Luke Daniels never thought he’d hit his wife, but after ten years in an unhappy marriage he broke down and slapped her in the face.
“She’d come home late, and I felt like she was humiliating me,” he says. “The scale of the violence wasn’t severe but I still felt bad about it. It was something I’d always looked down on, something I’d never do.”
After the incident, Daniels, 61, became so depressed that he sought counselling. In 1985 he joined the Everyman Project, helping to rehabilitate “perpetrators” in London. He now operates as something of a freelance counsellor, and says he still sees shocking cases from Hackney on a weekly basis. He works with people in all walks of life – from solicitors and priests to the poor.
Men who hit women however, do share one common bond: they have almost always seen or suffered violence as a child. And almost all of them can change their ways.
“As long as someone’s not damaged and they’re OK mentally, they can be rehabilitated. Violence is a learned behaviour and it can be unlearned,” he insists. Though Daniels is reluctant to say much on the subject, he believes that his problem stems from growing up in Guyana and seeing “horrific” violence in his home.
In Hackney – a borough made up of populations from all over the world – domestic violence is a particular problem, and one for which the council offers a variety of services and helplines. “A lot of people come from war-torn countries where they see violence every day, or where violence against women is acceptable,” Daniels says. “So it doesn’t come as a surprise that people here act that way.”
Daniels finds that most of his work involves people in their late 20s and early 30s; people who are settled in a relationship and feel safe in inflicting terror on their partner. One special case has concerned the counsellor, however: “There’s a man I work with in his 80s. He has arthritis, and hits his wife – his carer – all the time. So she can’t leave and abandon him, but she’s terrified.”
Surely, in this case, the help should be directed at his wife?
“Of course, women should feel that they have someone to tell who will get them out of a situation, even if they’ve been threatened that they’ll be killed if they speak out. But in general it doesn’t make sense to leave the man free to go from partner to partner committing violence.”
When asked whether he forced his wife to keep quiet, he laughs: “Oh no – don’t you fret – my wife told everyone! People came round to my house to beat me up.”
Luke Daniels will be reading passages from his book, Pulling the Punches, in CLR James library on Saturday 16 April
