I understood the controversy as that Erin Pizzey said DV victims fell into two camps.
The first camp consisted of victims who had been badly abused, came to the refuge, used the time to get things sorted, and then never went back to their abusive partners.
The second, however, were the victims who perpetuated the cycle and were locked in co-dependency dance of violence with their partners. It was a way of being for them, almost a culture.
These victims were as verbally, physically and psychologically aggressive as their partners, but as their partners were often male with greater physical strength, when the domestic situation became very inflamed, these victims suffered a greater level of physical harm.
When Pizzey set up her shelters, she expected victims to be of the first camp. She expected to be providing a way for victims to escape their abusers and begin new lives. She did not reckon on, or possibly even conceived of, the second camp. I suspect her lack of knowledge of the intricacies within English working class strata did not help.
Now, I understood what she was talking about, because I grew up in a former industrial town and everyone knew those kinds of "camp two" families. My grandmother would refer to the wives in them as "mill-molls", which was a kind of shorthand for very aggressive women who were vicious to everyone not in their circle and who were known for "playing hell". She would talk about taking steps to avoid their mothers when she was working on the factory floor back in the late '30s, so this gives you an idea of how long this phenomenon has existed.
Now I look at those families and see them as the consequence of the brutalisation of a certain strata of the English working class by industrialisation and slum poverty, but when I was young, they were the families where you steered clear of their kids because they were so aggressive and you didn't want to set them off.
But, you see, because so much of the world of liberalism and feminism takes a middle class consciousness as a base, it's very difficult to talk about this kind of thing and what it means for policy and social problems. The middle class left just come over all indignant and start muttering about how shameful it is to split people into the "deserving and undeserving poor", like any of them have the faintest clue about that world.
And I know, by writing this, I'm probably going to piss someone on this board off. So I am going to write this disclaimer, even though I shouldn't need to: "I believe with my whole heart that no-one should ever be abused physically, emotionally, financially, or psychologically."