The Together We Can End Violence Against Women And Girls Strategy consultation sets out action Government has taken to tackle all forms of violence against women and girls .It looks at what more can be done to challenge the attitudes that may uphold it in order to help women and girls feel safer.
A single-decker bus tour will visit local shopping centres, universities, sports grounds and train stations around the region. All are welcome to come along and contribute to the public debate.
The roadshow will visit
Friday 20 March
09:00 - 16:00 Cambridge City Centre [The bus will be located on Sydney Street, outside Boots.]
16:45 - 20:00 Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge City Centre [The bus will be located car park.]
Saturday 21 March
09:00 - 18:30 Luton Town Centre [The bus will be located on Market Hill, end of main shopping street.]
Southend woman, Gabbi Millar, survived four years of a violent marriage and now works as a Housing Officer for Southend Borough Council helping other women escape violent relationships.
Now happily remarried, Gabbi met her first husband in September 1997, just after she had been made redundant from her £50,000-a-year job. He began talking to her on Pitsea station in Essex after she had missed a train. "I had no idea he was an alcoholic, let alone violent," she recalled. "He was simply charming. Then he turned up on my door and wooed me in a very old-fashioned way. I thought he was the man of my dreams."
She married him after only six weeks and the beatings began just a fortnight later at their home in Southall, west London.
"There was a minor row," she said. "I can't even remember what it was about. Then he just started hitting me. I was very vulnerable when I first met him because I had just lost my job after 17 years in the City.
"Once the violence started he used to batter me on almost a daily basis. He would beat me black and blue, tried to strangle me and continually stabbed me with knives and forks or anything else he could put his hands on."
Her son's birth in September 1998 only made the situation worse, Mrs Millar said. "He just became jealous because my attention was on the baby.
I constantly feared that he would hurt the baby. If Kevin cried at night, I'd have to put myself between them and he wouldn't stop beating me until he saw blood."
Her husband was finally jailed for four months for assault in July 1999, but Gabbi agreed to have him back, hoping jail would have taught him a lesson. But in December that year, he was imprisoned again for six months for causing her actual bodily harm.
Freed again, her husband subjected her to such a severe beating in February 2000 that he fractured her cheek and broke four of her teeth.
Gabbi finally left him, taking her 17-month old son with her, and escaped to the Woman's Aid Refuge in Southend under police escort. Her husband was jailed for 18 months for the assault on her, and then shortly after his release from prison in 2002, he battered a homeless man to death with a fire extinguisher. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 16 years.
A year after reaching the refuge, Gabbi had recovered enough to start volunteering as a support worker. When the manager's job became vacant she successfully applied. Five years later she joined Southend Borough Council Housing Options Team as the domestic violence lead.
"You don't have to put up with it," is Gabbi's advice to other women suffering abuse. "No matter how bad you're made to feel, there is a way out - don't suffer alone."
Women's Aid in Southend 24-hour crisis line is: 01702 300006
Norfolk woman Joanne Robinson who has suffered domestic violence for more than half her life will be available for interview, and will be on the bus when it visits Norwich on Friday 20 March.
Joanne, 40, now lives in Dereham in Norfolk. She was born in Wood Green, north London and her earliest memories are of her father attacking her mother a pattern of behaviour that was repeated throughout her childhood and which she was powerless to prevent.
By the time Joanne became a teenager and starting meeting her boys in her own right, her self esteem had reached rock bottom, she was searching for love and support but had no idea how to find it. She embarked upon a series of abusive relationships and had two children before she reached 20.
"Every time my husband hit me or criticised me I felt it was my fault, that I had done something to deserve his threats, taunts and constant cheating with other women," says Joanne.
Joanne managed to leave her husband after he was jailed for five years, and although she won a bitter court battle to gain custody of her children, went to college to learn secretarial skills when her children started school, got a full-time job and moved house to Enfield, she continued to make poor choices when it came to men.
"Because I was desperate to believe a man could love me, I was very naive where men were concerned. I fell for insincere promises and put up lying and cheating behaviour. I had no sense of my own self worth."
Eventually Joanne reached breaking point when her latest partner said he would leave her unless she became pregnant with his child.
"I knew I didn't want any more children, "she said "I was afraid I would be left as a single mum. It was emotional blackmail which finally caused me to have a breakdown."
"At last I realised that my unhappy relationships were all about choices I was making. I kept hoping these men would change - but it was me that had to change."
Joanne found strength from a counseller and the support of her local church and started on the road to recovery.
Today Joanne works as a relationships counsellor. Since she moved to Norfolk in 2008 she has set up a training consultancy and runs workshops for women who have suffered abusive relationships and need to break out of the self destructive cycle, including women from different ethnicities who have been forced into arranged marriages or threatened with honour based violence.
The Women Against Violence Strategy was launched by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on 9 March. It includes a review into police powers for dealing with serial perpetrators of domestic violence and a review of the sexualisation of teenage girls.
The consultation will include public and stakeholder events in 40 towns and cities across England over the next nine weeks and aims to cover a wide range of issues including:
- Tackling persistent perpetrators including a review into what additional powers police and courts may need to control violent perpetrators - particularly serial offenders who move between relationships -led by Chief Constable Brian Moore, Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) lead on domestic violence.
- Helping women feel safer when they travel including a new website, enabling the public to report where they feel safe or unsafe and why; and the expansion of the Park Mark safer car parks scheme.
- A fact-finding review into the increasing sexualisation of teenage girls
- We are establishing a new advisory group with a specific focus on how schools can prevent violence against women.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said:
"Violence against women and girls is unacceptable in any form no matter what the circumstances are. I want to start a national debate on what more we can do to prevent it and challenging attitudes which condone it. Most importantly I want to reduce the fear of serious violence that can infringe the absolute right of women to go about their lives freely from fear.
"Over the next twelve weeks we will be speaking to thousands of people across the country, through an interactive website, in focus groups and with roadshows in more than 40 towns across the country. I want both men and women to engage with the consultation and tell us what would make them, or the women in their lives, feel and be safer. "
