Erin Pizzey
Erin Pizzey© 2002 Equal Justice Foundation
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A fond farewell to an extraordinary hero
One of the first shelters (Britain refers to them as a refuge) for abused women in the world was opened by
Erin Pizzey
in Chiswick, London, England in 1971. She continued to run that program until 1982.
Based on her experiences at Chiswick, she wrote the pioneering book on wife-battering, Scream Quietly or The Neighbors Will Hear, in 1978. That book was very successful in bringing the problem of abused women to the world's attention. In the wake of her inspiring example, shelters, or refuges, for battered women began springing up all over the world.
Initially, such shelters were impoverished, overcrowded, and run entirely with volunteer help. Because of the overcrowding, sanitation was often questionable, particularly given the numbers of children often contained in such shelters together with their mothers. Such overcrowding was almost inevitable given the unique nature of her original refuge and the open-door policy Ms. Pizzey insisted upon. Sadly, most shelters today do not maintain such a policy, and it is sad to realize that women with nowhere else to go are turned away by shelters in America.
Ms. Pizzey had repeated confrontations with borough authorities who were concerned with the conditions in her refuge. She was taken to court on several occasions on account of her operations. It was only by the direct intervention of Queen Elizabeth that she was able to continue.
All of mankind owes an eternal debt to Erin Pizzey for her pioneering work with family violence and providing a place of refuge for women who found themselves in abusive relationships with nowhere to go. But she is an extremely intelligent woman who soon expanded her work into attempting to understand the causes of family violence. Such understanding is essential if we are to reduce such abuse.
Quite early she realized that a clear distinction must be made between:
• Scenario One: Women who accidentally become involved with a violent partner and now wish to leave and to never return again.
• Scenario Two: Women who, for deep psychological reasons of their own, seek out a violent relationship, or a series of violent relationships, with no intention of leaving.
Erin Pizzey states that:
“...it is essential to understand the differentiation between our use of the words battered and violence-prone. For us, a battered person is the innocent victim of another person's violence; a violence-prone person is the victim of their own addiction to violence.”
She found that: “...62 women out of the first hundred women who came to the refuge were as violent or more violent than the men they left. Also many were prostitutes taking refuge from their violent pimps.” Pizzey further notes that such violent women abuse their children as well. Subsequent studies have shown that the great majority of child abuse and murders are perpetrated by females, most commonly single mothers.
Feminists have long noted that domestic abuse included both physical and emotional aspects. What they attempt to hide is the fact that emotional abuse is most commonly associated with women. Ms. Pizzey tackles that issue head on in her 1998 book on emotional terrorists and her findings are summarized here in a section by that name.
If useful help is to be provided, it seems obvious that such distinctions must be made when running a shelter for abused women. Clearly the two classes of women must be treated in quite separate fashion.
Aid and succor such as new housing arrangements, aid in finding employment, legal, and financial aid may be given many abused women with a successful outcome likely. Such women have a reasonable probability of reintegrating with society and leaving the nightmare behind. We doubt that anyone begrudges help for such unfortunate individuals.
We do question whether such help is forthcoming from most such shelters in America. Also, it is quite evident that women entering such shelters are treated with a one-size-fits-all approach. Reality is never so simple, however.
In the case of what Ms. Pizzey refers to as a violence-prone woman , new housing arrangements may be provided, legal and financial aid may be given, and all preparations made for such a woman to begin a new life, independent of her abusive partner.
However, experience shows that such women either return repeatedly to her partner (note that lesbian relationships are the most abusive of all), or the violence-prone woman finds herself in a relationship with a new and equally violent partner.
Thus, the help provided an abused woman who fits the pattern of Scenario One is quite inappropriate for a violence-prone woman, and may make her problems worse if she ends up with an even more violent partner. Such problems are compounded if the violence-prone woman takes her children from their biological father into the new relationship.
In her autobiography This Way To The Revolution (p. 283) Erin Pizzey points out that most:
“...refuges refused to deal with women who were alcoholic, drug addicts or who were violent. These women were screened out or if they entered a refuge were soon evicted. To me these were the women who most needed our help. I was outraged that no one would allow women to step off their pedestals and be truly human — least of all other women. Women who failed to become warm, loving mothers were punished and lost their children. The solution to me was blindingly obvious: do what we were doing. Take in problem mothers with their children — and mother them so they can in turn learn to mother their children.”
