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At least a quarter of women in England and Wales experience one or more incidents of domestic abuse in their lifetime
By Katie Nguyen
At least one in four women in England and Wales will experience one or more incidents of domestic abuse in their lifetime, official figures suggest. That means everything from being punched, slapped and kicked to being verbally threatened and sexually assaulted.
Nearly 1 million women experience at least one incident of domestic abuse every year, and 750,000 children a year witness domestic violence.
Why it happens, who it affects and what can be done to fight it were discussed in "The Violence Cycle" session at the Southbank Centre's WOW – Women of the World Festival in London this weekend.
In a reminder that the cycle often starts in childhood, Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids Company, a charity to help vulnerable inner-city children, described how 99 percent of the perpetrators of violence had themselves been exposed to chronic abuse and violence.
"When children are born, if we don't keep them safe and we don't protect them against toxic levels of stress, actually the impact is significant," Batmanghelidjh said. "Changes will take place in their brains and in their physiological status which may make them more prone to explosive behaviours, more prone to aggressive encounters, and so on."
Someone who knows the cycle well was the next speaker, Erin Pizzey, who founded Chiswick Women's Aid in 1971, the first women's refuge in London.
Pizzey's father was the youngest in a family of 17 children. His own father had been an alcoholic and his mother had been very violent. Pizzey's maternal grandmother died giving birth to her mother, who suffered abuse at the hands of her stepmother. "Neither of them managed to transcend their violence," she said.
She described what it was like when she opened her shelter more than 40 years ago. "When the first woman walked in ... and she took off her jersey, she was purple from her neck down to her waist," Pizzey said.
"Within a matter of days – it was terrifying – women were pouring through the door because there was somewhere to go and it was a safe place. One day we had 56 mothers in ... four rooms ... and they'd sleep with their backs against the wall and their heads on their knees with the children lying at their feet on mattresses."
Nathalie Mitchell, a young mum, spoke about the difficulties of parenting her own children and "not doing what she was supposed to do as a mother".
"I didn't really want to be a mother. I didn't actually want to be alive because of what I had been through and I couldn't see a way out," she said.
As a child, Mitchell was dragged across the floor by her hair as a child by her mother's boyfriend, kicked and sworn at. Later on she was subjected to emotional and physical humiliation by the father of her children.
The objectification of women was both a cause and a consequence of violence against women, said psychologist Linda Papadopoulos, who a couple of years ago did a review for the Home Office (interior ministry) on how sexualised images were affecting young people and how the objectification of women led to violence against them.
Among other things, she discovered that a popular video game rewarded players for beating up prostitutes, that images of women being walked around on leashes were shown in music videos and that breast enhancement had overtaken nose jobs as the most popular form of cosmetic surgery for women in recent years.
At the same time, men and boys were "hyper-masculinated", unable to express certain kinds of emotion, Papadopoulos said.
"If I'm afraid to show that I'm sad, I'm not so afraid to show that I'm angry because anger is a valid male emotion,” Papadopoulos added. “It's OK to be angry, it's OK to be rough and tough – therefore the gangs, therefore the subjugation of women or the violent videos – all of these things feed into it."
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