I well remember my first trip to the women's refuge in Harcourt Terrace in Dublin. There, just like my own refuge in Chiswick, London, the huge house was packed with desperate mothers and their children. I was so pleased the committee for Dublin's Women's Aid was made up of both men and women. I was aware from experience that my mother was as violent as my father. I always thought of her as a domestic terrorist.
I remember standing in front of my teacher at a school in Toronto, Canada, when I was about six years old begging my teacher to accept that the huge welts on my legs were caused by my mother whipping me with the ironing cord. The teacher refused to listen to me.
My parents were in the British Foreign Office, so the idea of domestic violence was unthinkable. Both my parents were violent and both came from violent and dysfunctional backgrounds. My father's eccentric and dysfunctional behaviour was recognised by the people with whom he worked. He lost his temper very easily and raged and insulted people.
Like many children from violent homes, we had no friends. My mother, however, was much loved because she was an angel in the streets and a very devil behind the front door. No one saw her violent behaviour.
In those early days, because there was no refuge in Ireland, many of the women fleeing violence in Dublin came to the Chiswick Refuge. In her Irish Times article of May 23rd marking the founding in 1974 of Women's Aid, Nuala Fennell mentions that when my film, Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear, was shown, the story told by a sobbing Irish woman shocked the Irish audience.
She fled her home in Ireland afraid for her life, leaving behind her three children. She was a genuine victim of her husband's violence. She needed refuge and a good solicitor to help get her children returned to her and a safe place to live well away from her psychopath husband.
Rose also arrived from Ireland with seven children. She too had been savagely beaten, as were her children. They had also been sexually abused by her violent husband who was a well-known criminal. It transpired very quickly that Rose also battered her children and continued to ply her trade as a prostitute in the streets of Chiswick.
Rose was not only a victim of her husband's violence but was a victim of her own violent and sexually abused childhood. Without our help and continued counselling, the prognosis for rescuing Rose and her children from a life of continued violence was poor indeed.
Rose's boys followed the example set by their father. They exploded if frustrated and hit each other and other people. Both parents ruled them by the boot and the fist and they learned their early lessons only too well. The girls imploded their rage and anger. They mutilated themselves and instigated fights with other children.
We soon had complaints from local shops that they were shoplifting and loitering around the men's public lavatories asking for money in returned for a glimpse of their budding breasts.
I never was able to understand how so-called experts imagined that only boys were infected by violence in the family and somehow the girls were impervious. Rose and her children needed our help and indeed lived in our care for several years. Rose, like my mother, was a violent woman; she didn't just need refuge, she also needed therapy.
By the end of 1974 I was aware that the English feminist movement could get no general support for their radical hatred of family life and of men. I knew they were looking for a legitimate cause to justify their hatred of men and for a source of financial support. They hastily produced slogans such as "all women are innocent victims of men's violence" and proffered false figures to legitimise their successful attempt to hijack the domestic violence movement.
Only now, 30 years later, are we beginning to pull back the political curtains that obscured the cause of violence behind the family front door. Men are often their own worst enemy when it comes to identifying the violent behaviour of women.
Most men are reluctant to recognise their partner's violence and will attempt to excuse her violent behaviour by believing that she is suffering from "her nerves," or premenstrual tension. Men also know that any admission that they are battered by the women in their lives will bring ridicule and disbelief.
My six-foot-four father lived in fear of my mother. She was a tiny four-foot-nine woman but her rages were terrifying. Any attempt at research into the violent behaviour of women brings with it threats of violence.
Susan Steinmetz, who wrote the first book on battered men, and her children were sent death threats. I was also persecuted and finally went into political exile. Domestic violence was by now a million dollar industry and part of the refusal to consider the plight of men was a reluctance to share in the bonanza.
During my time in America I worked on cases of paedophilia where there were as many women abusing children as there were men. Now we know that the most violent relationships of all are to be found in relationships between women. This makes a nonsense of the slogan "all men are batterers".
Even at the last Amen conference in Dublin, which was well attended by both men and women, I talked about women's violent behaviour and was accused of "blaming the victim". Why should there be conferences, television programmes, and newspapers devoted to discussing the violence of men and tight censorship when it comes to the violence of women?
When I opened the first refuge in the world for victims of violence, I had a vision of men and women working together to eradicate violence in the family. I believed then, as I do now, that violence is a learned pattern of behaviour in early childhood. In my work I teach that we all internalise our parents' behaviour and the good they do in our early lives helps us to become loving, caring people.
If we internalise the violence of our parents, the probability is that we will go on to repeat the pattern.
If only Dublin Women's Aid could join forces with Amen, the largest group which helps abused men in the world, then great progress could be made. Violence is part of the human condition and we will always need refuges for fleeing victims. If the two arms of the solutions to violence in the family could join forces it would send a positive message to other refuges across the world.
The message would be that in this new millennium, men and women can beat their swords into ploughshares and nurture the plants of our future generations. Only then will our children be born in peace.