By Erin Pizzey

In 1971 I opened the first and only refuge/shelter for women and children running from domestic violence in Chiswick, London.
Of the first hundred women coming into the refuge, sixty two were as violent to their partners, and violent to their children.

Most domestic violence is generational.  Most domestic violence is consensual.Violence is a learned pattern of behavior in early childhood and we now know thanks to MRI scans can cause brain damage in children.

I have always been opposed to  the Violence Against Women Act.  This act, purporting to protect only women against male violence, is a travesty of the truth.  This Act was conceived as a way to extract enormous sums of money to be diverted into funding the political arm of the women’s movement.

By creating a paranoid boundary of silence around the refuge movement and banning men from working in these places, there has been no accountability.

False figures have been used for research purposes. I was in the very early collectives of the refuge movement in England and I saw a stream of feminists insist that the purpose of this movement was to destroy family life.  Men were to be excluded and disenfranchised from the family and the new ‘family’ would be women alone with their children.

The VAWA law has successfully funded these intentions.

Erin Pizzey is an internationally-known author and pioneer is the refuge (shelter in the U.S.) movement.