The first refuge in the world devoted to the care and rehabilitation of violence-prone families was opened in Chiswick in London in 1971. In the early months a small house that we christened Chiswick Women’s aid was opened as a community centre to serve as a local meeting place for women locally and their children so that we could all pool our talents and work within our community.
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Those of us working in the field of domestic violence are confronted daily by the difficult task of working with women in problematical families. In my work with family violence, I have come to recognise that there are women involved in emotionally and/or physically violent relationships who express and enact disturbance beyond the expected (and acceptable) scope of distress. Such individuals, spurred on by deep feelings of vengefulness, vindictiveness, and animosity, behave in a manner that is singularly destructive; destructive to themselves as well as to some or all of the other family members, making an already bad family situation worse. These women I have found it useful to describe as ‘family terrorists.’ In my experience, men also are capable of behaving as ‘family terrorists’ but male violence tends to be more physical and explosive. We have had thousands of international studies about male violence but there is very little about why or how women are violent. There seems to be a blanket of silence over the huge figures of violence expressed by women. Because ‘family terrorism’ is a tactic largely used by women and my work in the domestic violence field is largely with women, I address this problem discussing only my work with women.
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