In the East London working class environment in which I grew up men who hit women were considered the lowest of the low. Yet it was commonplace and it happened in my own family. Equally it was not considered done for abused women to wash such dirty laundry in public. After the police started a few years ago to take it seriously and arrest perpetrators, domestic violence was found to be responsible for at least twenty five percent of all recorded assaults. It is the most numerous single type of assault with 530,000 cases in 1991.
Surveys show that still only twenty percent of assaults are reported to the police.
The statistics paint a horrifying picture. A quarter of women say they have experienced physical violence from a partner. In sixty-eight percent of incidents of domestic violence, children are in the same or next room, witnesses to the assault. A third of children present during an incident intervene to protect the mother. The women's refuge movement has done a great deal to change the public attitude to such violence.