Hard.
The Council, however, has no plans to provide an alternative for the women and children they would thereby force to move out. And the neighbouring Tory Richmond Council refused a grant for a Women's Aid place to be set up last month - thinking that if they ignored this issue it would simply go away.
Instead the women took over this hotel themselves. The owners - Goodhews Holdings, a large brewery group - have let the property stand empty for over six years, and there are plans to convert the site into a car park.
HARD WORK
Meanwhile the women there are hoping to stay and are working hard to make their new home more comfortable. They moved in with beddPhoto: JOHN STURROCK (Report) A group of 50 women and children moved into the empty, spacious Palm Court Hotel in Richmond last week. The women were forced to start a new squat after Hounslow Labour Council's threat to take legal action against Chiswick Women's Aid - a refuge for battered wives and their children. The Council insists that the number of women and kids staying there must be reduced from more than 100 to 36 before they will renew their annual £10,000 grant, because - they say - the place is a fire hazWing, gas stoves, paraffin heaters, pans, food etc., converting one of the former bars into a kitchen and other rooms into bedrooms, sitting rooms and office. They also plan to have a school on the premises for the children.
Unlike any of the other 33 Women's Aid centres in the country, Chiswick has always had an open-door policy. As Anne Ashby, their secretary, says: "The women here are all for this policy, because as they see it they could have been the woman who was turned away.
Therefore no-one is ever sent away, because that would mean sending them back to a violent husband. A space is always made in the overcrowded house, no matter how necue it gets were.
In her Penguin book Scream Quietly Or The Neighbours Will # RING SHOPPING CEN wick Women's Aid, says: "Those women who come to sleep on the left unimaginable suffering to be able to bear this way of life. There's no privacy in the house and no chance of peace and quiet.
FAIRY TALE
hold strong, young girls will believe takes him into her bed and kisses him.
'Anyone who has been badly knocked about loses all sense of ed women are almost permanently eat, others sleep little. Even the toughest find it hard to fight off the depression which overwhelms them.
VIOLENCE Hear, Erin Pizzey, founder of Chisfloor with their children must have *As long as the myths of beauty and beast, the princess and the frog that the love of a good woman can save any man, that the ugly frog will turn into a prince once the princess reality and ability to cope. Batterin in a shocked state. The constant fear of another beating leaves them very tense and nervous. Some can't The women leading the campaign *****************************•****** As the attack on women's right to abor for more places in Chiswick (where they have also squatted 20 other places, used as second-phase community houses for smaller family units) see the cause of wife battering only as violence being handed down from the father to the son. What they don't realise is that this is merely a physical extension of done. the oppression of the woman within the family. With a deepening economic crisis, worsening social conditions are putting an enormous strain on the family. their frustrations on their wives, because they are socialised by a society which treats women as inferior.
Doctors and social workers often close their eyes when they suspect a case - they haven't got the resources to deal with what they see as an insoluble problem. All they feel able to do is to send the woman back home, and perhaps take her kids away from her to be put into care.
INADEQUATE
Labour Party councillors and MPs can mostly only see a solution to wife-battering in terms of more crisis centres and second-phase refuges. where women can start to pick up the pieces of their lives and by appointing fewer avid anti-abortionists, identities once more. Of course these places are needed. All coun cils should provide accommodation and financial aid for women to run these centres under their own control and large enough to cope with an open-door policy. They have to But we can only really start to tackle the problem by taking it up as part of the general struggle for women's liberation. Anne Ashby and Erin Pizzey claim that wife battering has nothing to do with But only a political fight against all forms of women's oppres sion will ever create the conditions where it will be possible to end this brutal treatment of women.
A fight is needed to oppose all cut-backs in the social services - 1E fact these services must be extended so that better facilities can be pro vided for battered wives. The sexist lacology when dommates attitudes at both the public and private level must be challenged by socialists, which means an unambiguous stand in favour of women's struggle for equality now tions of an unrepresentative committee of
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take responsibility for the damage GENERALISE