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VIOLENCE IN THE FAMILY by Mrs. Erin Pizzey and Mr. Roger Blades of the Chiswick Women's Aid Group. THE CHAIRMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to introduce to you the speaker for tonight, who is going to speak on violence in the family. Mrs. Pizzey is the Founder of the Chiswick Women's Aid Group, and that in itself will indicate the qualification that she has to talk to us about this grave subject with which, directly or indirectly, many of us are concerned and interested. Mrs. Pizzey has indicated that she would like Mr. Roger Blades, who is also here, to speak to you on this subject, he being particularly concerned with looking after the children who go to the Refuge and, therefore, is also well qualified to talk to you on this subject. MRS. PIZZEY: I think that the first thing I will do is to give you some of the history of how the Chiswick Women's Aid came into being-and I want to tell you that it was by total accident, like so many things. I opened it when my children went to school. I felt that there was a deep need in our area for a meeting place for mothers with small children who were isolated and lonely, because I had been isolated and lonely when I was bringing up toddlers. I think that the women in the audience will realise what one is talking about, where you are not welcome anywhere except the parks with your rather rampageous young children. I felt that the time had come to replace the village pump (which was a natural meeting place for women) with a small house which we had, which was derelict, which was leased to us by the Hammersmith Council at a peppercorn rent. A group of women and myself started to redecorate the property and to open the doors to local women and their children. Quite quickly women started to come in, who did not just come to share time, but came with a specific number of problems. Then one day (and it really was one day) a local wife came in, and she took off her jersey and showed me bruises that had been inflicted by her husband with the leg of a chair, which left her top part of her body with the most horrific blue bruises. She explained to me that she had tried for years and years to get help and had received a degree of help from all the agencies involved-sympathy and everything else-but, basically, she was left at home to live with this man who assaulted her. The children were quite grown up by this time, some still at home, but all in terrible trouble. I began to try and help her when she said "No one will help me." I realized, personally, having come from a background not dissimilar, a sense of terrible outrage that here, all those years later, the same thing was still happening and there was no help in terms of what she needed. So I asked her to stay and then, by word of mouth, women started to arrive. Here was some place in which they could stay with their children, because what had happened traditionally was that, although there were hostels for women, there was almost non-existent provision for women to take their children. What had happened normally with violent families was that women, in desperation, would go to the Social Services and be told "If you want to leave your husband all that we can offer you is that we will take your children into care and then you will make a life of your own"-in other words, become single homeless. Most women, reluctant to give up their children, return home to further beatings.

66 So quite quickly in this little house that had four rooms and an outside lavatory I had 56 mothers and children sleeping upright along the corridors, in the outside back yard when it was warm enough, and in appalling conditions. Then Neville Vincent heard of our plight, came down and offered to buy us a much larger house, which we have now. This is 369, which is the Central Crisis Refuge. Originally it seemed quite a simple matter that all the women needed was refuge, that once she had refuge she could start a life of her own; but it became obvious that this was not at all the case. We were taking in women and children who had experienced such brutality that one would expect to find in concentration camps and as a result of the damage it would take many years to rehabilitate the mothers and children. So we conceived the idea not only of a crisis refuge that admitted the mother in crisis but of a second stage, where she moved from a big, warm, packed community to one which had five or six families, where, for a period (ideally, two to three years) she lives with emotional and financial security, when she is then ready, we hope, to take the next step, which is to go back into the community, making an independent life of her own. One of the difficulties in the beginning was just simply learning. I had nothing to lean on. There was virtually no literature about these families. There was nobody that one could turn to except the rather bemused social workers, probation officers and everybody concerned about the situation who kept saying "I have given Mrs. Jones a flat" or "I have tried to get Mrs. Jones away from this relationship, but she keeps returning." Then I began to realize that in our situation, with these terribly packed communities, for some reason we were able to hold women that nobody else was able to hold. What was it that we were offering that made this viable? So I began to look at what was happening and that I began to realize that the first thing for a woman running in fear of her life is to understand the psychology of violence, the psychology of fear. Many women have said to me "It is not the beatings that one is afraid of, it is the fear before the beating." The beating was almost a relief. It is the waiting. I realized that until she got into this incredibly packed, warm situation, where she felt that he could not attack her, it was the first time that she could make a real decision about what she was going to do. Most of her decisions beforehand had been panic decisions, as she raced hither and thither to relations and friends and hostels, but never feeling safe enough to sit down and examine what was happening. So certainly the comfort of the crowding gave her a sense of balance. Secondly and, in a sense, much more revolutionary, I realized that these families who had lived in fear and flight (and we call them "adrenalin high" situations) for so many years needed to be offered almost equal adrenalin high levels to match what they had left, and, in a way, Chiswick was becoming a de-escalating station, before she went on to the next stage, which is where she was living with a group of five, still excited, still active; but she needed to go through that whole process to where she could settle down to live with her children, back to a normal life. I think that it is extremely hard for people in non-violent situations to imagine the life of a violent family. But imagine the fact that not only does he beat his wife but the children watch. Fifty per cent of our children also have been beaten as badly as the mothers and have been tortured and have watched the husband rape the wife. So their entire image of life is completely distorted. It is Chiswick's job to establish the norm by which the rest

