Domestic violence includes sexual violence against women by their male partners, sexual attack as part of physical domestic abuse, violent sexual practices, rape in marriage, sexual violence from family members, and so on. But sexual abuse and assault by men stretch much wider in a panoply of harmful sexual practices experienced by women. Some commentators, including Liz Kelly, have pointed out that the focus of the gender violence movement as a whole has tended to be often filtered through the lens of domestic abuse. With less attention given to issues of wider sexual violence, there can be an unhelpful skewing in responses. Thus, in recognition, while this book is specifically about the struggle against domestic violence, it does contain some specific coverage of sexual and other types of violence, both throughout and in this dedicated chapter.

All forms of woman abuse sit on a spectrum of gender-based violence and cannot really be separated from each other. Thus, it is key for this history of challenging domestic abuse to include attention to the sexual violence movement more widely. From the beginning, the two major focusses of the violence against women movement were sexual abuse and inter-personal domestic violence by men. The new campaigns around both were often entwined.

The hardest issue: combatting sexual violence for the first time

Let us, then, take a step back, once again, to those early passionate days of the women's liberation movement, and return to reflect on rape and sexual assault. As for domestic abuse, these painful issues were suddenly in the public eye in the early 1970s as they had rarely been before. Rape groups, helplines and campaigns on sexual violence began to develop at more or less the same time as Women's Aid, or perhaps a little later. Like the domestic violence projects, they were part of women's liberation and were a leap of faith into the unknown at the time, conducted with profound commitment by those concerned.

For rape and sexual violence, this new awareness seemed to be happening for what felt like the first time in history. Until then, there had tended to be an all-embracing, disapproving, but broadly unconcerned culture regarding rape, and very often women victims/survivors of rape were the ones who took the blame.