When South Africa’s golden girl of broadcasting, Tracy Going’s battered face was splashed across the media back in the late 1990s, the nation was shocked. South Africans had become accustomed to seeing Going, glamorous and groomed on television or hearing her resonant voice on Radio Metro and Kaya FM. Sensational headlines of a whirlwind love relationship turned horrendously violent threw the “perfect” life of the household star into disarray.

What had started off as a fairy-tale romance with a man who appeared to be everything that Going was looking for – charming, handsome and successful – had quickly descended into a violent, abusive relationship.

“As I stood before him all I could see were the lies, the disappearing for days without warning, the screaming, the threats, the terror, the hostage-holding, the keeping me up all night, the dragging me through the house by my hair, the choking, the doors locked around me, the phones disconnected, the isolation, the fear and the uncertainty.”

The rosy love cloud burst just five months after meeting her “Prince Charming” when she staggered into the local police station, bruised and battered. A short relationship became a two-and-a-half-year legal ordeal played out in the public eye. In mesmerising detail, Going takes us through the harrowing court process – a system seeped in injustice – her decline into depression, the immediate collapse of her career due to the highly public nature of her assault and the decades-long journey to undo the psychological damages in the search for safety and the reclaiming of self. The roots of violence form the backdrop of the book, tracing Going’s childhood on a plot in Brits, laced with the unpredictable violence of an alcoholic father who regularly terrorised the family with his fists of rage.

“I was ashamed of my father, the drunk. If he wasn’t throwing back the liquid in the lounge then he’d be finding comfort and consort in his cans at the golf club. With that came the uncertainty as I lay in my bed and waited for him to return. I would lie there holding my curtain tight in my small hand. I would pull the fabric down, almost straight, forming a strained sliver and I would peer into the blackness, unblinking. It seemed I was always watching and waiting. Sometimes I searched for satellites between the twinkles of light, but mostly the fear in my tummy distracted me.”

Brilliantly penned, this highly skilled debut memoir, is ultimately uplifting in the realisation that healing is a lengthy and often arduous process and that self-forgiveness and acceptance is essential in order to fully embrace life.

Bart, die aantreklikste ou in haar matriekklas, soen Esli uit haar vel. Vir meer as veertig jaar deel hulle hul lewens, maak saam kinders groot en sien om na vriende en familie. Jaarliks vier hulle Kersfees in Kleinmond met geskenke en trifle en stappies langs die see met hul worshond.

Maar hoekom val Bart se broer uit ’n boom voor Esli se ouerhuis? En watter donker geheim is onderliggend aan Bart se ma se vreemde gedrag en onfatsoenlike grappe? Wat dink kollegas van Esli se haarstyleksperimente en panda-oë? Verdien sy om in die spaarkamer te skuil omdat sy, volgens Bart, aand na aand die kos brand en die hond se pote laat nat word as dit reën?

In So Lyk ’n Vrou vertel Ilse Verster van Esli se heelwording en hoe sy, ná ’n leeftyd van mishandeling, in ’n rooi rok op die strand kon staan met een vuis in die lug en vry kon voel. Sy gee stem aan ’n stukkende vrou wat net wil hê die pyn moet stop. Sy deel wat dit verg om jou teen die muur op te trek, jou teen die samelewing te handhaaf en jouself te red.

At the height of her journalism career, more than one million households across the country knew her name and her face. Her reportage on human suffering and triumph captivated viewers, and with it Vanessa Govender shot to fame as one of the first female Indian television news reporters in South Africa. Always chasing the human angle of any news story, Govender made a name for herself by highlighting stories that included the grief of a mother clutching a packet filled with the fragments of the broken bones of her children after they’d been hacked to death by their own father, and another story where she celebrated the feisty spirit of a little girl who was dying of old age, while holding onto dreams that would never be realised. Yet Govender, a champion for society’s downtrodden, was hiding a shocking story of her own. In Beaten But Not Broken, she finally opens up about her deepest secret – one that so nearly ended her career in broadcast journalism before it had barely kicked off.

She was a rookie reporter at the SABC in 1999. He was a popular radio disc jockey, the darling of the SABC’s Lotus FM, a radio station catering to nearly half a million Indian people across South Africa. They were the perfect pair, or so it seemed. And if anyone suspected the nature of the abusive relationship, Govender says, she doesn’t believe they knew the full extent of the horror that the popular DJ was inflicting on this intrepid journalist. The bruising punches, the cracking slaps, and the relentless episodes filled with beatings, kicking and strangling were as ferocious as the emotional and verbal abuse he hurled at her. No one would know the brutal and graphic details of Govender’s story … until now.

