Erin Pizzey

Erin Patria Margaret Pizzey (born 19 February 1939) is an English family care activist and a novelist. She became internationally famous for having started the first domestic violence shelter in the modern world. Haven House^[2] is often cited as the first women's refuge (called women's shelters in Canada and the U.S.), but at the time of their founding they only worked to help the mentally ill transition from committed life in a hospital to life in the outside world. By contrast the refuge started by Erin Pizzey was focused on removing victims of domestic abuse from their abusers, in an attempt to break the cycle. Chiswick Women's Aid, in 1971,^[3] the organisation known today as Refuge.^[1]

Pizzey has been the subject of death threats and boycotts because of her research into the claim that most domestic violence is reciprocal, and that women are equally capable of violence as men. Pizzey has said that the threats were from militant feminists.^[4][5][6]

Early life

She was born Erin Carney in Qingdao, China in 1939, along with her twin sister Rosaleen. Her father was a diplomat and one of 17 children from a poor Irish family.^[5][7] In 1942, the family moved to Shanghai; shortly thereafter, they were captured by the invading Japanese Army and exchanged for Japanese prisoners of war.^[8][9] She is the sister of writer Daniel Carney, known for his novel The Wild Geese.^[10]

Overview

Having initially engaged with the British Women's Liberation Movement, Pizzey distanced herself along with others when she witnessed what she described as "irregular and disrespectful behaviour" towards the money donated by desperate women across the UK.^[11] Pizzey confronted them over this behaviour,^[12] which according to Pizzey included claiming that telephones were tapped and labelling people they did not like as MI5, police and CIA Informers or Agents.^[11] She also was concerned about overhearing discussion of plans to bomb the London store Biba; she reported on this to the police after warning the people involved. Subsequently, Pizzey became aware that the police had the group and offices under surveillance.^[13] Pizzey says that she and her fellow members of the Goldhawk Road group (named after the street Pizzey lived on) were seen as trouble, because they did not accept others' behaviours and views. Erin was told she was to be watched.^[14]

Pizzey set up a women's refuge in Belmont Terrace, Chiswick, London in 1971 where abused women "were offered tea, sympathy and a safe place to stay"^[15] for them and their children. She later opened a number of additional shelters, despite hostility from the authorities. She gained notoriety and publicity for setting up refuges by squatting, most notably in 1975 at the Palm Court Hotel in Richmond.^[16][17][18] The original refuge in Chiswick has since been rebranded as the charity "Refuge".

Pizzey's work was widely praised at the time. In 1975 MP Jack Ashley stated in the House of Commons that "The work of Mrs. Pizzey was pioneering work of the first order. It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical by establishing the Chiswick aid centre. As a result of that magnificent pioneering work, the whole nation has now come to appreciate the significance of the problem".^[19] Even whilst being prosecuted by local authorities (Simmons v. Pizzey)^[20] and appealing matters to The House of Lords, Erin Pizzey was recognised for her work. Lord Hailsham stated, "This appellant, and the registered charity of which she is the agent, is providing a service... which is in fact provided by no other organ of our much vaunted system of public welfare... When people come to her door... in desperate straits and at all hours... the appellant does not turn them away... but takes them in and gives them shelter... And what happens to her when she does so? She finds herself the defendant in criminal proceedings at the suit of the local authority..."^[20][21]

Pizzey said that militant feminists – with the collusion of Labour's leading women – hijacked her cause and used it to try to demonise all men, not only in Britain, but internationally.^[22] Pizzey said of the newly emerging establishment "I never saw Women's Aid as a movement that was hostile to men, but The National Federation, which quickly formed, made it quite clear that men were the enemy."^[23] After the alleged hijacking, the demand for a service for women survivors of domestic violence grew and soon public funding became available.^[24] Pizzey has lamented that the movement she started had moved from the "personal to the political".^[25][26]