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of the world lives. This is our hardest task. I often say that when a mother comes into Chiswick she is no longer a battered wife-but that is where the work begins. Chiswick is not the answer for every woman who gets involved with a violent man. There are many women who get involved with violent men who have resources of their own and sufficient independence in their personality to resolve the problem for themselves. Chiswick, because our conditions are public, is known to be overcrowded, is known to be derelict, is known to be in conflict, in a sense. The sort of woman that comes to us is totally at the end of her tether, both emotionally and psychologically. So when she comes to us she has, in a sense, selected the kind of help that we can give, and rarely do we get a woman whom we feel does not need to come to us, because on the whole those women who have chosen to come to us can benefit from what we are doing. The staff at Chiswick are a mixture of men and women from all sorts of professions-and indeed lay people are working there. They arrive at ten at which time the children are ready to go to play school. Then the House Mother, whose job it is to vitalize the house into an efficient running, is there and the first house meeting of the day starts. All the post is opened publicly, except private letters addressed to the mother. Anything addressed to Chiswick is public knowledge, including finances. So the women are invited to feel involved in what is happening in the community, bearing in mind that they have lived with dominating and violent men and have seldom had a say in anything that has happened in their lives. They have become, in a sense, passive about any decisions that they have to make. In Chiswick they have to make decisions. They have to answer the phone. They have to run the house. House meetings are part discussion on the future of Chiswick, on the role of what we are doing, and partly, also, house discussions are about what is happening to the mothers. This involves something as minuscule as washing up. It also involves asking the women who are not pulling their weight why they feel they should not. What we are doing is re-educating. If one accepts that family life is the first and primary socializing agency for children, we must also realize that if it breaks down the children never have a chance of learning the rules by which the rest of us live. So this is the job at Chiswick. A large percentage of the women who come to us have had violent childhoods themselves. They have had no background on which to base anything. We, as we say, are not the welfare state. We are a body of people who are there to help, to enable, but not to do anything for anybody. This is important when a woman expects, as she often does, because she feels that she is entitled to a social worker, that she is entitled to this service and that service-she tends to sit back and say "What is wrong with you?" Because many of them have had social workers and whatever, not only in their generation or their mother's generation but in their grandmother's generation. There are small things which might seem small to everybody else but they are important to us. We could have rents paid direct to us, but we insist that the rents are paid to the mother from the welfare and the mother has learned to pay rent. She often comes from a family where the father has never worked and has no intention of paying rent. The idea of paying rent is a way of training for later on. The battered wife is not just a housing problem, it is a multiple problem. It is about human relationships and the ability to make good relationships as opposed to choosing bad relationships. Most of our mothers marry young.

68 Most of them marry at 16 or 17. Most of them marry to get out of their own bad family situations. What boy wants to marry at 16, 17 and perhaps 18, when the average man is out getting birds and having a beer in the pub with his friends and in no way he wants to be married? But our people want to marry because they have probably been hounded out of their own families because the family is violent. A violent father will not accept his son after a certain stage because the son can challenge his father. So he is out looking for his mythical family that is going to make it all better and, in two weeks, it is disaster. They start a child, usually before they are married, and violence occurs, in most cases, immediately. Because one of our problems is that a violent child has little patience and the most intense relationship is that of marriage and it requires a degree of maturity that our men do not have. It is not simply a question of saying that all men who are violent are brutes-because we never see it like that. In our experience, we deal with two sorts of men. First, those who basically are violent from childhood; they have experienced violence, they have witnessed violence, they have grown up with violence and they are violent. The only other category that we find sometimes is the spoilt boy and it tends to produce the same effect because, as a child, his aggression was never socialized, so he lashes out as he gets older. It is interesting that that particular boy, as a man, does not perpetrate the most hideous forms of violence, where you get a battered child growing up to torture, which he can do in his family. The spoilt boy tends to rule with his boot and fist and you can almost predict from the questionnaires, when you look at her history and his history, what he will do next and how much violence he will perpetrate on his family. The immediate problem was that the only recourse for these families to split up was to go to law. The biggest problem for us is that the majority of our men are totally unaware of what the law is. They live for the split second, so that a threat of jail, a threat of punishment and a threat of fines is a waste of time for them. Rarely have we been able to put any of our mothers back in their original homes on injunction, because it would take a 24-hour armed guard to keep the man out. Certainly injunctions work extremely well where a man spars with his fist and it just needs a judge to say "If you do that again my lad ... ! " But we deal with aggressive psychopaths-and there is no tomorrow. They deal only with the split second. Our only recourse is to create these second-stage communities while the wife recovers, well away from his territory. I discovered early on that a lot of people said to me "Now, look, if your address is openly known you are going to have all these violent men on your doorstep and they are going to smash the place up and they are going to kill everybody." On Dr. Gayford's study on our mothers a third of the men had done time for GBH, many of them are armed robbers and have been publicly violent. The most interesting thing that I have found is that those are the men that we never see. The violent men that one would expect to turn up on the doorstep do not-and the reason is that they do not move out of their own areas. There is a kind of primitive instinct in a violent person to remain in the streets and the areas that he knows and provided you move the mother to a completely different area he will not harass her, but the most lethal thing that you can do, in my opinion, when you are dealing with a man of this kind of violence, is to put her back to the matrimonial home and eject the husband, because I have lost women in that way, they have been killed; the man has come back in a final desperate act and killed her. So rarely do we put women back in their homes.

69 We use the second stage of the communities to filter the women through and then to rehabilitate them. I can honestly say that few women who have gone off on their own, having left the second crisis refuge, are we happy about. I think that the most exciting and best situation is where she has gone through the crisis refuge, been through the second stage and she has had the strength to move out and perhaps to re-marry (and we have had some very happy re-marriages) or to set up on her own, but near enough the second-stage community that she has not lost all her roots. I think that one of the most difficult things-for me, anyway-is to get people to understand; I suppose it is going back to this idea that you almost need, in order to reduce the level of adrenalin and excitement, this planned programme of the crisis refuge, the second stage, and then back into the community. Once having accepted that, we turn to the problems of the boys, which were acute. Roger will talk to you later about the work with the younger children, but I became extremely concerned with the mothers who were bringing in teenage boys who were complete replicas of their fathers. They had learned to rule by the fist. They treated all women as objects. They were obscenely abusive to everybody. They were then terrorizing the refuge, because what is interesting is that many of the women who had lost their violent relationship with their husbands because they feared that they could no longer stay there were actively encouraging their sons-sometimes an older son and sometimes they worked through their sons-to replace that violent relationship. This was particularly horrifying to see and part of the work in the house meetings is to point out to the mother that she was making her lover her son, thereby destroying him. To see a woman set up that relationship was to understand some of the damage that not only came from the father but also from the mother. Many of the women, having totally rejected their violent husbands had made their sons the replacement and the boy was finding that part of the time he was expected to be a boy and her son and the rest of the time he was expected to be her husband. That is another pattern that has to be broken, but what we are talking about is that we are trying to break this cycle of violence, because we can trace in many of our mothers that violence back generations and you could see children getting imprinted as they came through. It was interesting that boys were our primary concern because they were so explosively violent, criminal; already, many of the 16-year-olds had done time for mugging; they had been to many Borstal detention centres in this country, wherein little was done for their souls. They were certainly imprisoned, which, as many boys said, they preferred Borstal to being with us because you could lock up their bodies, but we insist that they work for themselves. The girls, on the surface, seemed much less of a problem-the teenage girls. Yes, they were much more liable to be promiscuous, but slowly one became aware that the girls, early on, managed to avoid a lot of violence in the family. First of all, they had the good situation where they could model themselves on their mothers and consider themselves victims, but dangerous because naturally they would choose to be victims later on; but, secondly, what they would do and had learnt to do with their fathers was to get rid of the father's aggression by psychologically seducing dad into leaving them alone. That seduction pattern carried on and that is where they were at great risk. Many of our girls at that age have already had problems af attempted rapes, this, that and the other, which one would expect, perhaps, when one thinks about it.

