‘5 Books That Could Save Your Life’ tour aims to help victims in abusive relationships

Published June 4, 2025 By admin with Comments 0

The ‘5 Books That Could Save Your Life’ tour will arrive at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast, on June 11, aiming to highlight the devastating impact of coercive control and its connection to domestic homicide.

Madeline Mc Aleer, Research, Training, and Development Director, Haven Horizons; said: “If we don’t understand coercive control and its link to domestic homicide, and how a relationship can quickly move from honeymoon to homicide, more victims will die.”

The Omagh woman said that the idea for the project began when she recommended a book on coercive control to a woman who said that reading it had saved her life.

“That’s why I selected specific books that I thought would speak to people and that would help them understand what coercive control is and to recognise dangers of coercively controlling behaviour,” she added.

Haven Horizons, a national organisation dedicated to the primary prevention of domestic abuse and coercive control based in Ennis, Co. Clare, set up the project and developed a partnership with two Belfast-based organisations, Reclaim the Agenda and Belfast & Lisburn Women’s Aid, to explore an all-Ireland approach to tackling coercive control and domestic homicide.

The panel will include Madeline along with other domestic abuse experts Danielle Roberts from Reclaim the Agenda and Noelle Collins from Belfast & Lisburn Women’s Aid and will be moderated by Irish Examiner columnist Sarah Harte. They will consider why the rates of coercive control and domestic homicide are so high across the island.

The PSNI reported 29,751 domestic abuse incidents in its report from April 2024 to March 2025. There were six murders with a domestic abuse motive in that period, double the previous year. A report of domestic abuse is made to An Garda Síochána every 10 minutes – that’s 65,000 incidents of domestic abuse in 2024 – an increase of 45 percent in the last four years. In the republic of Ireland, 2022 was the deadliest year in a decade -12 women and five children were murdered.

Danielle Roberts, Communications and Sustainability Coordinator, Reclaim The Agenda, said: “There is a tsunami of domestic abuse North and South, which has a huge impact on the victims, on their families, and also on society. This project involves a dialogue to facilitate a broader social understanding of coercive control and seeks to initiate real cultural change for all.”

Noelle Collins, Training and Programmes Manager, Belfast & Lisburn Women’s Aid, said: “This information could save someone’s life. Any person can be a victim of coercively controlling behaviour; coercive control cuts across all social strata. The ambition of this ‘5 Books that Could Save Your Life’ project is to raise awareness and understanding of coercive control and frame a new all-island response to domestic abuse and coercive control.”

This innovative project is supported by the Shared Island Civic Society Fund and the Republic’s Department of Foreign Affairs. It is part of an all-island conversation, with further events in Dublin later this year. The project concludes with a webinar in November, during which the authors discuss their books, their motivations for writing them, and the importance of sharing knowledge and considering this topic from different perspectives.

The five books selected for this project include Remembered Forever, by Luke and Ryan Hart, whose mother and sister were murdered by their father in a domestic homicide; Brutally Honest by Spice Girl and coercive control survivor Mel B; Invisible Chains, by psychologist Dr Lisa Aronson Fontes, In Control by Professor Jane Monckton Smith, a criminologist and former UK police officer, and What is to be Done About Violence Against Women by Professors Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Sandra Walklate, experts in the field of domestic abuse.

Madeline added: “These books deliver valuable lessons, including that most domestic homicides do not result from a spontaneous burst of anger. They are predictable and, therefore, preventable if you understand the red flags and progressive pattern of coercive and controlling behaviour adopted by perpetrators towards their partners.”

Content retrieved from: https://viewdigital.org/5-books-that-could-save-your-life-tour-aims-to-help-victims-in-abusive-relationships/.