Erin Pizzey – telling the truth even when it hurts

Erin Pizzey, who became the face of the fight to break the cycle of domestic violence in the UK, setting up Refuge in 1971, was ostracised and demonised when she talked of some violence in the home being reciprocal. She distinguished between ‘genuine battered women’ “the unwilling and innocent victim of his or her partner’s violence”; and ‘violence-prone women’, defined as “the unwilling victim of his or her own violence.” She undertook a stu