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So that was another set of problems that we were looking at and working with. Then, finally, it was looking at the overall appalling situation that these families with which we deal are, if we do not spend money now in rehabilitating them, costing the country thousands and thousands in terms of children care, Borstals, prison, mental hospital, etc. They are filling our institutions which in fact are not aware of the underlying problems. Weare having this repeated cycle and every agency recycles the violence without ever dealing centrally with the problem. There has been a great reluctance, really, to talk about this and deal with it because we all feel that the family is a private place. In a way, it is sacred. That front door to an Englishman's home-it is his drawbridge. Nobody wants to interfere behind there except to deal with the broken-down symptoms that trickle out. We are saying that the community no longer can afford it. To put it at its most crude, for centuries we have had wars which have creamed off our violent men. We have exported our problems to Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. They have suddenly wised up and they no longer take our misfits, so they are here, and the rates of crime and violence are rising in the streets to such a level that the entire community is beginning to become concerned. The roots of violence lie behind a front door. If you want to stop that violence, it it no good blaming the classrooms, it is no good blaming the playground or the television; you must look at that factor which is the family. There the children are trained. We have children who at seven are excellent cat burglars. They are trained by their fathers and beaten if they do not succeed. When they come to us, you must realize that it is no good castigating a child of seven for nicking from the local supermarket when he expects it to be a matter of pride that he has arrived with a joint of beef. You have to accept that a child's reality is built by its parents. The reality of a violent family is so totally different from the reality of a normal family; that the child will spend most of its day time in school or with social workers, or wherever, not even understanding what is being said, because he will go home to a reality that he understands, which is what mum and dad do to each other, and I think that the thing that we have to remember is that there is no law (and there are legal people here) that can be enforced unless the people who are enforcing the law and the people who are acquiescing to the law will to obey. Prison at the end of the day is merely time out for a violent man. He will come back and he will repeat the same pattern. I have talked to so many men-because I see the men on our doorstep and I talk to them-they will look at me and I say "Mr. Jones, your wife is entitled to go out with another man; you have been divorced." But he looks at you and says "That is my wife and children;" and you realize that he has no reality about divorce. You say "Mr. Jones, you have been told by the court that if you kick her door in once more you will go to gaol," and I know when I look at him that he has no conception of what tomorrow means. We have to deal with that in the man. This is why we have a men's house. This is a new project which we have always wanted. Our problem is lack of funds. We decided when we had all these problems of the Judges granting injunctions and removing men from the house and putting the women back that there is no way to put a woman back into the house unless you have some provision for the husband, because it is incredibly dangerous. In a way, you are jeopardizing her life with this move-and I have lost enough women to feel that keenly. So we conceived the idea of a men's house, which is in

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Islington, a place where a man, if he is evicted from the house, can go and stay, where he has a warm group to support him. It is not sufficient. I do not have the highly trained staff that one particularly needs, but there must be something more offered for the men, just as there is for women and children. To re-train, with years of damage, it will take a long time, but it is money well spent, otherwise our husbands are people who populate the gaols again and again and again at vast cost to the State. This way there is a chance that something realistic can be done in terms of changing the pattern of behaviour. There are a lot of arguments about what violence is. I, as a lay personmy only experience is at Chiswick-wou1d say that I consider aggression a natural part of human nature, but I consider violence a perversion of aggression. I think that one of our problems is to create a situation where our mothers and our children and our men can relearn other patterns of dealing with frustration, other than the violence. I have been going for five years. The oldest of our community houses is three years old. I am just now re-housing women in Bristol who have been living in the second stage community for three years. A percentage of those women were violent when they came in-just like the men-they came from violent homes and they were violent themselves. The only reward that I have is that I have women there who were hard, were aggressive and beat their children, now being rehabilitated and moving out into their own houses and so far one can say that they have changed enough for me to feel confident that they will no longer beat their children. But in order to achieve this we have to achieve this particular climate, which is that of the crisis. One crisis replaces another, followed by the de-escalation from that crisis to a smaller group and then out into the open. The last thing that I am going to talk about, before I turn over to Roger, is the almost intractable problem, the one that concerns me most, of the women (that I do not very often talk about because society is prejudiced towards this situation) who were battered as children, whose pain and pleasure has become very confused and you know that you may well rescue her from one situation, or she may ask you to rescue her from one situation, and she will immediately recreate exactly the same situation and indeed demand, provoke and incite violence. With regard to this woman, during this period that I have been working, I understand the mechanisms of her need. I understand from talking now to many hundreds of those women that because of the confusion they choose to be battered. What I cannot find is the key that unlocks that relationship. I will give you an example of a woman who has been in prison eight times for drugging her children. That is the tragedy of the children. Each time she has gone back to her husband Nick, who is extraordinarily violent. I know him. She did not make him violent. He was already violent and he has had other relationships. She chose him for his violence. She creates situations which I call, of those mothers, "death games"-because we speak very simply. The last time she was in I was talking to her about another woman who said to me (and this is true) "It is not the actual beating that I am looking for, not the breaking of the jaw or the smashing of the fist, because that hurts. It is the moment before." That is the adrenalin high. It is just as high as a high on heroin, it is just as high as a high on whisky. This is the way that she chooses to achieve her high. It is just that I am looking for. I said to her "What is it that you are looking for?" She said "Every time I get to that situation I wonder 'Is this it? Is this the end?'" And all that I could say, in absolute desperation (because I am very fond of this woman)

