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TODAY

Violence begins at home

Erin Pizzev

On Wednesday, October 30, while Women's Aid were launching a book called Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, about the savagely battered women and children in Britain today, across the world in Africa Muhammad Ali and George Foreman prepared to try to smash each other uncons cious in order to win a huge prize, watched with breathless anticipation by the whole world. The day of the 'Clockwork Orange' is upon us.

From the caseload of Women's Aid (6,000 in the last three years) it is possible to calculate that something like 25,000 women in Britain today experience extreme violence almost every day of their lives. From the moment they set up home they discover that they have formed a 'relationship with a man who has absolutely no control over his temper. Anything can spark him off at home and when he is frus trated at work he will come home and beat her senseless. Sometimes alcohol or drugs can be the trigger, sometimes no trigger is needed. Often the children have to stand by arid watch their mother bleeding and moaning while she is savagely kicked and punched into the floor.

Men who batter women virtually all come from homes where they were beaten by one or both of their parents, or where they watched their fathers beat their mothers – and it cuts across all social classes.

Boys model themselves on their fathers; the majority of the boys that have come through Women's Aid are disturbed and violent. If nothing is done for them now, they will be the next generation of batterers. Violence carries from one generation to the next. Women who marry violent men are rarely allowed to use contraception, because along with the batterer's 'violent nature goes a tormented jealousy that can barely let his woman out of sight and which finds security in keeping her pregnant and thus captive.

When I am asked whether violence is on the increase I point out that whereas the national proportion of normal families that have five or more children is 2 per cent, in violent families it is more like 10 per cent. As normal families limit their children there is no corresponding decrease in the numbers of children born to inherit fear and the rule of the boot and the fist. The traditional remedy for the unhappily married is the divorce court, but it is no remedy for the violently married. The law as it stands provides what appear to be safeguards in cases where an aggrieved spouse of either sex behaves in an uncivilised fashion during the dissolution of an unsatisfactory; liaison. If the husband threatens the wife either physically or mentally she can apply for a 'non-molestation' injunction which means exactly what it says, and in the majority of divorces this is perfectly adequate to bring a recalcitrant partner to heel. However, in the cases I deal with at Women's Aid an injunction is not worth the paper it is written on. We can take a battered wife, with evidence to support her claim of cruelty, into the High Court or the County Court and have our barrister ask the judge for a divorce on grounds of cruelty, custody of the children, maintenance, and that the husband be ordered to leave the matrimonial home upon service of an order to quit, and that an injunction be served at the same time ordering him not to molest his wife or his children. We can, and usually do, get all that. But we know that, even with the full weight of the law behind us, we leave the court with the mother and the children unprotected because the police do not enforce injunctions.

Typically, a batterer is served with an order to vacate the marital home by the inquiry agent at, say, 6 pm, goes to the pub, waits until dark and then returns to kick the door down and beat the woman severely. If she or the neighbours call the police they will look at the injunction and advise her that she must go back to her solicitor and ask him to take her batterer back to court. Then they drive off, leaving her bruised and bewildered, the husband triumphant, and the children confused. Is Daddy superman? Can he do anything he likes and get away with it?

In order to get the husband back to court the solicitor must be able to serve papers on him. The man then makes this impossible by being out all day. At this point, despairing of protection, many women abandon all effort to stay in the matrimonial home and come for refuge to Women's Aid. There they may have to sleep on the floor with their children; but they are safe. The majority of women in Women's Aid have been given their homes by the courts but, unless they have a twenty-four hour guard on the house, cannot live there because their men have never been 'socialised' in a good family setting and have learned from experience that they can assault their wives with impunity. Since infancy they have lived in a world of anarchy, hate and destruction,. and they carry this pattern into their adult lives. Ordinary laws that are applicable to most of us prove irrelevant to them. .

It is obvious that to send this type of man to goal gives his wife and children time to breath but does not in any way improve him. When such a man is sent to prison he only comes out twice as angry with the woman who put him there. If the prison psychiatrist finds time to see him he will usually report that he has a `personality problem'. No one likes the word 'psychopath', everyone is afraid of it, but this is exactly what he is – aggressive, dangerous, plausible and deeply immature.

Mental hospitals will not want to take him in. Technically he is not mentally ill. No pill, potion or course of ECT will help him. He has years and years of damage to be repaired – damage that has crippled his emotional growth and society fails to face this problem. That's a depressing face*but not a surprising one. I would say that very little short of a religious ' experience such as befell St Paul on the road to Damascus would change a violent personality once formed. But if we cannot save violent men from their mis-conditioning, I believe we can save their children. By channelling money to provide peaceful homes for them and their mothers, sometimes in communities like Women's Aid, sometimes in smaller groups, I am convinced that we can break the cycle that makes them first the battered and later the bat terers.

The proof is already discernible in some of the children who arrive disturbed and are too violent to play without smashing something or hurting somebody, but who, after a year in a community, are capable of behaving sociably for several days on end. One strapping ten-year-old began with roaring hammer-waving tantrums, awesome enough to keep grown men at bay. He used to do it several times a week, but in the last six months he's had just two outbursts – both of passive crying without any aggression.

Violence is international and so eventually will be Women's Aid. In the three years since the first centre opened in Chiswick, seventy others have sprung up around Britain to run on similar lines, one has opened ,in Holland, three in Sydney, one in Melbourne, and one in Bombay. But public indifference to family violence sometimes seems almost impenetrable. Recently Time magazine reported on the Chiswick centre, but carried the piece in its European editions only because, in the view of Time's editors, wife battering is not a significant topic in America. FBI figures show that in 1973 the number of cases of wife battering reported in New York

State was over 14,000 (as against only 4,764 cases of the more fashionable crime of rape).

As crime figures rise and people speculate about safety in the streets we might all remember that man is the most ruthless animal that stalks this planet. By opening the front door and looking at the roots of violence we have taken a step forward and gained an insight to build upon.

Erin Pizzey is chairman of 141°men's Aid. Her book, Screar0 Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, was recently published bY Co-venture and Penguin Books