Prone
to Violence by Erin Pizzey
Erin Pizzey
founded the first refuge for battered wives in 1971. As a result
of that work there is now refuge all over the world. She is also
a writer and a journalist. She has two children and two grandchildren
from her first marriage. She has written: Scream Quietly or the
Neighbors Will Hear, Infernal Child and The Slut's Cookbook. The
events and incidents referred to in this book are based on the authors'
personal experience and information given to them. The names of
the persons referred to in the text work have been altered and all
reasonable steps have been taken to ensure that they are not identifiable.
Author's
Preface
The premise of our work is that every baby needs to feel love and
happiness. A baby will bond these instinctive feelings to whatever
people and situations are available. It is the birth-right of every
child to be surrounded by nurturing and loving parents in an atmosphere
of peace. In a non-violent family, a child grows up in such an atmosphere,
and then, working from the secure base of being loved, will develop
an independent and choosing self that is able to recreate happy
love both in future relationships and with its own children. In
a violent family, however, this birthright to love and peace is
betrayed, because from the moment of conception the child lives
in a world where emotional and physical pain and danger are always
present. The child then bonds to pain. This bonding becomes an addiction
to pain. The child then cannot grow to form an independent self,
because he or she is slave to this addiction. Throughout life, the
person then recreates situations of violence and pain, for those
situations stir the only feelings of love and satisfaction the person
has ever known.
Whether
the children of violent families learn to find satisfaction through
the inflicting or the receiving of emotional and physical pain,
the violence that these people live on is merely an expression of
pain. The role of the caring community is to undo this fundamental
betrayal of people who have been emotionally disabled by their violent
childhoods. By creating a loving environment in which deep internal
work can be done to help violence-prone people to understand and
to overcome their addiction to pain, these people can then learn
to trust and be happy in love instead of pain.
This book
records ten years of work in such a community, along with the techniques
and insights gained through these years. The work now continues
in Britain through Women's Aid Ltd., which runs a house in Bristol.
The Author 19 February 1982
Introduction
The idea of a meeting place for women and their children grew out
of my disastrous brush with a local group of the newly emergent
Women's Movement in 1971. I was then feeling lonely and isolated,
with two small children to care for, and a husband frequently away.
When I first began to read the articles that other women were writing,
I felt they were writing about me. It was certainly a liberation
to find I was not the only woman who could not knit or sew, and
that there were other women out there who shared my pathological
hatred of housework. I began to look out for our nearest group.
Unfortunately
that group, in particular, seemed to be more concerned with world
politics than with my day-to4ay problems, like how to cope on my
own with two children, two dogs and a cat - for the loneliness was
sometimes dreadful. Luckily I did meet some women like myself who
wanted not only to bring up their children properly at home, but
also to use their energies and talents in improving our community
life, so that we would no longer feel so cut off and isolated that
we lived our lives on valium. Therefore we left it to the women's
group to decide the solution for world problems, and got on with
the more immediate task of finding a place where mothers could meet
each other and bring their children.
So with
two of my friends I began to scout round Hounslow for a little house
to use as a women's centre. Eventually Hounslow Council wrote to
me about No.2 Belmont Terrace, and I collected the keys. When I
first opened the door, I burst into tears - it was derelict. But
it was ours! By now our group had grown quite large, and we determinedly
got on with the work. Harry Ferrer, our plumber, showed us how to
fit pipes and mend washers, and we completely renovated the building
until one day it was ready for occupation.
Mothers
living locally began to call by on their way to and from school.
They would stop in for a chat or to share a problem with us. Gradually
we all pooled our knowledge and began to learn the complex Social
Security laws. We discovered that many women would come to see us
who could not face anything as authoritarian-seeming as a town-hall
or a Social Services department. We had created a very happy little
community of people from all walks of life, who knew that any time
they were lonely or in need of company they just had to go down
to No.2 Belmont Terrace, and someone was almost sure to be there
to talk to. And even when no one was there, it was still a warm,
welcoming place to take your kids. Then home did not seem so much
like a prison.
