Erin Pizzey: domestic violence campaigner, anti-feminist

Erin Pizzey set up the first refuge for battered women in 1971 and has been a lifelong campaigner on the issue of domestic violence. But she is strongly anti-feminist.

She does not accept the feminist claim that men are always the perpetrators when it comes to domestic violence and that women are always the victims. She believes this claim to be false and damaging to relationships between men and women and to the family.

Why does she feel so strongly on this issue? She revealed this week that she had the misfortune as a girl to be abused not only by her father but to an even greater extent by her mother:

Indeed, my mother's explosive temper and abusive behaviour shaped the person I later became like no other event in my life.

Thirty years later, when feminism exploded onto the scene, I was often mistaken for a supporter of the movement. But I have never been a feminist, because, having experienced my mother's violence, I always knew that women can be as vicious and irresponsible as men.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the movement, which proclaimed that all men are potential rapists and batterers, was based on a lie that, if allowed to flourish, would result in the complete destruction of family life.

It was Erin Pizzey's mother who was physically abusive toward her, once beating her with an ironing cord until there was blood running down her legs.

Erin Pizzey explains her decision to go public with the details of her childhood as follows:

I only decided to talk about my traumatic childhood last week - on a BBC radio programme called The House Where I Grew Up - but I decided long ago I would not repeat the toxic lessons I learned as a child. Instead, I would become a survivor.

Feminism, I realised, was a lie. Women and men are both capable of extraordinary cruelty. Indeed, the only thing a child really needs - two biological parents under one roof - was being undermined by the very ideology which claimed to speak up for women's rights.

This country is now on the brink of serious moral collapse. We must stop demonising men and start healing the rift that feminism has created between men and women.

Harriet Harman's insidious and manipulative philosophy that women are always victims and men always oppressors can only continue this unspeakable cycle of violence. And it's our children who will suffer.