Erin Pizzey,
founder of the battered wives' refuge, on how
militant feminists - with the collusion of
Labour's leading women - hijacked her cause and
used it to try to demonise all men.
During 1970, I was
a young housewife with a husband, two children,
two dogs and a cat. We lived in Hammersmith,
West London, and I didn't see much of my husband
because he worked for TV's Nationwide. I was
lonely and isolated, and longed for something
other than the usual cooking, cleaning and
housework to enter my life.
By the early
Seventies, a new movement for women - demanding
equality and rights - began to make headlines in
the daily newspapers. Among the jargon, I read
the words "solidarity" and "support". I
passionately believed that women would no longer
find themselves isolated from each other, and in
the future could unite to change our society for
the better.
Within a few days
I had the address of a local group in Chiswick,
and I was on my way to join the Women's
Liberation Movement. I was asked to pay £3 and
ten shillings as a joining fee, told to call
other women "sisters" and that our meetings were
to be called "collectives".
My fascination
with this new movement lasted only a few months.
At the huge "collectives", I heard shrill women
preaching hatred of the family. They said the
family was not a safe place for women and
children. I was horrified at their virulence and
violent tendencies. I stood on the same
platforms trying to reason with the leading
lights of this new organisation.
I ended up being
thrown out by the movement. My crime was to warn
some of the women working in the Women's
Liberation Movement office off Shaftesbury
Avenue that if it persisted in cooperating with
a plan to bomb Biba, a fashionable clothes shop
in Kensington, I would call the police.
Biba was bombed
because the women's movement thought it was a
capitalist enterprise devoted to sexualising
women's bodies.
I decided that I
was wasting my time trying to influence what, to
my mind, was a Marxist/ feminist movement
touting for money from gullible women like
myself.
By that time, I'd
met a small group of women in my area who agreed
with me. We persuaded Hounslow council to give
us a tiny house in Belmont Terrace in Chiswick.
We had two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs,
a kitchen and an outside lavatory. We installed
a telephone and typewriter, and we were in
business.
Every day after
dropping my children at school, I went to our
little house, which we called the Women's Aid.
Soon women from all over Chiswick were coming to
ask for help. At last we had somewhere women
could meet each other and bring their children.
My long, lonely days were over.
But then something
happened that made me understand that our role
was going to be more than just a forum where
women could exchange ideas. One day, a lady came
in to see us. She took off her jersey, and we
saw that she was bruised and swollen across her
breasts and back. Her husband had taken a chair
leg to her. She looked at me and said: "No one
will help me."
For a moment I was
somersaulted back in time. I was six years old,
standing in front of a teacher at school. My
legs were striped and bleeding from a whipping I
had received from an ironing cord. "My mother
did this to me last night," I said. "No wonder,"
replied the teacher. "'You're a dreadful child."
No one would help
me then and nobody would ever imagine that my
beautiful, rich mother - who was married to a
diplomat - could be a violent abuser.
Until that moment
35 years later, I had buried my past and assumed
that because we had social workers, probation
officers, doctors, hospitals and solicitors,
victims of violence had enough help.
I quickly
discovered, as battered women with their
children poured into the house, that whatever
was going on behind other people's front doors
was seen as nobody else's business.
If someone was
beaten up on the street, it was a criminal
offence; the same beating behind a closed door
was called "a domestic"' and the police had no
rights or power to interfere.
The shocking fact
for me was that there had been a deafening
silence on the subject of domestic violence.
All the social
agencies knew about domestic violence, but
nobody talked about it. I searched for
literature to help me understand this epidemic,
but there was nothing to read except a few
articles on child abuse in medical journals.
So in 1974 I
decided to write Scream Quietly Or The
Neighbours Will Hear, the first book in the
world on domestic violence. I revealed that
women and children were being abused in their
own homes and they couldn't escape because the
law wouldn't protect them.
If a husband
claimed he would have his wife back, she
couldn't claim any money from the Department of
Health and Social Security, and social services
could only offer to take the children into care.
Meanwhile, our
little house was packed with women fleeing their
violent partners - sometimes as many as 56
mothers and children in four rooms. All had
terrible stories, but I recognised almost
immediately that not all the women were
innocent. Some were as violent as the men, and
violent towards their children.
The social workers
involved with these women told me I was wasting
my time because the women would only return to
their partners.
I was determined
to try to break the chain of violence. But as
the local newspaper picked up the story of our
house, I grew worried about a very different
threat.
I knew that the
radical feminist movement was running out of
national support because more sensible women had
shunned their anti-male, anti-family agenda. Not
only were they looking for a cause, they also
wanted money.
In 1974, the women
living in my refuge organised a meeting in our
local church hall to encourage other groups to
open refuges across the country.
We were astonished
and frightened that many of the radical lesbian
and feminist activists that I had seen in the
collectives attended. They began to vote
themselves into a national movement across the
country.
