Achievements

CWASU is a small part of an international network of researchers, service providers and activists who share a concern to 'make a difference' - to improve understanding of and responses to women and children, to increase the extent to which perpetrators are held accountable for their actions and to prevent gender violence and child abuse. Our ability to 'make a difference' has been in no small part due to the creation of a changing climate of opinion. Areas where we have made a contribution include:

• Maintaining a centre for research from a feminist perspective for thirteen years on external contracts.
• Expanding the understanding of feminist research practice.
• Continuing to make and maintain connections - with individuals and organisations as well as between forms of child and woman abuse.
• Increasing interest in, and respect for, research amongst practitioners and policy makers - that it can be both a tool in arguing for resources and policy change, as well as offering insights which inform direct work.
• Challenging the construction of mothers of children who were sexually abused by fathers as 'collusive', and becoming part of such a powerful feminist critique that the guardians of family dysfunction perspectives shifted their position markedly.
• Doing background work with journalists that fundamentally changed the perspective of their story - the first example being a Newsnight feature in 1990 that defined child pornography as a record of sexual abuse.
• Being a founder and continuing member of the British Sociological Association Study Group on Violence Against Women.
• Editing the special issue of Child Abuse Review with Margaret Kennedy on disability and abuse.
• Developing a conceptual framework for understanding the connections between domestic violence and child abuse with a connected practice principle that woman protection can be the most effective form of child protection.
• Exploring the meaning of the concepts of 'victim' and 'survivor' in writing, research and training, drawing out the ways in which they have become an oppositional dualism which neglects the survival strategies women and children use whilst violence is occurring and underplays the legacies of abuse which cannot be 'recovered' from.
• Work on sexual exploitation of children that located it within a continuum of child sexual abuse and made connections to exploitation of adult women in the sex industry.
• Contributing to a context in which a feminist approach to abuse by women and violence in lesbian relationships can develop.
• Chairing a Group of Specialists for the Council of Europe and drafting the report and Plan of Action on violence against women.
• Conducting the first study on trafficking in women in the UK.
• Co-editing an edition of the journal Violence Against Women on European perspectives.
• Developing and completing projects from EU funding (the DAPHNE and STOP programmes) which enabled us to develop strong partnerships with individuals and groups in Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany, amongst others.
• In our role as special advisors to the British Council, conducting three international seminars, attended by people from 60 countries, writing a briefing document on violence against women and conducting training and consultancies in Africa, Asia, Western, Central and Eastern Europe.
• Developing links with the International Organisation of Migration, through the training for trainers project in the Balkans, writing a paper on research methodology and evaluating recent research.
• Developing, with Purna Sen, and conducting a week long seminar for 70 Oxfam staff in Sarajevo in 1998 to enable them to integrate violence against women into their developmental and humanitarian work.
• Being a member of the external reference for the Home Office review of sexual offences law.
• Developing a critical analysis on the rehabilitation of the concept of "paedophile" (Kelly 1997a), which was recently supported in a piece in Community Care (Kennington 1997).

Feedback from organisations and individuals, which suggests that the work of CWASU has made a difference, is sustaining in a field which is distressing, and in terms of the scale of the problem, can be dispiriting. One example highlights the way in which a perspective developed in an academic context can have effects in individual cases. A recent civil law case involved a woman with three children, one of whom has special needs. She was going to be evicted from her flat as a "noisy neighbour" because of her ex-husband's ongoing harassment. The expert testimony provided by CWASU pointed to the way her safety had been ignored, and the case was settled by re-housing the family in a newly built three-bedroom house.

Most recently, the Director's contributions to the field have been recognised. Professor Liz Kelly was awarded a CBE for 'services combating violence against women and children' in 2000, and from January 2005 she was appointed to the Board of Commissioners of the Women's National Commission. Our Senior Researcher Linda Regan was awarded an MBE for recognition for her contributions in 2005.

Last year Dame Anita Roddick endowed Prof. Liz Kelly CBE as Chair in Violence Against Women. This is the first of its kind in Europe and it will contribute significantly to recognising the importance of this area within academia. The Roddick Foundation's donation will further CWASU's independent research into violence against women and children. The inauguration of Prof. Liz Kelly as Chair took place 20 September 2006 at the launch of the exhibition at the Women's Library: Prostitution - What's going on?

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