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was "If that is what you are looking for, he will eventually kill you and then you will have achieved what you are actually striving for; but when he kills you, Maggie, I will go to court for him, because he did not do it to you. You did it." I am sure that people here will have views on that. I know that it is one of the most intractable, puzzling problems for me, and these are the women that we tend to hold in the crisis refuge for a long time. He cannot hold her. I cannot find an alternative high for that woman. I cannot find anything except perhaps the roller-coaster at the Battersea funfair for ever. You have to find almost something that she would rather have. But we can help women who are not quite as fixated. We keep them in the central crisis refuge sometimes for a year, until they are ready to move on; but we have almost to absorb their levels of excitement and adrenalin sufficiently for them to become bored with us and then they are ready to move on. So when I am asked by the DHSS "For how long do you keep them?" 1 say "It is not our decision." If you short-circuit it, if you push her out before she is ready to move she will go straight back into her relationship. It must be a very individual period of time. Therefore, we have an awful lot of problems. One is trying to say to the DHSS "Look, in these cases overcrowding is not a bad thing. Overcrowding is therapeutic. Overcrowding creates tensions that actually release some of the anxieties in these particular type of women." It is hard work, because they all look at you in total horror. You say "Now, given that these women have been savagely beaten and with other problems that they have, the best thing for them is to live in small groups where they are emotionally and financially comforted, otherwise you are going to find them rushing out and picking up the first man that comes along and they are back in the same boat again." The first lady that I spoke to at the DHSS said very stuffily "I think it is very unnatural for women to live together." I said "It is very unnatural for women to live with violent men." So you can imagine that our conversations are fairly acid, but there it is. There does have to be at some point, 1 think, the understanding. What we all tend to do is to say "My reality is everybody else's reality." The violent family's reality is not everybody else's reality and it needs particular care. I am now going to hand you over to Roger to talk to you about the children. (Applause) MR. ROGER BLADES: I work in the play group, which is away from the house. It used not to be, but it is now a new house round the corner, down the road and quite separate, so that when the children leave the house, leave their mothers, they come for the whole day to an environment that we can create. There is a team of us. There are four of us who are there full time and there are about four or five other people who come in on a part-time basis and we slot them all in together so that there are (we hope) always an adequate number of people. None of us gets paid so we just have to hope that people turn up. That in itself creates between us a feeling of enthusiasm and of dedication for the children, because these children that we play with each day, are with each day, during which period we become their family, are extraordinary people. I do not regard them as children separate from adults. Just like the mothers and fathers that we have been talking about, they fall into two camps, if you want to look at it like that. They are highly agitated and aggressive boys who do not want to listen and do not want to play games with other children; they want to dominate, smash things, grab

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things-grab your attention or your applause or condemnation. Above all, they want some strong reaction immediately. Then there are girls who, in the most extreme cases anyway, are tremendously withdrawn, are unable to talk to other people, sit in a corner on their own, do not want to play, and, if they do play, they obviously are not ready to understand the group; they are not ready to understand what everybody else is doing. They obviously are crying out for attention as well. With the small staff that we have, with perhaps 50 or 60 children, at times 30-we never know in the morning how many children we are going to meet thereit becomes a stressful job, but we find that we gain our ability to deal with that stress and we gain our ability to carryon doing it from the children themselves, because they are so bright-minded, although they are educationally backward and backward in terms of how they deal with social relations. I did a child psychology course and, if you are thinking in terms of psychoanalysis, they have very little super-ego, they have little ability to see how society behaves and how groups behave and how we expect them to behave. But they have a lot of energy, they have a lot of probing thoughts and creative impulses. I have read books on what other play groups do in the States, particularly, and they seem to be based on much the same patterns. The people that play with them, the play leaders, have to adopt a multitude of roles. You are brother, father, mother, sister. You can become an authoritative figure; you can even let them order you around. You have to be able to change in and out of different uniforms at any possible opportunity. We have to follow what they want to do. We have to give them the opportunity, not to give them a set lesson or a rigid set-up so that you say "You do this and you do that and let me see it when you have done it-and how does that compare with somebody else's?" You cannot do that. You have to let them follow their impulses and do what they want to do, all the time carrying on being yourself. In a sense, we do what we want to do. If we really do not feel like playing football and we would rather have a game of snakes and ladders, then we play snakes and ladders and if somebody else wants to play snakes and ladders, then we will do it together. If a child wants to play football he has to learn a way relating to this group and make us want to play football, so we could then go and play football. We follow the children round in the way that they move. It is like following the tides and moves of the stars. It is a mysterious business because as it is a shadow to the home and because it mirrors what goes on in the main house, in the crisis refuge, we have to obey much the same sort of movements that Erin was talking about. We have to create and keep going a sense of crisis, a sense of adrenalin. We have to have a lot of energy; we have to keep dancing round. Then at times we can calm down, and then the whole group calms down, except for two or three exhibitionists, and then you can say "You are an exhibitionist. You are showing off. You are doing that because you want attention and we all feel like doing something else." So in that way we are trying to build in not so much a super-ego of how society should be, not so much the rules and regulations, but we are trying to build in a sense of what it feels like and what it means to relate to other people. I should think that in nine cases out of ten, of the families from which they come, the model for the boys' behaviour is aggression. The model is that if somebody stops you carrying out what you want to do you go ahead and do it anyway. It does not matter about the cops, it does not matter what the woman says-it does not matter a damn-you can go ahead and do it and if anybody gets in your way you sock them or kick them and, if you

74 cannot do that because they are bigger and heavier than you, you think of another way of doing it. It is not just the boys. I remember a girl who came in as well. She was about 11 and she was called Karen. It took a long time to get through to her. After a while, when talking and playing and just hanging around with her, she told us about how, when she had gone to the new school at 11, her father had told her "When you get to your new school you are going to meet a lot of older boys. If they bully you, you punch them first. Then, if that does not work, you kick them. And if that does not work, you come home and get a hammer and go back there and hit them with the hammer. Sure enough, of course, she went to school and it happened that a l6-year-old boy started pushing her around. She punched him and he punched her back. So she kicked him and he gave her a hell of a kick back, and she cried and went home. Her father hit the roof. He said "What did I tell you?" He grabbed her by the hair, took her to the back of the shed, got a hammer and put a hammer in her hand, walked back to the school with her with the hammer and said "We are going to find that boy and hit him with the hammer." He was not there, he had gone home. So he beat her for not immediately running home and getting a hammer and going out and extracting revenge. That is what we are having to deal with. The most extraordinary thing is that the children that we get are all good children because they are doing what their parents have told them; they are acting in a particular fashion because that is the family that they have come from. That is how they behave and "That is how you are supposed to behave." If somebody says something rude to you, you hit them in the eye. There is no alternative. So what we do, by having patience, is to demonstrate a higher tolerance threshold. Sometimes it gets too much and we can't take it. That is why we need a firm group together so that when one of us cannot take it he just turns round and walks out and the rest can carryon doing the job and then when he feels calmer and better able to deal with it he comes back in. Out of the four permanent staff three of us are men and it seems important that we have men in that position simply for that reason, so that you can show that men do not have to be intolerant, that men do not have to storm round punching and kicking and that men can think of other ways of dealing with situations. A~ I have said, the three of us are university graduates, all in different things. One of them was a psychologist. I did anthropology and was involved in other social sciences. The other one was at Oxford and he did french. But that does not matter. We came from an intellectual background and we went through different things individually and then we seem to have come together specifically to deal with this problem of how you teach a higher threshold to a child, of how you teach a little five-year-old who is the image of his father-and you can see his father in him; he acts in the same way, he talks in the same way and he tries to behave in the same way and in many cases he is the same person. The father may have been out in the world for 30 years earning a living, but that does not make much difference. He is still very much the same sort of person. He will go and steal if he wants something, he will attack if he wants something to change and he will smash something up if he feels frustrated. So we are dealing with a minuscule violent man. All that we can try and do is to teach that there are other ways of doing it, there are more clever ways, more intelligent ways; that if you sow the seeds of violence it comes back to you, that if you yell and shout the yelling and shouting will come back. We try and teach them a certain sort of ability to see groups, the ability to see that if you kick against the traces in such and such a way you suffer,

