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Domestic Violence Quotes

Any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive or threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are or have been intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality.

– Government’s official definition of domestic abuse

Everyone has the human right to live in safety and free from violence and abuse. Society has a duty to recognise and defend this right.

– Women's Aid

It is only later [in the relationship], when the door to your home is locked, that you really start to learn what power and control look and feel like. That is when you learn that ‘I’ll always look after you,’ ‘I’ll never let you go,’ and ‘You’re mine for life’ can sound menacing, and are used as a warning over and over again.

– MP Rosie Duffield during second reading of Domestic Abuse Bill (October 2019)

Domestic abuse blights lives. It can destroy lives, and not just the life of the immediate victim but of the children and other family members as well.

– former Prime Minister Theresa May, same debate

It is up to all of us to make sure that we are doing everything we can to make clear to our society and to the public the horrific nature of domestic abuse, the impact it has on people’s lives and the need for us as a society to say, ‘Stop it’.

– Theresa May, same debate

It [coercive control and domestic violence] is characterised by silence, silence from those that suffer, silence from those around them, and silence from those who perpetrate abuse. This silence is corrosive: it leaves women, children and men carrying the burden of shame. It prevents them from speaking out about the abuse and it prevents them from getting help. And at its worst it can be fatal.

– HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, same event

The campaign to end domestic violence needs the voices of men as well as women, challenging the cultural, economic and political context in which we all experience the world.

– HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, same event

Domestic abuse will never end until we make it socially unacceptable

– Mark Groves- National Centre for Domestic Violence

No one should live in fear. It is not acceptable, not inevitable, and together, we can make it stop.

– Survivor's comment to SafeLives

It [domestic abuse] starts slowly: a few emotional knocks, alternated with romantic gushes and promises of everlasting love, which leave you reeling, confused, spinning around in an ever-changing but always hyper-alert state, not knowing what mood or message awaits you.

– MP Rosie Duffield, same debate 

This [domestic abuse] is not something that simply takes place behind closed doors and that others can ignore; it is something that affects us all. It affects our economy, it affects our society, and it affects our young people as they are growing up.

– Theresa May, same debate

They are some of the bravest people I have ever met.

– HRH The Duchess of Cornwall at the Women of the World Festival (March 2020), about survivors of coercive control and domestic violence

We must bring this taboo subject out in the open and talk about it.

– HRH The Duchess of Cornwall referring to domestic abuse, same event

It’s easy to minimise your actions. Maybe you think what you’ve done isn’t that bad. Maybe you’re making excuses ... Maybe you’re feeling guilty or ashamed of how you’ve behaved. It can hurt to admit that what you’ve done is not okay. But by doing so and choosing to change, you’re taking responsibility for your actions, and are on the road to change.

– Respect, which works with perpetrators to help them amend their ways
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By Fiona Bawden, Times Online (8th May 2007)

“Steve Connor, a student at City Law School, is a man on a mission. Six years ago he was a fairly directionless 27-year-old. Today, as well as taking the Bar Vocational Course, he is chairman of the National Centre for Domestic Violence, a ground-breaking organisation that he dragged into existence after a friend could not get legal help to protect her from an abusive partner.

Connor’s route to the Bar has been circuitous. In 2001 he returned from a year in Australia (he says that he would not dignify describing it as a gap year), and took a job as a process server in South London. The job (“I just saw it advertised in the paper”) was not quite as dull as it sounds. On one occasion he was threatened with a machete, on another, he was nearly stabbed by a man he had arranged to meet on Clapham Common to serve with a non-molestation order: “He’d seemed really friendly on the phone…”

The turning point in his life came when a friend, who was being abused by her partner, turned to him for support. Connor went with her to the police. She did not want to press criminal charges so the police suggested that she visit a solicitor to take out a civil injunction. “We must have seen 12 solicitors in a morning. We just went from one to the next to the next to the next. Everyone was very eager to help until we sat down to fill in the forms for the legal aid means test,” he says. The woman, who had a small child, did not qualify for public funding. But, Connor says, her financial situation as it appeared on paper did not bear any relation to her financial situation in reality. “She had a part-time job and she and her partner owned their home. Yet she didn’t have any money. Her boyfriend was very controlling and controlled all the money; he kept the chequebooks and didn’t let her have access to the bank account.”

The injustice of the situation got under Connor’s skin. “I just couldn’t believe that there was no help available to people who did not qualify for public funds but could not afford to pay.

I just kept feeling that this must be able to be sorted if only someone would address it.”That “someone” turned out to be him.

In 2002, thanks entirely to Connor’s doggedness, the London Centre for Domestic Violence was formed. It started out with him and a friend, but is now a national organisation, covering 27 counties, and has helped approximately 10,000 victims last year to take out injunctions against their partners.

NCDV now has nine full-time staff, 12 permanent volunteers and has trained over 5000 law and other students as McKenzie Friends to accompany unrepresented victims into court. We have also trained over 8000 police officers in civil remedies available regarding domestic violence. The National Centre for Domestic Violence (NCDV) has branches in London, Guildford and Manchester and is on track to have branches in 16 areas within the next two years.

NCDV specialises exclusively in domestic violence work and could be characterised as a cross between McDonald’s and Claims Direct. The high degree of specialisation means that its processes are streamlined: clients can be seen quickly and the work is done speedily and cheaply. “Sometimes, we will have one of our trained McKenzie Friends at a court doing 10 applications in one day,” Connor says.

Clients are not charged for the service. NCDV staff take an initial statement: clients who qualify for legal aid are referred to a local firm; those that don’t get free help from the centre itself. It runs on a shoestring, heavily reliant on volunteers and capping staff salaries at £18,000 a year.

Steve expects to qualify as a barrister this summer and hopes that having a formal legal qualification will give the centre added clout. “We are already acknowledged as experts and consulted at a high level, so I thought it would be helpful if I could back that up by being able to say I’m a barrister,” he says. He is just about to complete a one-year full-time BVC course at the City Law School (formerly the Inns of Court Law School) and, all being well, should be called to the Bar in July. Although Connor sees his long-term future as a barrister, he says that he has no immediate plans to practise. “I want to get NCDV running on a fully national level. Then I may take a step back and have a career at the Bar.”