A middle-aged man, in the midst of a divorce, loses his job and asks if he can move in with his elderly, widowed mother - for just a short time until he gets organized. As the days turn into weeks, he slowly but surely begins to take over her small apartment. Mom can't watch TV or move around freely in the apartment because he sleeps on the sofa - both day and night. So he suggests that he move to the bedroom and she sleep on the sofa.

Then, he offers to do her shopping and buy her medicine, but he has no money. So he asks for her credit card. He also offers to do her banking and takes control of her money. As time goes on and he still has no job, he begins to get nervous and starts to yell at her, threatening to put her in home if she protests. He fires the caregiver who comes a few times a week to help - isolating mom even more.

As his outbursts become increasingly violent, his anguished mother, now totally dependent on him, is torn between complex feelings of guilt, love and self-preservation.

This is the representative case in a film by JDC-ESHEL (a Hebrew acronym for the Association for Planning and Development of Services for the Aged in Israel, a non-profit supported by the government and the Joint Distribution Committee), as part of efforts to raise awareness of elder abuse, a subject that has only recently entered public consciousness in Israel.

Despite recent headlines about institutional abuse by caregivers or violence against the elderly by strangers, the film presents what is, unfortunately, the true face of elder abuse in Israel today: a family affair.

A nationwide study published in 2005, which was conducted by the University of Haifa's Department of Gerontology and School of Social Work, found that 18.4 percent (as opposed to between 4% to 10% in most Western countries) of the elderly interviewed (women over 60 and men over 65 living at home) had suffered from abuse during the year preceding the survey - and 90% of this abuse was committed by family members, either the victim's spouse or children.

So what is going on in Israel? "It all depends on how one defines abuse," explains Noa Stollman, who deals with elder abuse in the Department for Aging of the Jerusalem Municipality's Social Services Department.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines elder abuse as "a single or repeated act, or lack of appropriate action, occurring in a framework in which there is an expectation of trust, which causes harm or distress to an older person."

"In the Israeli survey, a very wide definition was used that included neglect," Stollman continues. "Other countries look only at physical, psychological and financial abuse."

The University of Haifa study, which included both Jews and Arabs, found only 2% of the abuse to be physical, 6.6% financial and 14.2% verbal. The largest percentage of abuse (some 18%) involved neglect - either active or passive.

"What we are seeing here in the field in Jerusalem bears out the results of this survey," Stollman adds. "Almost all the abuse is by family members. It is sad that the very people who should be the support system of the elderly are the ones abusing them."

And apparently the older and frailer the elderly person is, the more he or she is apt to fall prey to abuse. A 2006 survey, carried out among patients admitted to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa and Jerusalem's Hadassah-University Hospital at Ein Kerem, found that 25.6% suffered from abuse, 7% of it physical. Women are more likely to be victims than men, both because they live longer and are less financially independent. Arab women are the most vulnerable to physical abuse.