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everybody else around you suffers, and we can say to them "You are suffering now. You hit that child because you are unhappy. You obviously are sad. You don't want to talk to us about why you are sad and that is a shame, but you hit him because you were unhappy." We do not give exorbitant hugging to the person who is hit. Often the better way is to hug the person who did the hitting. It is all topsy-turvy. You keep on changing their premises-and that is the one thing that they have never had. Yet, in a way, it is what they have had. I lived with a violent couple for a month last year after I joined Women's Aid. I had nowhere to live. I moved into the house with an l S-year-old boy who is now in a detention centre and his 17-year-old wife who is undergoing some sort of day treatment at the psychiatric unit. When the two of them were living together she had a son by a former husband and she invited her 12-year-old brother from Liverpool to stay with them. The were in the other room and I was in the front room. It was the early morning and I was asleep. I woke up and I could hear the girl screaming at her brother. As I was living in the household it was like being a doubleagent. She screamed at her brother to go out and put the kettle on. "Go out and put the kettle on and make us a cup of tea." This poor child wandered out and tried to turn the gas on, but it would not turn on because it needed a shilling in the meter. So he turned round to her and yelled back "It won't go on. It needs some money in the meter." She said "Of course it bloody doesn't." She stormed out and swiped him across the ear, across the room. She saw that it needed a shilling in the meter when she turned it on and she screamed "Why didn't you tell me it needed a shilling in the meter?" He said "I did" and she hit him again. There was no way that he could win. As soon as he opened his eyes and his life began on that day he knew that he was going to be hit. It did not make any difference whether he was good, bad or how he was, older and bigger people would hit him; so all his emotional life becomes intense, either for a complete escape or, what seems to be more common, a kind of revenge, a possible revenge. Such people plot revenge because that is the only thing that they can keep hold of, it is the only thing that is strong to them; everything else wavers. We waver as well, but what we do is that we never threaten them; we do not ever stand there ready to punch them. If anything, we never hit them, we never mix it with them. We are totally acquiescent at times to a very violent child. We go along with his fantasy, we play it out, and in the end we say "Look! -What is happening with that? You are not actually getting anywhere by doing that. There are other forms of revenge, more constructive ways of revenge. You can change your life, you can change other people's lives. It is not too late." Obviously, a lot of women do change. Radically they change. Then they go back home. With children there is a stronger chance. It is like preventive medicine. You can stop them from mugging and fighting and smashing things up before they ever get round to it because you can point out that there are alternatives. That is how I see my job, that is how I see what we do. Whether that works or not, we have constantly monitored to see. Often it does not work. Children are with us and then they are gone. You can engage in a great conversation with a child and you really feel that something useful is happening and is moving and there is a relationship. Then you go in the next day and the child has gone because his mother has made a decision to go somewhere else. Then we find that there are children who are there for too long. A child has learnt what we have to offer. He does not want to accept any more. It is

76 going to take a long time before he accepts any more. He has accepted something, but not all of it. Then you find that he is bored. They go through stages. When they come in a lot of the children cannot understand what is happening. Of course they cannot. They get a lot of love, attention and hugging and listening to and eventually they begin to understand. Then they begin to open up. Often the quiet children become the most violent children because they suddenly open up and all the anxiety and all the pressures that have been with them are expelled and they run amok. Then they realize when they are running amok that we are not chasing them with a big stick, we are not yelling and screaming at them. We have pointed things out to them as to why they do it and we stop them from hurting other children. Then we notice, oddly enough, that most of the violence that happens is in words, and very often they go to fight when they know that you are there to stop them from going to fight. It is a threat and trying to make a person's ego something important, something big. Or else somebody is frightened, scared or confused. Neither of those attitudes or modes of behaviour work with us. We do not let them work and we pay them scant attention. When a girl is frightened and scared you obviously say "There is nothing to be frightened of," but you do not let her dramatise a great self-pity wave of it, because that is not going to work either. What we do is to run a group, a community of children, so the children just have to learn to fuse themselves into a community and we, the staff, who work there are big children ourselves. We are in their world and we are double agents in their world because we filter through what we have learned about life to them as friends. They then begin to understand. That is how I see what we do and sometimes it works in a surprising way. Sometimes it works so spectacularly. You can see a child go to punch somebody and he just realizes that it does not work and he stops and thinks of something else. That is the reward for doing it. At other times you can see a girl getting sexually provocative. For instance, a seven-year-old girl will run in, jump and scissor her legs round my waist and kiss me full on the mouth as "Good morning" because she thinks that I am going to be violent to her. So I give her a bit of a hug and say "Good morning. That is your morning kiss" and I do not let her do it again. I try and regulate it and try and keep it so that they know where they are with a person. I do not want her jumping over me all day. I do not want to see people punching and hitting all day. So I stop them when they are doing it; I talk to them when they are doing it. In that way the children have a chance-just a chance-of learning about themselves and learning' about what they have been through. That is what I did. (Applause) THE CHAIRMAN: I take this opportunity of throwing the meeting open to discussion. Mrs. Pizzey and Mr. Blades have been kind enough to say that they will answer questions if there are any that you wish to ask. DISCUSSION Lou BROWN: Could you tell us more about what the women do during the day. Do they have discussions among themselves as to what happens in their homes? Or do they tend to do nothing and nothing is organized? Is it flexible? MRS. PIZZEY: When the children go to play school, which is ten o'clock, when they are collected by the staff, there is the house meeting-that is the beginning of the daywhen all the mothers are expected to be in the office, not ordered to be there, but because the post is opened, and that is a point of interest. They tend to filter in. The only time that they are ordered to be there is if there is a house meeting involving a particular situation and during that house meeting all sorts of things are discussed. It may be that a mother has left to go home and the community discuss this. "Why has MRS. (OR MISS)