After a stormy
argument, I left the hall with my abused mothers
- and what I had most feared happened.
In a matter of
months, the feminist movement hijacked the
domestic violence movement, not just in Britain,
but internationally.
Our grant was
given to them and they had a legitimate reason
to hate and blame all men. They came out with
sweeping statements which were as biased as they
were ignorant. "All women are innocent victims
of men's violence," they declared.
They opened most
of the refuges in the country and banned men
from working in them or sitting on their
governing committees.
Women with alcohol
or drug problems were refused admittance, as
were boys over 12 years old. Refuges that let
men work there were refused affiliation.
Our group in
Chiswick worked with as many refuges as we
could. Good, caring women still work in refuges
across the country, but many women working in
the feminist refuges, about 350, admit they are
failing women who most need them.
With the first
donation we received in 1972, we employed a male
playgroup leader because we felt our children
needed the experience of good, gentle men. We
devised a treatment programme for women who
recognised that they, too, were violent and
dysfunctional. And we concentrated on children
hurt by violence and sexual abuse.
Yet the feminist
refuges continued to create training programmes
that described only male violence against women.
Slowly, the police and other organisations were
brainwashed into ignoring the research that was
proving men could also be victims.
Despite attacks in
the Press from feminist journalists and
threatening anonymous telephone calls, I
continued to argue that violence was a learned
pattern of behaviour from early childhood.
When, in the
mid-Eighties, I published Prone To Violence,
about my work with violence-prone women and
their children, I was picketed by hundreds of
women from feminist refuges, holding placards
which read: "All men are bastards" and "All men
are rapists".
Because of violent
threats, I had to have a police escort around
the country.
It was bad enough
that this relatively small group of women was
influencing social workers and police. But I
became aware of a far more insidious development
in the form of public policy-making by powerful
women, which was creating a poisonous attitude
towards men.
In 1990, Harriet
Harman (who became a Cabinet minister), Anna
Coote (who became an adviser to Labour's
Minister for Women) and Patricia Hewitt (yes,
she's in the Labour Cabinet, too!) expressed
their beliefs in a social policy paper called
The Family Way.
It said: "It
cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an
asset to family life, or that the presence of
fathers in families is necessarily a means to
social harmony and cohesion."
It was a
staggering attack on men and their role in
modern life.
Hewitt, in a book
by Geoff Dench called Transforming Men published
in 1995, said: "But if we want fathers to play a
full role in their children's lives, then we
need to bring men into the playgroups and
nurseries and the schools. And here, of course,
we hit the immediate difficulty of whether we
can trust men with children."
In 1998, however,
the Home Office published a historic study which
stipulated that men as well as women could be
victims of domestic violence.
With that report
in my hand, I tried to reason with Joan Ruddock,
who was then Minister for Women. The figures for
battered men were "minuscule" she insisted and
she continued to refer to men only as
"perpetrators".
For nearly four
decades, these pernicious attitudes towards
family life, fathers and boys have permeated the
thinking of our society to such an extent that
male teachers and carers are now afraid to touch
or cuddle children.
Men can be accused
of violence towards their partners and sexual
abuse without evidence. Courts discriminate
against fathers and refuse to allow them access
to their children on the whims of vicious
partners.
Of course, there
are dangerous men who manipulate the court
systems and social services to persecute their
partners and children. But by blaming all men,
we have diluted the focus on this minority of
men and pushed aside the many men who would be
willing to work with women towards solutions.
I believe that the
feminist movement envisaged a new Utopia that
depended upon destroying family life. In the new
century, so their credo ran, the family unit
will consist of only women and their children.
Fathers are dispensable. And all that was yoked
- unforgivably - to the debate about domestic
violence.
To my mind, it has
never been a gender issue - those exposed to
violence in early childhood often grow up to
repeat what they have learned, regardless of
whether they are girls or boys.
I look back with
sadness to my young self and my vision that
there could be places where people - men, women
and children who have suffered physical and
sexual abuse - could find help, and if they were
violent could be given a second chance to learn
to live peacefully.
I believe that
vision was hijacked by vengeful women who have
ghetto-ised the refuge movement and used it to
persecute men. Surely the time has come to
challenge this evil ideology and insist that men
take their rightful place in the refuge
movement.
We need an
inclusive movement that offers support to
everyone that needs it. As for me - I will
always continue to work with
anyone
who needs my help or can help others - and yes,
that includes men.
Erin
Pizzey, international founder of refuges
(shelters) for victims of domestic violence,
United Kingdom:
“For the last 30 years the UN has been
infiltrated and brain-washed by feminist
activists, thus the UN has published its Study
on Violence against Women. This study is a
Chimera* and must be resisted by everyone.
* Chimera: A fire-breathing female monster with
a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail (Greek
mythology)”