In Beaten But Not Broken, this Indian woman does the unthinkable, maybe even the unforgiveable, in breaking the ranks of a close-knit conservative community to speak out about her five-year-long hell in this abusive relationship. Her story also lays bare her heart-breaking experiences as a victim of childhood bullying and being ostracised by some in her community for being a dark-skinned Indian girl. Govender tells a graphic story of extreme abuse, living with the pain, and ultimately of how she was saved by her own relentless fighting spirit to find purpose and love. This is a story of possibilities and hope; it is a story of a true survivor.

The perfect match. Or so she thinks. Her warmth and empathy. His charisma and ambition. Yet, Cathy feels safer teaching battle-scarred gangsters in a prison classroom than at home with her own partner.

By day she walks on eggshells. At night she sleeps on the backseat of her car. Her safe place is an all-night roadhouse; her best friend, her journal. The slow boil intensifies until, one day, Cathy finds her grandmother’s armoire smashed to pieces in her bedroom, a hammer on the floor, her life in splinters beside it.

Part memoir, part inspiration, Boiling A Frog Slowly is unflinching in its confrontation of abuse and utterly courageous in its portrayal of redemption.

A searing investigation that challenges everything you thought you knew about domestic abuse.

Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?

Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators – and the systems that enable them – in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience – abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence – not in generations to come, but today.

Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes.

"Warm, honest and true--A Woman Makes A Plan is full of insight as well as a good dose of humor, offering readers a lifetime of hard-won advice." --Diane Von Furstenberg The international supermodel shares personal stories and lessons learned from a life of "living dangerously--carefully"

Maye Musk is a fashionable, charming, jet-setting supermodel with a fascinating and tight-knit circle of family and friends--and is 71 years old. But things were not always so easy or glamorous--she became a single mom at 31, struggling through poverty to provide for her three children; dealt with weight issues as a plus-size model and overcame ageism in the modeling industry; and established a lifelong career as a respected dietitian, all the while starting over in eight different cities across three countries and two continents. But she made her way through it all with an indomitable spirit and a no-nonsense attitude to become a global success at what she calls the "prime of her life."

As everyone who follows her obsessively on social media knows, Maye is a fount of frank and practical advice on how the choices you make in every decade can pay off in surprising, exciting ways throughout your life. In A Woman Makes a Plan, Maye shares experiences from her life conveying hard-earned wisdom on career (the harder you work, the luckier you get), family (let the people you love go their own way), health (there is no magic pill), and adventure (make room for discovery, but always be ready for anything). You can't control all that happens in life, but you can have the life you want at any age. All you have to do is make a plan.

So lyk ’n vrou, Ilse Verster se hartroerende verhaal oor Esli se lewe van mishandeling deur ’n gewelddadige eggenoot, het lesers in 2022 geskok en aangegryp. ’n Vrou staan op is die vervolg op die blitsverkoper en vertel van die nuwe hoofstuk in Esli se lewe.

Ná ’n uitmergelende egskeiding wat haar finansieel byna ruïneer, reis Esli Kaap toe om perspektief te kry op ’n lewe waar sy nie meer ’n slagoffer is nie. Dan gebeur daar ’n wonderwerk. Sy ontmoet iemand en hulle besluit om te trou. Uiteindelik is die geluk, vrede en veiligheid waarna sy haar lewe lank gehunker het, vir Esli beskore.

Máár haar stryd is nog lank nie verby nie. Post-traumatiese stres, ’n vreemde omgewing en nuwe verhoudings bring onverwagse uitdagings. Ook baie vrae, soos: Hoe kan ’n mens gelukkig wees, maar steeds huil? Die ongekende blootstelling wat tydens boekbekendstellings, praatjies en mediaonderhoude volg op die sukses van So lyk ’n vrou, maak dinge ook nie makliker nie. Esli kan haar nie volledig losmaak van die verlede nie, want almal stel moeilike vrae. Terselfdertyd moet sy ander slagoffers van narsisme moed inpraat.

In ’n Vrou staan op deel die skrywer haar ervarings van die moets en moenies in die proses na heelwording. Want om ’n oorwinnaar te wees, verg ook moed, deursettingsvermoë en ’n sekure instink vir oplossings wat wérk.

A fusion of conversations, observations, and personal reflections on his own experiences, work with men, and scholarship, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity is Kopano Ratele’s meditation on love, violence and masculinity.

This book seeks to imagine the possibility of a more loving masculinity in a society where structural violence, failures of government and economic inequality underpin much of the violent behaviour that men display. Enriched with personal reflections on his own experiences as a partner, father, psychologist and researcher in the field of men and masculinities, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity is Kopano Ratele’s meditation on love and violence, and the way these forces shape the emotional lives of boys and men.

