Erin Pizzey

Erin Patria Margaret Pizzey (née Carney, born 19 February 1939, China, daughter of a diplomat) is a British family care activist and a best-selling novelist. She became internationally famous for having started one of the first^[1] Women's Refuges (called women's shelters in the U.S.) in the modern world in 1971. She also the founder of UK domestic violence charity Refuge. However, Pizzey reports that she and her work has been the subject of threats and boycotts due to her conclusion that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are just as capable of violence as men.

Overview

She began in the Goldhawk Road, Chiswick, West London where abused women were offered tea, sympathy and a place to stay for them and their children. Pizzey later opened a number of additional shelters despite hostility from the authorities. Pizzey's crucial pioneering work and determined campaigning was widely praised at the time. In 1975 MP Jack Ashley stated in the House of Commons that:

"The work of Mrs. Pizzey was pioneering work of the first order. It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical by establishing the Chiswick aid centre. As a result of that magnificent pioneering work, the whole nation has now come to appreciate the significance of the problem".^[2]

Pizzey said that militant feminists - with the collusion of Labour's leading women - hijacked her cause and used it to try to demonise all men, not only in Britain, but internationally.^[3] After the alleged hijacking the demand for a service for women survivors of domestic violence grew and soon public funding became available. Today the movement has been rebranded as Women's Aid and garners millions of pounds a year from a variety of sources, although primarily from the state. Pizzey has lamented that the movement she started had moved from the "personal to the political".

Soon after establishing her first refuge, Pizzey realised that much domestic violence was reciprocal, with both partners abusing each other in roughly equal rates. She reached this conclusion when she asked the women in her refuge about their violence and she concluded that most of the women were equally violent or more violent as their husbands. In her study "Comparative Study Of Battered Women And Violence-Prone Women,"^[4] (co-researched with Dr. John Gayford of Warlingham Hospital), Pizzey distinguishes between "genuine battered women" and "violence-prone women;" the former defined "the unwilling and innocent victim of his or her partner's violence" and the latter defined as "the unwilling victim of his or her own violence." This study reports that 62% of the sample population were more accurately described as "violence prone." Similar findings regarding the mutuality of most domestic violence have been confirmed in hundreds of subsequent studies.^[5][6]

In her book Prone to Violence (full text available online) Pizzey has propounded the theory that many of the women who took refuge had a personality such that they sought abusive relationships. Pizzey describes such behaviour as akin to addiction. She speculates that high levels of hormones and neurochemicals associated with pervasive childhood trauma lead to adults who repeatedly engage in violent altercations with intimate partners despite the physical, emotional, legal and financial costs, in unwitting attempts to simulate the emotional impact of traumatic childhood experiences. The book contains numerous stories of disturbed families alongside a discussion of the reasons why the modern state care-taking agencies are largely ineffective (one extreme situation was when a woman in the refuge bit off a top of another woman's finger). According to many webpages, Pizzey has said, or has been quoted as saying^[7]: "Men are gentle, honest and straightforward. Women are convoluted, deceptive and dangerous."

Some internet sources make the claim that Prone to Violence was suppressed by feminists (a search of all libraries in the world that could be accessed from the US Library of Congress through the Inter-Library Network in 1996 revealed a total of only thirteen listings worldwide), however there is no evidence to support the assertion. However the organisation Refuge was founded by Pizzey but her name is nowhere to be found on their extensive website - not even in the history section [2]

Pizzey says it was after death threats against her, her children, her grandchildren, and the killing of her dog, all of which she states were perpetrated by feminist activists, ^[8][9] that she left England for North America. She returned to London in the 1990s where her insights were sought by politicians and family pressure groups.

Personal life

Pizzey's daughter, Cleo Scott was married to former Jamaican British Culture Club bassist Mikey Craig from 1977 until 1982.

Current Work

Pizzey is still actively working to help victims of domestic violence. She is a patron of the charity Mankind Initiative‎.^[10]

Libel case

In 2009 Pizzey successfully sued Macmillan Publishers for libel over content in the Andrew Marr book A History of Modern Britain. The publication had falsely claimed she had once been part of the militant group Angry Brigade that staged bomb attacks in the 1970s. ^[11] The publisher also recalled and destroyed the offending version of the book, and republished it with the error removed.^[12] The link to the Angry Brigade was made in 2001, in an interview with The Guardian, in which the article states that she was "thrown out" of the feminist movement after threatening to inform police about a planned bombing by the Angry Brigade of the clothes shop Biba, "I said that if you go on with this - they were discussing bombing Biba [the legendary department store in Kensington] - I'm going to call the police in, because I really don't believe in this."^[13]

References

Books

Non fiction

• Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear
• Infernal Child (an early memoir)
• Sluts' Cookbook
• Erin Pizzey Collects
• Prone to violence ISBN 0-600-20551-7 Out of print; full-text available online
• Wild Child
• The Emotional Terrorist and The Violence-prone ISBN 0-88970-103-2 (excerpt)

Fiction

• The Watershed
• In the Shadow of the Castle
• The Pleasure Palace (in manuscript)
• First Lady
• Counsul General’s Daughter
• The Snow Leopard of Shanghai
• Other Lovers
• Swimming with Dolphins
• For the Love of a Stranger
• Kisses
• The Wicked World of Women
• The Fame Game (work in progress)
• The Lifestyle of an International Best selling Author

Awards

• International Order of Volunteers For Peace, Diploma Of Honour (Italy) 1981.
• Nancy Astor Award for Journalism 1983.
• World Congress of Victimology (San Francisco) 1987 - Distinguished Leadership Award.
• St. Valentino Palm d’Oro International Award for Literature, February 14, 1994, Italy.

External links

• Erin Pizzey website
• Erin Pizzey's Blog
• This Way To The Revolution, by Erin Pizzey
• Erin Pizzey -- Founder of Modern Women's Shelter Movement
• The Planned Destruction of The Family, by Erin Pizzey
• Erin Pizzey, crusader for battered women, by Brian Deer
• MenWeb - Men's Issues. Working with Violent Women by Erin Pizzey
• Prone to Violence by Erin Pizzey
• Why Did My Grandson Die? Original title Fragile by Erin Pizzey
• How feminists tried to destroy the family, by Erin Pizzey