Essay on Stereotyping and Prejudice against Older People
Relations between people in any society, in any time period and country are not easy, rather versatile and sophisticated process, unfortunately not deprived of different stereotypes and types of discrimination. In the year 1969 Robert Neil Butler used the term “ageism” in relation with discrimination against senior people. According to him ageism presented a combination of three constituent elements: “prejudicial attitudes towards older people, old age, and the aging process; discriminatory practices against older people; and institutional practices and policies that perpetuate stereotypes about older people” (Iversen, Larsen and Solem 4). Further in this paper the notion of ageism will be discussed in detail, taking into consideration its concept, ageist attitudes and finally possible negative impacts, it might have upon elderly people.
In order to have clearer understanding of the key concept, it is necessary to provide a concrete definition to the notion of ageism, thus commonly “”ageism is defined as negative or positive stereotypes, prejudice and/or discrimination against (or to the advantage of) elderly people on the basis of their chronological age or on the basis of a perception of them as being ‘old’ or ‘elderly” (Iversen, Larsen and Solem 20). However there are cases, when this term is used in relation to younger children or adolescents, meaning, that their ideas are not rational because of their young age and their behavior is not correct, because they are too young.
Such notion as ageist stereotyping is usually described as categorization into some groups and giving certain characteristics to these groups of people. Unfortunately most stereotypes are lacking evidences and are too generalized, like for example the statement, that all people, who are getting older, have poor health. The prejudice, that older people are not able to take part in some activities or sports is closely related to the first example about bad health state.
Another example of stereotyping or ageist prejudices is the so –called benevolent prejudice, which means, that elderly people are seen as incompetent and constantly needing patronage. On the one hand, people try to be friendly towards aging people, on the other hand, they a kind of suppress them, but their constant, sometimes unnecessary help.
Most employees are looking for experienced workers, not to teach them all the peculiarities of the work; at the same time, most of them want to have only young and energetic employees and thus often reject new workers, who are older, only based on the prejudice, that they would perform their worker slower and be less flexible.
One of the worst prejudices is probably related to the health care sphere, as there are unfortunately a lot of examples, when physicians don’t pay proper attention to their patients, only based on their age.
This is evident, that ageism has serious negative effects upon elderly people. Hearing all the above mentioned stereotypes every day, from most people around, unfortunately, older people really start to feel themselves not competent, not clearly thinking, depending, useful members of the society. “Studies have also specifically shown that when older and younger people hear these stereotypes about their supposed incompetence and uselessness, they perform worse on measures of competence and memory” (Nelson 13). Certainly some strong personalities are able to overcome those stereotypes and live the way they, want to and do the things, they like to do, without paying much attention to others’ opinions.
Overall, we have studied the notion of ageism, its definition, ageism- related stereotypes and the negative impact, which these stereotypes and prejudices have upon elderly people in any society.
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