Blending academic substance and rigour in a readable narrative style, Ratele illuminates the complex nuances of gender, intimacy and power in the context of the human need for love and care. While unsparing in its analysis of men’s inner lives, Ratele lays out a path for addressing the hunger for love in boys and men. He argues that just as the beliefs and practices relating to gender, sexuality and the nature of love are constantly being challenged and revised, so our ideas about masculinity, and men’s and boys’ capacity to show genuine loving care for each other and for women, can evolve.

An astonishingly brave and moving book from Caroline Darian, daughter of infamous Dominique Pelicot, detailing how her mother rebuilt her life as the world follows a trial that will go down in history.

The trial of Dominique Pelicot, which began on 2 September 2024, has captured the world's attention. Behind the haunting details of Pelicot's unthinkable crimes are a mother and daughter who were forced to rebuild their lives. This is their story.

In November 2020, Caroline Darian received a call from the police in Carpentras. Her father was in police custody. The seizure of his computer equipment revealed the unthinkable: since 2013, he had drugged his wife before handing her over, in a state of unconsciousness, to men, from all ages and stages of life.

With exceptional courage, Darian recounts the earth-shattering discovery that a loved one, her own father, is capable of the worst. But more importantly, she shares the remarkable story of her mother Gisèle and how she carried on living, without self-pity, while learning to manage all of the things her husband once took care of. She shares how her mother managed to maintain her joie de vivre in circumstances none of us could imagine.

Gisèle has won acclaim around the world after she gave up her right to anonymity and opted for a public trial, a trial in which Caroline herself has testified, turning the tables: the shame no longer borne by the victims in silence but directed, at last, to the abusers. Together, mother and daughter reveal another side to the violence committed against women, as they bravely transform their private trauma into a collective fight.

Men who act abusively have their own story to tell, a journey that often begins in childhood, ripens in their teenage years, and takes them down paths they were hoping to never travel. Men Who Batter recounts the journey from the point of view of the men themselves. The men's accounts of their lives are told within a broader framework of the agency where they have attended groups, and the regional coordinated community response to domestic violence, which includes the criminal justice workers (e.g., probation, parole, judges), and those who staff shelters and work in advocacy. Based on interview data with this wide array of professionals, we are able to examine how one community, in one western state, responds to men who batter. Interwoven with this rich and colorful portrayal of the journey of abusive men, we bring twenty years of fieldwork with survivors and those who walk alongside them as they seek safety, healing and wholeness for themselves and their children. Women who have been victimized by the men they love often hold out hope that, if only their abusers could be held accountable and receive intervention, the violence will stop and their own lives will improve dramatically as a result. While the main purpose of Men Who Batter is to highlight the stories of men, told from their personal point of view, it is countered by reality checks from their own case files and those professionals who have worked with them. And finally, interspersed within its pages is another theme: finding religious faith or spiritual activity in unlikely places.

What does it mean for men to join with women as allies in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence? Based on life history interviews with men and women anti-violence activists aged 22 to 70, Some Men explores the strains and tensions of men's work as feminist allies. When feminist women began to mobilize against rape and domestic violence, setting up shelters and rape crisis centers, a few men asked what they could do to help. They were directed "upstream," and told to "talk to the men" with the goal of preventing future acts of violence. This is a book about men who took this charge seriously, committing themselves to working with boys and men to stop violence, and to change the definition of what it means to be a man. The book examines the experiences of three generational cohorts: a movement cohort of men who engaged with anti-violence work in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of the feminist anti-violence mobilizations; a bridge cohort who engaged with anti-violence work from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, as feminism receded as a mass movement and activists built sustainable organizations; a professional cohort who engaged from the mid-1990s to the present, as anti-violence work has become embedded in community and campus organizations, non-profits, and the state. Across these different time periods, stories from life history interviews illuminate men's varying paths-including men of different ethnic and class backgrounds-into anti-violence work. Some Men explores the promise of men's violence prevention work with boys and men in schools, college sports, fraternities, and the U.S. military. It illuminates the strains and tensions of such work-including the reproduction of male privilege in feminist spheres-and explores how men and women navigate these tensions.