77 she left?" Was it the community's fault? Was it a decision that the mother made? So the discussions in that house meeting are therapeutic discussions. That goes on all through the day. All night long the discussions go on. The discussions are always about what is happening to each woman at that time. We accept a bizarre level of behaviour because of who we are, which perhaps would not be accepted in other institutions. We know that when the community is 147 strong it works rather like London in the blitz. It is the easiest time to run it, funnily enough. The most difficult time-because then it is not reacting, things are not happening-is when the numbers go right down and boredom and apathy arise. That is when it is difficult to keep the tension going that creates the discussion, creates the friction, and brings up all the problems as a result. I have often said "Don't worry about violent women who come in aggressively. Those we can handle." The most dangerous woman is the quiet, gentle woman and she can use her violence quite differently, sometimes through her children, whom she will allow to behave in the most appalling fashion and will say "I can't help it." You finally say "Well, you can, actually. It is not that you have to do anything, because you make yourself virtuous, but you allow your son to behave like the husband because that is the way that you use your aggression." That upsets her, because no one else probably has seen that. Apart from that or apart from anything else, keeping a house with that kind of overcrowding hygiene is an enormous job. It has to be cleaned up at least three times a day. Women go to solicitors with each other, they go to the high court, they go to social security, they go to speak, they visit each other, and so on. It is a busy community which you rarely see, except for a house meeting or perhaps everybody in on a particular discussion. For instance, I suppose the most contentious thing is what we call "smash-up." If the community gets quiet and it is getting a bit boring the community will create its own dramas and they are usually quite difficult because they involve breaking windows and having a big fight. This was brought home to one group of women when we had a lot of adolescent boys in the house about whom the women complained bitterly. They said "My God, it is the boys, we can't live like this, it was better at home." So I said "All right, we will see. I will send every boy away on holiday for a week." The women said "Absolutely marvellous." We sent them all off for a week. After the first night I came in in the morning and the mothers said "A marvellous night. We had a lovely time. We cooked and we baked." On the next night there was a terrible fight, with the ladies going for each other and windows being broken. I said "Now, who are we talking about? You or the boys?" They had rather shamefacedly to admit that they missed the boys, because what they were able to do was to channel their own violence off through the boys, allowing the boys to behave in such a fashion, which was ridiculous. I said "Come on, don't tell me that 30 women can't control a handful of boys. If you do not do it, you do not want to control them." So this is what is going on all the time. It is an exhausting place to be in, I can tell you. MR. ALEC SAMUELS: I am connected with the Women's Aid Refuge in my town and I was perturbed by what seemed to me to be all the pessimism which underlay what Mrs. Pizzey was saying. She assumed that the situation was necessarily a breakup one, there was no chance of any reconciliation, that the violence shown in every case had, as it were, fatal potentialities. No doubt in some cases that might be so, but in my experience I would not say that it is so pessimistice as that. I was also disturbed that there was no point in trying to put the wife back into the home. My view of that is that in many cases the husband drives the wife out and he has been allowed to remain in the home, he has achieved a victory, and this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. If the wife could be put back in the home where she belongs (after all, it is her home) and he could be put out effectively, in many cases something could be done to bring the husband to reason. As Mrs. Pizzey will know, Parliament has recently passed the Domestic Violence (Matrimonial Proceedings) Act which will come into force not later than April of this year, which will enable a wife or anybody on her behalf to go straight to the Circuit Judge and get an injunction immediately and that injunction can have coupled with it a power of arrest on which we hope the police will act in the event of any breach. Does she not see any possibility, in some cases, of being able to bring the man to see reason if the wife is able to get back in her home and get him out so that she will not be the defeated party, as she seems to be at the moment. MRS. PIZZEY: On the point about injunctions, I think that injunctions can work for a man with whom sanctions are viable. I feel that in many cases injunctions will work for men who normally are aggressive but not extremely violent. I think that men who are fast with their fists will abide by injunctions. In our case-and I did say that Chiswick is not the place for every woman who experiences violence-it is a particular type

78 of violence. If you look at the history of the men, in the majority of cases the man has been violent since childhood, and there is no way by which you can put her back in the house and keep him away unless you wish to put a 24-hour armed guard on the door. The police cannot function in that way. The trouble is that by the time the police have been alerted (and, let us face it, the majority of people in the working classes do not have telephones) it is too late. He is in again; he has battered her again and even killed her. In our case, I am not looking at or talking about other women's aids because other women's aids, quite rightly, have different approaches. In our case I think that we get the bottom end of violence and it is rarely that we have got a woman back into the house. Certainly we try. The judges are good to us and do grant injunctions, but, on the whole, it is not feasible. MR. HOPE: I work in schools and, in going into the background of families, I agree that the cycle between the children and their fathers needs to be stopped. I do not get a picture of what is happening in relation to these children's education. Are they going back in and out of schools? Is there any place-for instance, hostels-instead of their coming with their mothers? I accept that the mothers want to get away for their own purposes, but is there anything with education in it? MR. BLADES: There is quite a discussion about it at the moment. The way that I talked I think related more to how it used to be. There was an old church hall where Van Gogh used to teach Sunday school. It was a ghostly, historical sort of place. It was a big barn. It was impossible to do any sort of teaching. The children were of all age groups, mixing together, changing their minds. Then we moved into this new (what we call) School House or Play House. One of the children who came in called it a Space School. What we have found is that we have injected more of the ability to teach simple things, such as to play dominoes. That is teaching about numbers. Of course, most of the children that we get are educationally backward because school has not had time to deal with them. There is a statutory requirement that when the child is in the particular Borough, he has to go to school after a certain time. We accept that. So what we feel is that it is no good a child just going directly to school, because they put up all sorts of barriers to being able to go through the day, of being able to write down sums, to draw pictures and do what they are supposed to do at that particular time. They are not really learningthey are surviving-and if you can do something about the emotional state of that child and get him to be more willing and more enthusiastic about being able to meet other children, of being able to get on in life and with other people, then he has a far better chance of going back to school. We understand and we know that all these children are going to go back to state education. All that we are saying is that if they went immediately, straight away, into state education they would suffer. We can remedy some of the faults that are stopping them from getting a good state education. We have several cases of extremely violent boys. There is one particular child called Patrick, one of the most vitriolic and tempestuous children that we have ever had, and after dealing with him for four or five months we took the brunt of all the frustration and anger that he had to give-not all of it, but a lot of it that he had to give. He was put into a state school down the road and he got in fine. But I did feel that after going through a confusing, emotional experience he was in no fit state to slot into an ordinary classroom and carryon his education. He needs something else first and we try to give that-we try to act as a bridge. Indeed we have Wednesday meetings, which are working meetings, to try and swop as much information as we can about the children, their backgrounds and their home life and what we are going to feel about them in the future. We invite teachers from local schools and they talk to us about the possibility of some of our children going to their schools. Also, some of our children have gone to their schools and they tell us how they are getting on. A state school is all very well but it is only for half a year, more or less. There are long holidays. Six weeks in the summer. But we are a continuing community and we are there all the time and the child knows that we are there all the time, so when he is on holiday or in the evening there is somewhere for him to go and somewhere for him to be part of. Yes education has a lot to offer and I think that children should learn as much as they can, but they have to be in a fit state to learn it. Otherwise they will not learn anything at all.