All this
changed the day the first battered woman walked through the front
door and showed me her bruises. 'No one will help me,' she said.
Those words took me back to a time in my own childhood when no one
would help me - as I begged them to bury my mother because my father
refused to. 'I will help you,' I promised her, and refuge was born.
Within weeks there were at least forty mothers and children packed
into four tiny rooms. Fortunately for me, our predicament was high-lighted
in a small piece written by a journalist for the Observer. After
that a man called by one day and, sitting himself down on a mattress,
asked me what I most needed. 'A new house,' I told him. 'Go and
find it,' he said. I did. This man was Neville Vincent, the Managing
Director of Bovis Ltd. In November 1974 we acquired a much larger
house in Chiswick High Road. However, we were still not out of the
woods. Even as we moved in, our numbers were already too great.
We were still officially overcrowded. Because at that time there
was nowhere else for women to run to, I insisted that no one should
ever be turned away. As a result, although we were legally allowed
to house only thirty-six residents, our numbers sometimes went as
high as one hundred and fifty mothers and children. My colleague
Anne Ashby agreed with me over the 'open door' principle, and we
enshrined it in our policy that the door would remain open day and
night. This, of course, created an unbearable tension between ourselves
and our local Borough, who quite rightly were worried by the overcrowding,
the ensuing health hazard, and the possibility of fire. On 29 April
1976 the Borough first took me to court for overcrowding.
Just before
I was to appear in the Acton Magistrates' Court, I was invited to
tour America with Tina, Nikki, and Annie, who were working with
me at the time. I was genuinely startled and moved that anyone should
consider that we had anything valuable to offer, so I accepted at
once. We flew into New York on 12 March 1976, and visited sixteen
other cities to raise funds for new refuges springing up all over
the USA. I remember that I was particularly interested in finding
if anyone else had come to similar conclusions on why some people
actually choose violent relationships - which is the major theme
of this book. But in response I mostly met again the hostility of
those people who insisted that all women were simply victims of
male oppression. It seems to me that America's Women's Movement
is much more broadly based than its British counterpart. It was
with members of the National Organization of Women that we had the
best dialogues - at seminars and meetings where people wanted to
share a sense of bewilderment arising from the fact that now there
were established refuges, so many women seemed to be merely using
them like revolving doors. They would come to the refuges when the
level of violence got too much, only to return to their violent
men for another few weeks, and then come back to the refuges again
for help.
Some of
the refuges dealt with this problem by allowing such women three
visits only. As they explained to me, this rule meant that the staff
could concentrate their efforts on the women who genuinely wanted
to get out of violent relation-ships. But they knew, just as we
did, that if you wanted to do effective work in a refuge, the problems
attached to women who seemed unable to stay away from violence would
have to be fully explored sooner or later. Our trip ended with a
lunch of honour in Washington DC, sponsored by Congresswoman Lindy
Boggs and Congressman Newton Steer. As I stood to give my speech
in a lovely room surrounded by members of Congress on Capitol Hill,
it was bard not to feel bitter that back home, within a few weeks,
I would be facing charges in an English court for carrying out the
refuge work I was now describing to a supportive audience.
Thanks to
a brilliant manoeuvre on the part of our barrister Stephen Sedly
and David Ormondy, a public health adviser, the Acton Magistrates'
Court found me not guilty of overcrowding. The good news was followed
immediately by bad news. Hounslow appealed, and got ready to take
me to the High Court in the Strand. During this time, through a
series of fortuitous events, we managed to persuade the reluctant
civil servants to give us a grant of £2,000 a month. This
generosity could have had something to do with the threat of our
group arranging a sit-in outside 10 Downing Street. We numbered
about one hundred and twenty mothers and children, and we were already
well known for our immediate ability to get on the streets with
our placards and demand action where necessary. We had received
a reassuring letter saying that our application for a grant would
be considered. However, we heard nothing for several months, and
it was not until October 1974, the day before the publication of
my book Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, that a cheque
arrived by taxi, with a letter from the Department of Health and
Social Security.