In the years since Erin Pizzey brought the issue of family and intimate partner violence to the world's attention there has been considerable discussion of the need for shelters for men and their children who married a violent woman, or who became violent after some years in the marriage due to some biological or medical conditions, e.g., a small percentage of women become violent upon entering perimenopause between ages 35 and 50. Other women may be involved in accidents that lead to mental instability and, of course, the dementia of old age almost always leads to violent outbursts in both men and women. Certainly the intervening years have provided definitive research that women are as violent as men in intimate relationships, confirming Erin Pizzey's early findings.
As a result a few shelters for men have now been opened for men in Britain. There was one in Calgary in Canada but it received no support, went bankrupt, and its long-time supporter, Earl Silverman, then committed suicide in April 2013. In the United States there are but a few, the Valley Oasis Family Violence Shelter in Lancaster, California, being the first. Other shelters that are known to accept abused men are listed by state here. There are very few that provide housing for men and their children, or who will allow women to bring male children over age 12 into the shelter, although federal law now mandates all shelters treat men and women equally.
Before diving into the different needs of abused men it is worth reviewing the experience of Erin Pizzey in this area. As she did with almost all aspects of intimate partner violence, Erin pioneered a refuge (shelter) for abused men in England in the 1970's. The first thing she found was that donors were unwilling to provide any assistance for abused men. But, as she describes in her autobiography This Way To The Revolution (p. 114) she was, as always, undeterred and:
“We opened the house, and I faced another stark reality. Whereas filling a house with women and children resulted in the women quickly forming a community and taking charge of their own lives, filling a house with men resulted in them disappearing into a room and sitting helplessly on their beds or else sulking because their was no one to run the place and take care of cooking and other practical matters.
In vain we talked to them about the set-up in Chiswick. We talked about self-help. We talked about how we would decorate the satellite houses ourselves as well as do minor repairs. We talked about their responsibility to care for one another. We met with blank silence. They were not only unwilling or incapable of caring for each other in the house but we were unable to get any male volunteers to help out.”
As a result her abused men project petered out and things have not improved much in the decades since. Her observations also provide some basis for why many feminists desire to return to a matriarchy with total disregard for all the material benefits our patriarchal society has generated.
Virtually all of the men who contact the
Equal Justice Foundation
want their problems fixed, immediately and at no cost to or effort by them. Of course they are totally unwilling or unable to consider helping tackle the underlying issues. Occasionally one will write a garbled and often misspelled letter or email to some inappropriate official, and they have no idea how government works, or more accurately doesn't work. When that complaint fails to inspire total and complete sympathy for the poor, mistreated dears they crawl back into their caves and blame everyone but themselves for their misery and criminal convictions
(See Controlling Domestic Violence Against Men).
!
Time-and-time-again it has been necessary to point out to these men that a plea bargain is a guilty plea. That if they admit they are guilty and sign the document saying they are guilty, then they are guilty in the eyes of the world. But that doesn't deter them from whining and crying about how their rights have been violated and no one will listen to their side of the story. But if asked to provide a timeline of events in order to sort out what happened they seem constitutionally unable to do so. Nonetheless, it was all her fault.
Erin Pizzey goes on describing her experience attempting to set up a male shelter and states that:
“Meanwhile I learned a big lesson. Women are naturally tribal. They will organize and help one another and take care of each other's children. Men are different. Most are solitary and invest their emotions only in their partners and their offspring.”
Her lessons should be kept in mind by anyone attempting to deal with abused men. The pain of a relationship that fails violently, and in which they were often walking on eggshells for many years, usually drives them deeper into their caves and solitary ways. Many never emerge and suicide is an all too common outlet for them. But banding together to fight the system, as women have done so successfully, does not seem to be an option.
From experience to date it appears that setting up shelters for abused men is not likely to accomplish much not already being done by groups like the Salvation Army. Occasionally a man escapes from a violent wife with his children and does need the services a shelter might provide. In many cases today family violence shelters will provide a hotel voucher for a few nights and that may be sufficient and the cost/benefit of doing more does not appear to be justified in most locales.
It is clear that the approaches taken in dealing with and treating abused women are almost always inappropriate for dealing with the problems of abused men. Since, in the experience of the Equal Justice Foundation, abused men almost universally exhibit the characteristic symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), approaching their treatment and needs from that perspective is likely to be more effective than providing food and shelter in a safe house.