Soon after establishing her first refuge, Pizzey asserted that much domestic violence was reciprocal,^[27] with both partners abusing each other in roughly equal measure. She reached this conclusion when she asked the women in her refuge about their violence, only to discover most of the women were equally as violent or more violent than their husbands. In her study "Comparative Study of Battered Women And Violence-Prone Women,"^[28] (co-researched with Dr. John Gayford of Warlingham Hospital), Pizzey distinguishes between "genuine battered women"^[28] and "violence-prone women";^[28] the former defined as "the unwilling and innocent victim of his or her partner's violence"^[28] and the latter defined as "the unwilling victim of his or her own violence."^[28] This study reports that 62% of the sample population were more accurately described as "violence prone." Similar findings regarding the mutuality of domestic violence have been confirmed in subsequent studies.^[29][30]

In her book Prone to Violence, Pizzey expressed concern that so little attention was paid to the causes of interpersonal and family violence, stating, "to my amazement, nobody seemed to genuinely want to find out why violent people treat each other the way they do".^[31] She also expressed concern for the view expressed by government officials that solutions to the issue of domestic abuse and violence could be found in socialist or communist countries. Pizzey pointed out that marital violence was a great problem in Russia, and China addressed the issue by proclaiming wife-beating a crime punishable by death sentence.^[31] The book looks at what appeared to be learned behaviour, often starting in childhood, linked to hormonal responses. Pizzey describes such behaviour as akin to addiction. She speculates that high levels of hormones and neurochemicals associated with pervasive childhood trauma lead to adults who repeatedly engage in violent altercations with intimate partners despite the physical, emotional, legal and financial costs, in unwitting attempts to simulate the emotional impact of traumatic childhood experiences and manifest the learned biochemical state linked to pleasure. The book contains numerous stories of disturbed families, alongside a discussion of the reasons why the modern state care-taking agencies are largely ineffective. Promotional events for the book were met with protest,^[32] and Pizzey reports that she herself and co-author Jeff Shapiro needed police protection during the promotional events for the book.^[4][5]

In 1981, Pizzey moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, while targeted by harassment, death threats, bomb threats^[33] and defamation campaigns,^[6] and dealing with overwork, near collapse, cardiac disease and mental strain.^[34] In particular, according to Pizzey, the charity Scottish Women's Aid "made it their business to hand out leaflets claiming that [she] believed that women 'invited violence' and 'provoked male violence'".^[6] She states that the turning point was the intervention of the bomb squad, who required all of her mail to be processed by them before she could receive it, as a "controversial public figure".^[35]

Having moved to Santa Fe to write, Pizzey promptly became involved in running a refuge in New Mexico, as well as dealing with sexual abusers and paedophiles.^[6] Pizzey said of this work, "I discovered that there were just as many women paedophiles as there were men. Women go undetected, as usual. Working against paedophiles is a very dangerous business."^[25] Whilst living in Santa Fe, one of her dogs was shot and two others were stolen, which she claims was a result of racist neighbors.^[33] Her family suffered new harassment following the publication of her 1982 book Prone to Violence. Pizzey links much of the harassment to militant feminists and their objections to her research, findings and work.^[6][33][36] Describing the harassment, Deborah Ross of The Independent wrote that "the feminist sisterhood went bonkers".^[5]

Following the abuse and threats in Santa Fe she moved to Cayman Brac, Cayman Islands^[37] where she wrote with her husband, Jeff Shapiro. Subsequently, she moved to Siena, Italy where her writing and advocacy work continued. She returned to London in the late 1990s, homeless due to debt and in increasingly poor health.^[5] Her insights are still sought by politicians and family pressure groups.

Current work

Pizzey is still actively working to help victims of domestic violence. She has been a patron of the charity Mankind Initiative since 2004, when she received a Roger Witcomb Award.^[38] From January 2007 to December 2011 she has published articles in the Daily Mail newspaper.^[39] In March 2007, Erin ,as a guest , attend the ceremony of opening the first Arab refuge for victims of domestic violence in Bahrain.^[40]

Pizzey said in 2009 that she has "never been a feminist, because, having experienced my mother's violence, I always knew that women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men".^[8]

In 2013 she joined the editorial and advisory board of the men's rights organization A Voice for Men (serving as an Editor and DV Policy Advisor) and from January to August wrote thirteen articles for the group's web site. Only one was published 14 July the following year. None were published in the first half of 2015.

