4. ERIN PIZZEY
A LETHAL PHOBIA – EXTRACT
Welcome to video four.
Erin Pizzy. Erin Patrice Margaret Pizzy established the first domestic violence shelter in London in 1971. She was the founder, the first before anyone else. Soon after establishing her refuge, she asserted something the emerging feminist movement found deeply inconvenient.
Much of the much of the domestic violence she was seeing was reciprocal. For these findings, Pizzy received death threats. She was boycotted, exiled, banned from the refuge she herself had founded. It was not until 2020, 49 years later, that her name was mentioned publicly on the organization's website for the first time. I have asked multiple people working across the Australian DV sector, including trained police, one simple question.
Who created the first woman's shelter?
Every single time I received a blank expression in an industry receiving 4.7 billion dollars in government funding, not one person could name her. The clinical term is alethophobia.
A Lethal Phobia. Available now.