Based on her experiences with violent women, in 1982 Ms. Pizzey published a book, Prone to Violence. For her efforts she was picketed by a group of British shelter workers, who referred to themselves as “feminists.” These militant extremists staged demonstrations against her, and she and her family members received death threats. “ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS,” “ALL MEN ARE BATTERERS,” read the placards. She was advised to travel with a police escort during her promotional tour. The book disappeared from the shelves of libraries and book stores alike. The publisher went bankrupt in the process.
The harassment of Erin Pizzey became so bad that she was driven into exile in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and did not return to England until the late 1990's. Ms. Pizzey documented her travails in a 1999 article entitled Who's failing the family?
Ms. Pizzey is a liability to the women responsible for her abuse, as she knows many of them quite well from the early days of the women's shelter movement. Many of these radical women, some of whom quite literally were Communist or Maoist terrorists, e.g., they participated in the bombing of the BBC TV van and the attempted bombing of the British Post Office Tower, the hub of the UK's TV network, during the 1970 Miss World Congress, but are now safely ensconced in prominent positions in government and the media (Walter Schneider, personal communication, 1999, and Erin Pizzey's 2011 autobiography This Way To The Revolution ).
In 1995, Mark Rowley from New Zealand had a librarian from the Library of Congress do a search of library catalogues that could be accessed through the interlibrary network. Only thirteen copies of Prone to Violence were found in the whole world. Walter Schneider (personal communication, 1999) checked Canadian library catalogues and found three copies listed, one at the University of Alberta and two at the University of Toronto. When Mark Rowley checked the Library of Congress, they didn't have a copy of it either. He then donated the one that Erin Pizzey had sent to him. That copy is still listed in the catalogue and is still on the shelf as of late 1999 when he checked during a visit to Washington, D.C.
However, as with many things people would prefer to hide, her original book is now available on the Web. Fortunately, the book was also eventually reprinted and, as of 2011, is available via Amazon.com.
In 1998, Ms. Pizzey published another book on The Emotional Terrorist and The Violence Prone. This book also includes an updated version of her Prone to Violence work. A basic section of her 1998 book is “A comparative study of battered women and violence-prone women” (1998, p. 12-27). Unless, and until, shelters can routinely distinguish between battered and violence-prone women, they are batting in the dark. She has provided the basic foundation needed for making such distinctions.
The extreme reaction generated by Ms. Pizzey's work showed she had tapped the fundamental truth that women are as violent as men in intimate relationships, which militant feminists would desperately like to hide. However, unless all aspects of a problem are examined, it is unlikely the problem can be solved.
If the violent nature of many women is simply hidden and denied, domestic violence will continue and likely increase. Patricia Pearson has examined in detail the myth of innocence associated with women. But Erin Pizzey has not been idle either and additional photos and information can now (2011) be found on her Facebook page.
Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.
October 7, 2025
— Erin Pizzey, who has died aged 86, founded the first shelter for battered wives and their children in Chiswick, west London, in 1971; the
Chiswick Women's Refuge
gave rise to
Refuge,
the national domestic violence charity and the establishment of hundreds of such centres up and down the country.
Erin Pizzey was awarded the Italian Peace Prize, wrote several best-selling books and won awards for her journalism. She was once rated 14th in a poll of “the 100 women who shook the world.” and her charity, Chiswick Women's Aid, was supported by the great and the good from David Astor to Roger Daltrey and from Keith Joseph to Lord Goodman.
During the 1970s, her battling 17 st figure was a familiar sight on the nation's television screens. She made two world tours to promote her cause and was often in court for helping women to take their children abroad to evade custody rulings or defending her hostels against charges of overcrowding.
But the popular image of Erin Pizzey as the British equivalent of Andrea Dworkin — the similarly tank-like American feminist — was a misleading one. Although she had been attracted to the women's movement in its early stages, Erin Pizzey's motivation was an urge to help people in difficulties, not to score points in some feminist war against men.
Indeed, unlike many in the sisterhood, Erin Pizzey needed the company of men, enjoyed their chivalry, and believed fervently in the traditional two-parent family as the foundation stone of society.
Relations between Erin Pizzey and more radical elements in the feminist movement became strained over her rather autocratic ways and her policy of employing men at her refuge in the belief that children need positive male role models
.