Her two April articles pertained to two interviews she gave on the Reddit community "IamA", where she promoted her Facebook page and the "AVFM Online Radio" podcast on BlogTalkRadio.^[41] She announced her first interview a week prior on /r/MensRights.^[42]

In May, following her promotion of the BTR podcast series the previous month, Erin also began running her own program on AVFM radio initially called "Domestic Violence Revelations with Erin Pizzey" which ran for five episodes until the title was shortened to simply "Revelations with Erin Pizzey". In "Revelations" she transitioned from doing personal readings to holding discussions with guests. Under her new format she interviewed Glen Poole and Neil Lyndon in July; Geoffrey James and Suzanne Venker in August; then Philip W. Cook, Warren Farrell, Attila Vinczer and Mike Buchanan in September. The first segment of a newer series called "Thoughts with Erin" also began in September on AVFM Radio on the "Honey Badger Radio" series, where "honey badger number one" Erin expressed her views on the show's topic of "Feminism's pimp hand" with her hosts, and mentioned having known the deceased Earl Silverman.

In November 2014, Pizzey became owner/manager of the AVFM WhiteRibbon.org website,^[43] which has been criticized by the original White Ribbon Campaign as "a copycat campaign articulating ... archaic views and denials about the realities of gender-based violence."^[44][45]

Libel case

In 2009 Pizzey successfully sued Macmillan Publishers for libel over content in the Andrew Marr book A History of Modern Britain. The publication had falsely claimed she had once been part of the militant group The Angry Brigade that staged bomb attacks in the 1970s.^[46] The publisher also recalled and destroyed the offending version of the book, and republished it with the error removed.^[47] The link to the Angry Brigade was made in 2001, in an interview with The Guardian, in which the article states that she was "thrown out" of the feminist movement after threatening to inform police about a planned bombing by the Angry Brigade of the clothes shop Biba. "I said that if you go on with this – they were discussing bombing Biba [the legendary department store in Kensington] – I'm going to call the police in, because I really don't believe in this."^[48]

Personal life

Pizzey married Jack Pizzey, then a naval lieutenant, when she was 20, first meeting in Hong Kong. They had two children. She divorced Jack Pizzey in 1976, and divorced from her second husband, Jeff Shapiro, in 1994.^[49] Pizzey lives in south London. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2000.^[50]

In 2000 Pizzey's grandson Keita Craig, who had schizophrenia, hanged himself in a prison cell. Erin Pizzey and her family campaigned against the coroner's verdict of death by hanging and in 2001 a jury at a second inquest unanimously found that Keita's death was contributed to by the neglect of prison staff. The case was the first ever to reach a finding of neglect in a suicide case.^[50][51]

Books

Nonfiction

• This Way to the Revolution: A Memoir ^[52] ISBN 978-0-7206-1360-5
• Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear^[53] ISBN 978-0-14-052311-9
• Infernal Child: World Without Love ^[54] ISBN 978-0-9540002-1-9
• Sluts' Cookbook^[55] ISBN 978-0-354-04724-1
• Erin Pizzey Collects^[56] ISBN 978-0-600-20686-6
• Prone to violence^[57] ISBN 0-600-20551-7
• Wild Child: An Autobiography ^[58] ISBN 978-88-900096-0-0
• The Emotional Terrorist and The Violence-prone^[59] ISBN 978-0-88970-103-8

Fiction

• The Watershed
• In the Shadow of the Castle
• The Pleasure Palace (in manuscript)
• First Lady
• The Consul General's Daughter
• The Snow Leopard of Shanghai
• Other Lovers
• Swimming with Dolphins
• For the Love of a Stranger
• Kisses 1995
• The Wicked World of Women
• The Fame Game (work in progress)
• The Lifestyle of an International Best selling Author

Awards

• International Order of Volunteers For Peace, Diploma of Honour (Italy) 1981.^[60]
• Nancy Astor Award for Journalism 1983.^[61]
• World Congress of Victimology (San Francisco) 1987 – Distinguished Leadership Award.^[61]
• St. Valentino Palm d'Oro International Award for Literature, 14 February 1994, Italy.^[61]

See also

• Intimate partner violence
• Women's Aid Federation of England

References

External links

• Official website
• WhiteRibbon.org (Website devoted to ending violence against all people)