A MEMBER: I want to ask Mrs. Pizzey how many people she has in the refuge at the moment and perhaps to break down who they are. How many mothers? How many children? Could we have some idea of what it is?

79 MRS. PIZZEY: At the moment we have 60 mothers and children. We are officially limited to 36. 60 is not too bad. It is normally nearer the eighties and nineties. So we are having a bit of a rest at the moment. The thing is that we tend to have large families. We have three women with seven children each. This is because most of the men involved, the cohabiting husbands, are morbidly jealous. That is a horrific sign. I went to Broadrnoor, where they said that for anybody who was morbidly jealous they decided to put a label round their neck saying that they were paranoid schizophrenics. In no way is every man who beats his wife a paranoid schizophrenic, but they certainly are morbidly jealous and part of their jealousy is fantasy about their wives' sexual activities which may involve things like she may not leave the house and, as many of our men do not work, they are home all the time. If she goes shopping she is timed. Certainly she may use no form of contraceptive, or she will be beaten. What she must be is pregnant all the time, although she is beaten when she is pregnant. So we tend to have these large families with a horrific amount of miscarriages, cot deaths and other things. So at the moment I think we have 60 mothers and children, which gives us usually about 24 mothers and the rest children. And the numbers vary from day to day. We can never say how many mothers we are going to have. I can tell you that the holiday times are the worst. Christmas is a disaster because it is money, booze, and at a time when it is supposed to be so happy for normal people, it is upsetting for most of the men who have had horrific childhoods. It brings it all back. We know that after Christmas we get a rush. Another thing, which I do not know if anybody else can explain, is the full moon. So many women have said "A full moon and he goes berserk." We have records of the times and the numbers of women who have come in stretching over three years and we always know that three days after a full moon the mothers will start to come in. I know that this is funny, but it ties up with what is said by people who work in the psychiatric hospitals. They say the same thing. I know that it is not scientific, but it is a fact that I often meet. I must also explain that we have a solicitor who comes to Chiswick. He is from the Law Society. We also have health visitors who come regularly. We have a doctor who comes. All the agencies that we can involve are involved and our great friends locally are the probation officers, who have a straightforward view of life. We try as far as possible to involve all agencies in the work that we do. You must remember that the social workers who refer families to us are those who care particularly about their families and they tend to bring them or actually drive them in themselves. In spite of a directive that went out a year ago saying that no social worker was supposed to refer any family to Chiswick because of the overcrowding, many social workers are so desperate about the state of their family that they bring them anyway. I take my hat off to them because they put their necks on the line for that. MR. BELCOURT: I am a barrister. One of the things that emerges from your address is that there are many women who come to you for help who appear to provoke the violence of which they are victims. What is your approach to these women who appear to get some kind of masochistic thrill out of being beaten? We in practice at the Divorce Bar are familiar with situations where wives have applied to judges for injunctions and the moment that they get their injunctions you see them walking out of court arm in arm with their husbands. That is a frequent occurrence. I have on many occasions had to appear several times and, having obtained injunctions, have been instructed to go back on an application to commit the husbands to prisons for contempt of court, only to find outside the door of the court the wife saying, "Oh, he doesn't really mean it. He loves the children. Give him another chance. I don't want him to go to prison." I have a feeling, as to a lot of these women, that there is something in their make-up which requires that violence. How do you cure them of that? MRS. PIZZEY: That is the the most difficult of all. It is not all our women. We must remember that we are talking about maybe a third if the women that come through the refuge. They are a vital third because they are the third that are breeding the next generation of mothers of killers, because they not only seek violence themselves but they train their children. The first point of healing is the house meeting, where, when she has lost her husband to provoke, she will then provoke within the house. Then it is up to us to bring out the reality from the other mothers, of saying "Look at what you are doing. Yes, there was a fight last night. What is your part in this violence? Why is it, whenever there is trouble, you are in the middle of it?" She may not be one of the women who lashes out. There are few house rules in Chiswick, but one of them is that there may not be violence between women. If there is, it is extremely serious. It is the one thing that you can be voted out for. It has to be a unanimous vote by the mothers to vote somebody