Meanwhile,
during the Conservatives' period in office, I had been encouraged
by Sir Keith Joseph to apply for an Urban Aid Grant of £10,000
a year. The Urban Aid scheme was a very new idea in those days.
Hounslow had many other schemes to put forward to the Government,
but due to local pressure and the continued support of a local Labour
councillor, Jim Duffy, they did put my scheme in. To their surprise
and my amusement, it was granted. By this time, help came from another
direction. David Astor had resigned from the Observer and offered
me his services. He brought with him the kindly and powerful figure
of Lord Goodman. Now, at least, Anne Ashby and I were no longer
on our own.
We had a
curious mixture of dedicated staff and volunteers. We scoured London,
taking possession of empty houses belonging to other boroughs which
refused to take financial responsibility for their own families,
who turned up on our doorstep. We took these houses over by night,
to create new communities for such additional families. By the time
of the court cases, Chiswick Women's Aid had established twenty-two
squats, and had also acquired the Palm Court Hotel (forty-five private
suites), three Greater London Council properties, and a large vicarage
in Bristol. Even so, at our main refuge we had to erect large garden
sheds in the backyard to cope with the overflow of one hundred and
fifty mothers and children living in the house.
As the case
in the High Court approached, the battle lines were set, but I was
no longer powerless, or fighting in a vacuum. We had Lord Gordon
on our side, and I felt very much more confident. In the late spring
of 1976, Hounslow took me to the High Court, where I was found guilty
of the charge of overcrowding. We appealed this decision, and the
matter went to the House of Lords in March 1977. There the five
Law Lords reluctantly found me guilty, and I returned to Acton Magistrates'
Court for sentencing. During this time, and responding to so much
publicity, other groups had formed to take up the idea of refuge
for women and children. Many comprised good, loving people, both
men and women, who sincerely wanted to help, but there were also
the usual faces seen around all social movements, and I was wary
enough to stay clear of their politics. I never saw Women's Aid
as a movement that was hostile to men, but The National Federation,
which quickly formed, made it quite clear that men were the enemy.
This view totally rejected our own philosophy - which cannot be
encapsulated in a political theory, but which recognises that the
basis of the problem is a human one: violence occurs in both men
and women. That is not a politically fashionable view in certain
quarters, and, indeed, for them we were outcasts from the very beginning
because we had always employed male workers at our Refuge - and
we also ran a special house for the men of the problem families
who sought our help.
The civil
servants, who hated our open-door policy as much as they hated our
evidence of the mistreatment of problem families by the various
State-run agencies saw their opportunity to get rid of us. They
removed our grant on the grounds that we were not a national organisation,
even though we had been officially declared so by the Charity Commissioners
and our mothers and children came from all over Britain. They handed
the grant to the National Federation instead. At about the same
time, Hounslow Council voted to remove our Urban Aid Grant, thus
hoping to starve us into submission. Fortunately, they did not know
that I had been given a sum of £50,000 by an anonymous well-wisher,
which I had tucked away in bonds for just such an occasion. Those
staff that could afford to all gave up their meagre salaries. Most
of us were volunteers, so that presented little problem, and we
soldiered on.
The final
court case was my sentencing at the Acton Magistrates' Court on
6 October 1977. The following February, in response to a letter
from one of our mothers, the Queen intervened and saved the Refuge.*
The war was over, and the rest is history. This book is not about
the politics of survival for pressure groups, because that is a
whole book in itself. This book is about the problem families and
my (and later Jeff's) work with them. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours
Will Hear is about how people are violent. Infernal Child, my autobiography,
is about how a violent childhood affects children. Prone to Violence
is a book about why people are violent. In these pages we can all
recognise parts of ourselves, and hopefully, in gaining understanding,
we can learn compassion, and in turn help to persuade our society
to refrain from further brutalising already brutalised people.
*The Court sentencing and the letter from Buckingham Palace (quoted
in full) are described in Chapter Five.
http://www.bennett.com/ptv
