Interview with Erin Pizzey - Founder of the Battered Wives’ Refuge

Erin Pizzey – Founder in 1971 of the first Battered Wives’ Refuge in the world, author of numerous fiction and non fiction books including Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will Hear, the first book in the world on domestic violence. 

Born in China she was held hostage by the Japanese, suffering a turbulent, traumatic and dysfunctional childhood. Her father was a diplomat and after escaping from China they settled for a short time in South Africa as refuges until eventually being moved to Beirut.  She spent most of her childhood moving from country to country all over the world.

She talks about her mother and father who fought tooth and nail the whole of their married life and about her mother who never loved her, but who adored and loved her sister.  Erin says “She couldn’t stand me, she was a cold narcissistic exhibitionist, they are the worst mothers, they can’t love.”

Her journey is an incredible one and an inspiration to us all and has contributed to publications such as The New Statesman, The Sunday Times as well as many international journals and newspapers.  
 
Q - You were born in China what was that like?

Erin – "I was born in the middle of that huge war in a German hospital, I was a twin, at this time the Japanese had already taken over. I still don’t understand why my Mother did not get us the two children out as almost everybody else was leaving with children. But she was a Party giver and the only thing I can think of is that as the more senior women left Shanghai she became more senior herself."

Q - It must have been a terrifying experience to have been held hostage – what was that like and how did you escape?

Erin  – "It wasn’t long before the Japanese stopped being neutral towards the British people and suddenly became hostile.  One day we found them on the doorstep, but we were very lucky we didn’t get taken to the concentration camps, they took my godmother and her 3 children.  We were left under house arrest they did that because we were diplomats and were going to be swapped for Japanese prisoners of war.  I was only 4½ at the time so I can’t remember much, but I remember the sounds of the bombing and there were bodies everywhere.

I particularly remember three things from my journey on the ship we took to leave China.  I remember standing in rows for hours and hours on the deck with our life jackets, nobody knew whether the Kamikaze pilots would get us, the second was the most beautiful ballet dancer dancing on the top deck, and third the most enormous learning curve was the Japanese guard who came very day, he showed us pictures of his children and used to bring fresh fruit for my sister and me."

Q - Why did you start the first refuge for battered women and children?

Erin – "I didn’t go out to set up a refuge.  I was at home, it was 1970, I was at home with Jack my husband who was in Nationwide working for the BBC. I didn’t see much of him so I was very lonely and isolated.  I decided I wanted to get involved with the community and there was no way I was any use to anybody whilst I had a child with me.

We persuaded the council to give us a house in Belmont Terrace in Chiswick. It would be somewhere women could bring their children whilst we worked. All sorts of women came in, women came to us who wouldn’t go anywhere near social services.  Cathy was the first woman who came in, she said to me “No one will help me” she showed me her bruises.  It brought memories flooding back to when I was a child just six years old standing in front of a teacher in Montreal in Canada. 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. I asked the teacher to help me, she didn’t, she wouldn’t.
 
It was a huge moment, I knew I had to do something, I knew Cathy needed my help.  And then it was just like measles all a sudden word got out that there was somewhere to go and women flooded into this tiny house.

So Hounslow council decided that the only way to deal with it was to threaten to jail me because I had no right to take in women and children, I had no permission.
We were fighting all the time to beat the authorities.  It wasn’t just about battered women it was about exposing the huge underclass that existed.  The exposure of children to violence and the incest and the drugs and the alcohol and children have no way out of that.  These are the children who aren’t going to school, who don’t have normal meals; many of them didn’t even know how to sit down at a table.  And it was showing up how all the agencies, were actually ignoring them. 

There wasn’t any literature on wife battering anywhere in the world, nothing, and very little bit about child abuse, but that was only in medical literature.   So in 1974 I wrote Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will Hear which was really a collection of all the letters and cases that came to me. I had an awful job getting it published but I finally did get it published and then we made a film. Again we had a struggle to get it shown, it was actually shown very late at night.

By this time people were beginning to accept that Domestic Violence was a very very real problem and needed dealing with.  But we couldn’t get any money, we had a small grant from the government for a period of time but that was very quickly withdrawn because we were always overcrowded.  Our argument was that a woman would never turn another woman away. It was just a massive battle with me having to go to jail almost all of the time, because the case against me went from the magistrate’s court up to the High Court. I lost in the High Court and we appealed to the House of Lords, but they had to send me back to the magistrates for sentencing.  And what ended it all was one of the mothers wrote to the Queen and a letter came back from the palace to say that no one would ever be evicted from refuge.

That ended the persecution; they all had to come to some sort of compromise, which they did.  It was a dreadful 12 years, a nightmare.

I left in 1982 – but back in 1974 the feminists had hijacked the entire subject and created their own refuges no men were allowed to work there, well half our staff were always men, no men today can work in a refuge. And boys over 12 can’t come to a refuge the mothers have to make other arrangements.  This is shocking!"

Q – What do you believe is the route cause of Domestic Violence?

Erin – "It’s so important to get the message across that when a baby is born, yes you have a genetic package, but thereafter its experience that shapes the brain.  So where you have extreme violence and sexual abuse and neglect the babies are born brain damaged and go on to be brain damaged and that’s why it’s so important to get this message across that domestic violence isn’t a gender issue it’s a learned pattern of early behaviour.  We’ve got to stop blaming men for domestic violence and start looking at the routes of violence which lie in the early years of a baby’s life."

Q – What now?

Erin – "I love to write, I am just writing my autobiography now – its about the years in the refuge."

Q - Having now travelled the world – where have you been to and which is your favourite?

Erin – "My favourite place is England."

Q - What advice can they give to other women who want to face a challenge?

Erin – "I believe we are all born with a purpose – it may be a small purpose if you find it and follow it with all your heart and with love you will succeed."

Q - What is your proudest moment?

Erin - "I think seeing one of my mothers a couple of years ago, she’d come with her children from abroad and was in hiding, I managed to win the case and she was able to stay with her children.  She’d come without any qualifications at all and she had managed to qualify as a social worker."

Q - Do you have a role models – if yes who is it?

Erin - "Churchill was a great role model."

Q - What do you enjoy most?

Erin – "My children, grandchildren and great grand child."

Q - Do you still have ambitions – if you do what are they? What next?

Erin  – "My ambition is to see all victims of Domestic Violence receive refuge.  The majority of the work I do now is to help with abuse in the elderly, there is a wonderful website www.compassionincare.com/ of which I’m the patron.  The only money we get is from donations, we monitor nursing homes.  If we find anything disturbing or bad we report those nursing homes."

For more information about Erin go to: www.erinpizzey.com/