80 out. It has happened rarely. But that is the point of discussion, when there has been an incident, when there has been a flare-up. Given (touch wood) the history of Chiswick and the women that we have had, we have never had any serious damage from any fisticuffs. We have had a few thumps and a bit of hair-pulling, but, fortunately, the climate is such that it cannot escalate beyond that because the daily house meeting keeps the temperature down. It is extraordinary, when you are dealing with realities, to have a woman come in and she will sit there. She has come in with her children, she will be sitting in the room opposite me, her children will be running around and I wiII say "How are you with the children?" "Oh, fine. I love my kids." Then the child will perhaps go over to the phone. "Get your hands off that phone or I will push your fucking face in." You will say to her "Do you always speak to your children like that?" "Like what?" And you say "You have just be very violent to your child, haven't you?" "I haven't." You have to break through that, to the point where enough mothers are sitting around to say "It is you. You are the one who is violent. Certainly your husband is violent, but look at your role in all this." That is where the work starts and that is a long, long term. This is where I would like to see courts taking up places of safety orders, where a woman gets to a refuge (I know it is not possible), where she is not allowed to yo-yo between a violent husband and the refuge. At least while she is in the refuge the children are safe, they do not starve, and they are protected; but there are terrifying death games that can go on between couples, of which you are aware just as much as I am, and the helplessness of the children in between. I have at times, in desperation, put children into care, because one place that has evidence to put children into care is Chiswick because we live with the mothers and we know what is going on and, to my horror, when the mother returns horne a few weeks later she has got them out again. I am not advocating care because, as far as I am concerned, unless you sterilize the woman, you take her children away and she will replace them. This is the hardest part of our work. It is amazing to watch in a house meeting a mother who has not accepted that she is violent. To give an example, there was a drunken scene-because no one can bring alcohol into the house, it is not allowed, but the women are allowed to go out, if they want to go dancing or whatever, but they cannot bring it in. However, this woman carne in, she would not accept that she was violent, yet her aggression was apparent to everybody; another woman wiped her finger on her face and she bit off the top of her finger, which produced an incredible house meeting the next day and I finally said "Do you now accept that you are violent?" and she said "Yes, I am violent." That was beginning to work with her. She now works on our work force, mending our buildings, which is an ideal job for her. (Laughter) That is what the work is about MRS. ELIZABETH BUTCHER: I am a probation officer. I was wondering whether you have ever used the medium of drama with your children as a vehicle to express their reality as well as perhaps to diffuse some of the anger and revenge feelings that they have about their parents. MR. BLADES: That is an interesting point. In the evenings we used to have a drama class. The sister of one of the staff is an actress and she used to come once a week and take these drama classes. It worked too well-it worked exceptionally well-because, once given the role of the Big Bad Baron, this boy is the Big Bad Baron and you can't stop him from being the Big Bad Baron. (Laughter) Eventually these drama classes dissolved because all the extras were determined to be stars. It had to be dissolved. Everybody was sent home. We could not take any more. Two more children came round the next night, hammered on the door and said "Where is the drama?" (Laughter) The drama is everywhere. It is dramatic all the time. You are right, we do that, but we have to act with them most of the time and it is almost as if we cannot make anything that is a play, because it is all play, we play all the time. Yes, you are right, we try and do that-and it is interesting to watch the little ones playing mothers and fathers, where even the three-year-old "father" hits the three-year-old girl because she is the "mother". We use that not as a sense of drama but as something that we can talk about and say 'Why did you do that?" and that sort of thing. MRS. THURSTON; Mrs. Pizzey has mentioned certain predisposing factors, including a history of familial violence and early marriage. Are there any other predisposing factors that have been noticed, such as things like unemployment, overcrowding, racial mixtures or perhaps any particular trades followed by the husband? Are there any other factors that tend to come into it? MRS. PIZZEY; Doctors' wives, I am afraid. (Laughter) It is true. The middle class women. Doctors' wives and policemen's wives, followed quite closely by solicitors. This is embarrassing! (Laughter) Why is that? This is one of the things, when I first started, that shocked everybody. There was a paper on wife-torturing a hundred years

81 ago and Disraeli promised that something would be done. There was virtually a select committee and it all went under the carpet, and now we are here again. When I first started I was told quite categorically that it was the working classes, inarticulate, could not reason, had to lash out with their fists, and I said "Well, that can't really be true, because I have barristers' wives, solicitors' wives, etc., who are coming to me, who have been battered; they have large homes, they have very good job potential." For all those reasons, unemployment, overcrowding and bad housing do not seem to be the cause. This is why I began to look at it, particularly because of the middle class women who came and what it seemed to go back to every single time was the violent patterns of behaviour in childhood, except for this one exception, which is the totally spoilt boy who again, in his aggression and rages at three, is allowed to express any kind of anger and is totally served by his mother usually out of a tacit father or non-existent father, who grows up to batter. Those are the two things that I can see. There are variables. There are occasionally severe mental illnesses, schizophrenics. I have been told by experts that heroin addicts are not violent. That is not true. In my experience I have seen women badly beaten by heroin addicts. Those are other causes, but not as enormous as the fact that battered children grow up to batter. MRS. THURSTON: Is it on the increase, or is it noticed more? MRS. PIZZEY: That is an extremely difficult one. I am almost congratulating everybody that we are probably civilized enough now to look at this particular problem. Certainly the violence in society 100 years ago was many times worse that it is now. On the other hand, what does concern me is that one of the controlling factors in the small communities was the extended family, where people lived in small groups and you had the community involved with the family life. In the old days if a man beat his wife they tied him to a pole and walked him round the village, beating tin pans and singing a particular rhyme-which was very effective, I thought. A MEMBER: Could Mrs. Pizzey tell us anything about battered husbands? (Laughter) MRS. PIZZEY: It is not funny. It is most tragic. It is even more tragic because at the moment the battered wife will see that society it totally on her side, but what about the men? I would say that there are two things. In a good marriage with a lot of control and something specific is brought up and it explodes into violence, Dr. Gayford defines this as a sort of repeated physical assault. I am a large woman, my husband is taller than I am and there is no way that I am stronger than he is if it came to fighting, so there is no way that I could beat him repeatedly. On the other hand, what I can do and what many women do is to beat him psychologically. We have men coming to us saying "Please help me. I don't know what to do with her. She pushes me and pushes me to where I hit her and I feel so disgusted and ashamed." You say "Look, you are not violent, she is violent. What you have to learn is that by hitting her you are satisfying her. Either learn how to handle her and understand what is going on, or get out, because she will destroy you in the end." I have spent a lot of time with these men and I do sympathize. We have just had a woman who married a 64-year-old man, who is very gentle and illiterate, and she battered hell out of him; she fractured his skull. It did not take us long to begin to say to her "Christine, you are a batterer" and she was terribly annoyed. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. She was beating the children and the children, in an effort to disguise what she was doing, were blaming the father; but, with us, they were able to draw pictures and able to talk to the play staff, where they were able to tell the truth. Certainly women batter men, but they tend to far more with their tongues. They tend to withhold sexual favours. There are many, many ways. Sometimes bruises heal and broken bones heal, but the damage to peoples' souls can last forever. I think that the other thing to say is that in Chiswick we are apolitical; we see it in terms of human relationships, good relationships and loving relationships. This is what we teach. THE CHAIRMAN: I must draw the meeting to a close. We all have been most interested tonight in the address of both our speakers and I am sure that you will wish to show your appreciation and express your thanks to both of them for coming here and for the interesting addresses that they have given us, which were informative and instructive. (Applause) (The meeting then ended.)