Erin Patria Margaret Pizzey

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Erin Pizzey, in receipt of the inaugural award named after her.
27 June 2014.

Erin Patria Margaret Pizzey (born 19 February 1939) is an English family care activist and a novelist. She became internationally famous for having started one of the first women's refuges (called women's shelters in Canada and the U.S.) in the modern world, Chiswick Women's Aid, in 1971, the organisation known today as Refuge.

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 as capable of violence as men. Pizzey has said that the threats were from militant feminists.

Early life

She was born Erin Carney in Tsingtao (now Qingdao), China in 1939. Her father was a diplomat and one of 17 children from a poor Irish family. The family moved to Shanghai and were captured by the invading Japanese Army in 1942 and exchanged for Japanese Prisoners of war. Her brother Daniel Carney was also a writer, mostly known for The Wild Geese novel turned into a film.

Overview

Pizzey set up a women's refuge in Belmont Terrace, Chiswick, London where abused women were offered tea, vindaloo, sympathy and a place to stay for them and their children. She later opened a number of additional shelters despite hostility from the authorities. Pizzey's crucial pioneering work and determined campaigning 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".

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. After the hijacking the demand for a service for women survivors of domestic violence grew and soon public funding became available [source?]. Today, Chiswick Women's Aid has been rebranded as Refuge and is a national organization that garners millions of pounds a year from a variety of sources, the primary one of which is the state. Pizzey has lamented that the movement she started had moved from the "personal to the political".

Soon after establishing her first refuge, Pizzey determined that much domestic violence was reciprocal, with both partners abusing each other in roughly equal rates. 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," (co-researched with Dr. John Gayford of Warlingham Hospital), Pizzey distinguishes between "genuine battered women" and "violence-prone women;" the former defined as "the unwilling and innocent victim of his or her partner's violence" and the latter defined as "the unwilling victim of his or her own violence." 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.