For her part, Erin Pizzey became disenchanted with her friends among the feminist intelligentsia: “I used to go to dinners in Islington,” she recalled later. “Jill Tweedie and other women journalists would be there all talking about female circumcision in Africa. But when I started my refuge none of them would come to help me clean baths or replace washers on taps. For most of the chattering women in the movement, it was all a game.”
Her final break came in 1982 when she published Prone to Violence, in which she argued that abused women often collude in the violence they suffer and can themselves be more abusive than men. Her views led to her being bombarded with hate mail and death threats. She was banned from women's groups and greeted by crowds of chanting women waving banners reading “All Men are Rapists.” Her publisher at the time dropped her and she was locked out of many women's aid refuges.
Erin Pizzey maintained that a child who is brought up with emotional and physical violence often becomes addicted to pain. Throughout life, that person then recreates situations of violence,
“for those situations stir the only feelings of love and satisfaction the person has ever known.”
When the feminist backlash became too much for her, Erin Pizzey fled abroad with a new husband to try to make a living out of writing. But in 1997 she returned to Britain, destitute, homeless, fragile, and in need of help herself. Like many of the women who came to her refuge, Erin Pizzey too, it turned out, was the product of a violent upbringing: “Everything that happened,” she observed later “prepared me for the life I eventually led.”
She was born Erin Patria Margaret Carney in Shanghai on February 19 1939. Her Irish father, Cyril, one of a family of 17, was the first grammar school boy to enter the Diplomatic Service. He was also a violent bully who beat his wife and terrorized his three children.
Erin's mother Ruth was little better. Adopted at the age of two, she had grown up cold, snobbish, and given to sudden outbursts of violent rage, mostly directed at Erin, her least favourite child. Once, while the family was living in Canada, her mother beat her with an iron flex for some minor misdemeanour until the blood ran down her legs. “But when I showed my teacher, all she said was 'No wonder. You're a terrible child'.” Erin, her mother told her, was “born to hang.”
As the family moved from posting to posting, Erin attended a variety of boarding schools, where she usually got on the wrong side of authority. At a convent in Dorset, she avoided expulsion by dragging the richest girl in the school along with her on her exploits, gambling, correctly, that the school would not want to lose the fees.
Erin's mother died when she was 17. Two days later she ran away from home after waking up to find her father in bed with her. She never saw him again, though he lived another 25 years.
In 1961, aged 21, she married Jack Pizzey, a naval officer she had met in Hong Kong, who went on to become a reporter for BBC television. They had two children and later adopted seven black boys. But in the early years of their marriage, living in a small flat in Hammersmith with two small children, and with her husband often away, Erin found herself becoming lonely, isolated and depressed.
She was inspired by articles written by Jill Tweedie and others which argued that women were made for better things than domestic drudgery. “I thought, 'this is what I've been waiting for all my life', that women were going to stop competing and start communicating, to get things done, to change things.”
The Guardian gave details of how to contact the new movement and she was directed to her local women's liberation workshop in Chiswick. “It was held in a very middle-class home in Chiswick,” she recalled, “and I gazed at the Mao posters on the wall of the drawing-room. When asked why I was there by the hostess – a very small woman with a sharp tongue — I replied that my husband was a television reporter and was very rarely home and I felt lonely and isolated with my two children.”
“'Your problem is not your isolation but your husband. He oppresses you and he is a capitalist.' I pointed out that she too had a mortgage so she therefore was also a capitalist, and far from oppressing me, my husband was baby-sitting so I could attend this meeting.”
The group, she soon found, was more concerned with the revolution than with helping women like her to cope with loneliness, and she did not endear herself to its members by refusing to see the family as a “place of oppression” or refer to her husband as “my jailer.” Eventually she was thrown out after informing the police about planned bombings by the Angry Brigade.
None the less, through the group, she did meet some women in a similar predicament, and with two friends, she began to scout round for a meeting place. Eventually Hounslow council gave her a derelict house which she and her friends renovated as a drop-in centre and play group for women with young children.
All this changed in 1971 when a woman walked through the front door covered from head to foot in bruises and asking for protection from a violent husband.
“Her words took me back to a time in my own childhood when no one would help me,”
Erin Pizzey recalled.
“'I will help you,' I promised her, and the refuge was born.”
