A main aim and focus of this book is to highlight some of the transformatory understandings and wider ‘politics’ – most especially from the early days – that have characterised the violence against women movements in the UK and across the world. Feminism is nothing unless transformative, as Patel elucidates. And the feminist activists have always aimed to build a better world for women, but for children and men in many ways, too – in fact, for humanity.

From the 1970s on, both the rape crisis and the refuge movements in the UK's countries (and elsewhere) developed quite extraordinary ways of organising themselves, and came up with radical and innovative policies to govern their work. Many of these experimental practices no longer operate and, in fact, are in danger of being overlooked in these different times. Remembering them is important, however, to cherish and record precious feminist history. But it is also important because they can bring insights and ideas for now – and for the future. We forget them at our peril. It is to these innovations that we now turn. This is a celebration, really, of that time and of the innovative attempts at social change that the women activists made.

Focussing on domestic abuse, including sexual violence

This discussion is mainly illustrated through reference to the domestic violence movement and Women's Aid. However, the movement against sexual violence, discussed in the last chapter, also operated these sorts of policies. Like refuge organisations, rape crisis services and campaigns organised themselves as collectives. Also like refuge services, they held women-centred principles, and they tried consciously to break down power differences between the women using the services and those providing them – who were sometimes the same women. They depended, at least initially, on unpaid dedication, and they took rape services forward in new and feminist-inspired ways. After 40 years, many of them still do so.

Operating similar policies, the domestic abuse movement is the principal subject discussed here, as a kind of illustrative ‘case study’ of extraordinary feminist ways of organising.