Ellen Pence: Legal advocacy for battered women (USA)

"I actually hold on to two truths. One is that I'm politically irrelevant to many people, and the other is that I have been an active part of a social movement that has changed the world for women."

"50 years from now, seventy years from now, when they look back, they will look back at us as the people who changed everything in terms of violence against women, and the ability of men to freely beat their wives and their partners and their lovers."

"The issue is not that men have fear of abandonment, not that they're insecure, not that they feel alienated, it's that they have too much power and too much hatred to women."

From 1996:

"Legal Advocacy For Battered Women – Keynote Address

 This presentation will begin with an overview of the history of legal advocacy/legal reform work for battered women in the United States, focusing on how that work emerged out of the shelter movement and women's experiences. Then, taking as a model the community of Duluth, Minnesota, it will describe the politics of an outside community group promoting changes in laws, policies, procedures, training for workers, and distribution of resources from the standpoint of women's experiences. Controversies in criminal and civil law reform work will be discussed and I will argue that in spite of these controversies, this work is important to women's lives. Finally, using both a national and community-based perspective, I will discuss new strategies for moving beyond the work we accomplished in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ellen is the Project Director at the Duluth Domestic Violence Protection Project and is author of Education Groups for Men Who Bater: The Duluth Model (1993) as well as many articles and papers on the subject of domestic violence. She has conducted and presented more than 500 domestic violence related maining seminars, and conference keynotes in the US, Canada and elsewhere for law enforcement officers, prosecutors, mental health workers, educators, judges, probation officers and religious leaders."

Ellen Pence founded Praxis International in 1998, and remained its executive director until 2011. She was the co-author of two books, Educational Groups for Men Who Batter: The Duluth Model and Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence: Lessons from the Duluth Model. She died in 2012, aged 63.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/jan/19/ellen-pence