I have written of those who seek to bring justice to abused women. I have written in anger, and in grief, and in hope. I have written of the one in three women in my homeland of Aotearoa New Zealand who are subjected to violence. I have written of those whose lives and deaths are violently excluded from such statistics. I have written of those who lived and died at the margins of normative ideas of ‘victim’ and ‘woman’. I have written of those who experience layers of injustice from colonization to racism to heterosexism. I have written of the long-standing efforts of feminist anti-violence activists. I have written of those who recognize the institutional failure to protect vulnerable bodies from violence and organize to oppose such injustice. I have written of those women who dedicate their waking hours to creating deep emotional bonds between us. I have written of those women who tell stories of the abused, the dead, the discarded. I have written of those women who are the best of humanity consistently confronted by the worst. I have written of women in all of their glorious complexity.

I am undone by those women.

Core to this book has been my experience working alongside my colleagues in a feminist anti-violence collective. My colleagues were dedicated to supporting those subjected to gendered violence and changing the social conditions which underpin that violence. Although my colleagues had variable relationships with the idea of activism (as I discuss in Parts II and IV), they were, nevertheless, proud bearers of four ongoing commitments to collectivism, feminism, decolonization, and LGBT+ pride. These commitments were foundational to their effort to identify and dismantle harmful social and institutional practices and to foster new, more equitable, ones. My colleagues’ efforts can be understood in reference to Black feminist Audre Lorde's famous sentiment: ‘the Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's House. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change’ (Lorde, 1983). My colleagues were creating new tools. My colleagues were building a new house. This book has been an account of those tools.