Within weeks at least 40 mothers and children had taken refuge in the centre's four tiny rooms, and for the next few years Erin Pizzey battled against official indifference and incomprehension to secure funding and better premises. “There wasn't a problem of battered wives,” one female civil servant told her “until you made it one.”
In 1974 Chiswick Women's Refuge acquired a much larger house in Chiswick High Road where, although they were legally allowed to accommodate only 36 residents, their numbers sometimes went as high as 150. In 1974, Erin Pizzey wrote Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will Hear, the first book to draw attention to the plight of battered wives.
Erin Pizzey's work attracted national and international media attention, and over the 1970s the movement grew as it took possession of empty houses all over the capital. By 1976 Chiswick Women's Aid had established 22 squats, and had also acquired the Palm Court Hotel, three GLC properties, and a large vicarage in Bristol. Even so, at their main refuge in Chiswick they had to erect large garden sheds in the back yard to cope with the overflow of mothers and children living in the house.
Not only did they admit they had contributed to the violence in their homes, but that they were also violent to their children. Many, too, used the refuge as a temporary bolt-hole in a continuing domestic war, eventually returning to their abusive husbands. Erin Pizzey saw her mission as breaking the cycle of violence by persuading the women to recognise their own share of responsibility in perpetuating violence through the generations.
Meanwhile, other groups formed around the country to take up the idea of refuges for women. But unlike Erin Pizzey, many of those involved saw the problem as essentially political. Feminist writers like Tess Gill and Anna Coote suggested that domestic violence was “an expression of the power that men wielded over women” and that wife-battering was not the practice of a deviant few, but something which could emerge in the normal course of marital relations.
So when Erin Pizzey spoke of women being part of the problem, she found her views suppressed by
“feminist journalists and radical feminist editors who had found in the women's refuge movement a cause to further their political vision of a world without the family and without men.”
When she called a conference to help other groups get started, she found herself invaded by
“radical separatist feminists”
preaching revolution.
Eventually a number of groups formed the National Women's Aid Federation but Erin Pizzey refused to join them and sent a round-robin letter to social services and housing departments warning them of the political agenda of Women's Aid. But increasingly it was her rivals who won public funding.
Because of her opposition to what she believed was the hijacking of her movement by radical feminists, Erin Pizzey and her family became a target for abuse and death threats. By the time Prone to Violence was published in 1982, she had become so hated by the radical feminist movement that she had to have a police escort on her book tour.
Erin Pizzey's marriage to Jack Pizzey had ended in divorce in 1979 and shortly before the publication of her book, she took off to New Mexico with her children and her new husband, Jeff Shapiro, an American psychologist 21 years her junior, whom she had met at the refuge and married in 1981. From New Mexico, they moved to the Cayman Islands where, for the next 10 years, Erin Pizzey produced a string of racy, Shirley Conran-type novels while enjoying the sun and deep-sea fishing.
The marriage lasted 11 years, and ended shortly after she and her husband moved to Tuscany. Desperately short of money and all alone except for a dog and a cat, Erin Pizzey found work serving drinks in a local bar. But in 1997, deeply in debt, she was evicted by her Italian landlady and returned to London, penniless, homeless, jobless and almost friendless. Only Fay Weldon sent her any cash.
For a time Erin Pizzey lived in a hostel for homeless families in Richmond, but soon found a modest niche as a critic of radical feminism and moved to a flat in south London.
In 2000, when her grandson, Keita, a schizophrenic, took his own life in a prison cell, Erin Pizzey reacted in typical fashion, galvanising her family to fight the coroner's verdict of death by hanging on the grounds that her grandson should never have been left alone. In a ruling seen as a legal landmark, she successfully got a jury to agree that neglect by the prison staff had been a contributory factor in his death.
In 2001 she was a coauthor of the article Controlling Domestic Violence Against Men by Charles Corry, Martin Fiebert, and Erin Pizzey.
In 2013, Erin Pizzey joined the board of the men's rights organisation A Voice for Men, advising on policy and writing articles for the group's website. In 2016 she appeared in the documentary The Red Pill, about the men's rights movement. She was also a patron of the charity Both Parents Matter
In addition to her books about violence in families, Erin Pizzey wrote novels and three volumes of memoirs, Infernal Child (1978), Wild Child (1996) and This Way to the Revolution (2011). She also published The Slut's Cookbook (1981).
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