, it's more negative comments directly to the person," she says "With women, it's more behind your back."
But it doesn't always stop at back-biting and bickering. Seniors have also been the victims of violence, she says, sometimes over something as trivial as a coveted spot at the dinner table.
"At one facility where I worked, there wasn't assigned seating so residents would tend to claim ownership at certain tables," she says. "And one time, a woman was sitting at a table having a cup of coffee and another resident came in and saw her seated at 'his' table and started yelling at her. She yelled back. And then he hit her — with his fist."
According to Bonifas, incidents like these are all part of a pattern of behavior.
Dementia and violence
"There's kind of a continuum to this aggressive behavior," she says. "Bullying would be on the lower end of the spectrum and at the higher end, you'll have actual incidents of violence between seniors. They could be hitting each other, kicking each other; there have actually been deaths."

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