Drawing on longitudinal interviews, government records, and personal narratives, feminist sociologist Lisa Brush examines the intersection of work, welfare, and battering. Brush contrasts conventional wisdom with illuminating analyses of social change and social structures, highlighting how race and class shape women's experiences with poverty and abuse and how "domestic" violence moves out of the home and follows women to work.
Brush's unique interview data on work-related control, abuse, and sabotage, together with administrative data on earnings, welfare, and restraining orders, offer new empirical insights on the impact of work requirements and other post-welfare rescission changes on the lives of low-income and battered mothers. Personal narratives provide first-hand accounts of women's perceptions of the broad forces that shape the circumstances of their everyday lives, their health, their prospects, their ambitions, and their diagnoses of their world. Deftly integrating the political and the personal, the administrative and the narrative, the economic and the emotional, Brush underscores the vital need to reexamine ideas, policies, and practices meant to keep women safe and economically productive that instead trap women in poverty and abuse.
With her fresh approach to problems people often see as intractable, Brush offers a new way of calculating the costs of battering for the policy makers and practitioners concerned with the well being of poor, battered women and their families and communities.

Despite significant accomplishments over the past 35 years, antiviolence activists know that justice for most abused women remains elusive. Most victims do not call the police or seek help from the courts, making it crucial to identify new ways for survivors to find justice. This path-breaking book examines new justice practices for victims that are being used in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. These informal, dialogue-based practices, referred to as "restorative justice," seek to decrease the role of the state in responding to crime, and increase the involvement of communities in meeting the needs of victims and offenders. Restorative justice is most commonly used to address youth crimes and is generally not recommended or disallowed for cases of rape, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse. Nevertheless, restorative practices are beginning to be used to address violent crime.
Restorative Justice and Violence Against Women considers both the dangers and potential benefits of using restorative justice in response to these crimes. The contributors include antiviolence activists and scholars from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Some are strongly in favor of using restorative practices in these cases, some are strongly opposed, and many lie somewhere in between. Their chapters introduce a range of perspectives on alternative justice practices, offering rich descriptions of new programs that combine restorative justice with feminist antiviolence approaches.
Controversial and forward-thinking, this volume presents a much-needed analysis of restorative justice practices in cases of violence against women. Advocates, community activists, and scholars will find the theoretical perspectives and vivid case descriptions presented here to be invaluable tools for creating new ways for abused women to find justice.

Tracy Going‘s powerful memoir, Brutal Legacy (originally published in 2018), was first adapted for stage by the award-winning theatre maker, Lesedi Job, with a cast including Natasha Sutherland, Charlie Bougenon and Jessica Wolhuter, and it has now inspired a documentary, That’s What She Said – A social inquiry: in it, Tracy offers up her story to be scrutinised by a random group of men in the present. They watch her account as it is displayed in a theatre production adaptation of her book. The film documents this process and the frank discussions that follow the performance. Offering a unique social dialogue, to bring an important message across as a relatable film without diminishing the abused, or men / women in general.

When South Africa’s golden girl of broadcasting, Tracy Going’s battered face was splashed across the media back in the late 1990s, the nation was shocked. South Africans had become accustomed to seeing Going, glamorous and groomed on television or hearing her resonant voice on Radio Metro and Kaya FM. Sensational headlines of a whirlwind love relationship turned horrendously violent threw the “perfect” life of the household star into disarray. What had started off as a fairy-tale romance with a man who appeared to be everything that Going was looking for – charming, handsome and successful – had quickly descended into a violent, abusive relationship.

“As I stood before him all I could see were the lies, the disappearing for days without warning, the screaming, the threats, the terror, the hostage-holding, the keeping me up all night, the dragging me through the house by my hair, the choking, the doors locked around me, the phones disconnected, the isolation, the fear and the uncertainty.”

The rosy love cloud burst just five months after meeting her “Prince Charming” when she staggered into the local police station, bruised and battered. A short relationship became a two-and-a-half-year legal ordeal played out in the public eye. In mesmerising detail, Going takes us through the harrowing court process – a system seeped in injustice – her decline into depression, the immediate collapse of her career due to the highly public nature of her assault and the decades-long journey to undo the psychological damages in the search for safety and the reclaiming of self. The roots of violence form the backdrop of the book, tracing Going’s childhood on a plot in Brits, laced with the unpredictable violence of an alcoholic father who regularly terrorised the family with his fists of rage.

“I was ashamed of my father, the drunk. If he wasn’t throwing back the liquid in the lounge then he’d be finding comfort and consort in his cans at the golf club. With that came the uncertainty as I lay in my bed and waited for him to return. I would lie there holding my curtain tight in my small hand. I would pull the fabric down, almost straight, forming a strained sliver and I would peer into the blackness, unblinking. It seemed I was always watching and waiting. Sometimes I searched for satellites between the twinkles of light, but mostly the fear in my tummy distracted me.”

Brilliantly penned, this highly skilled debut memoir, is ultimately uplifting in the realisation that healing is a lengthy and often arduous process and that self-forgiveness and acceptance is essential in order to fully embrace life.

"The Language of Abuse" provides the first comprehensive examination of marital violence in later medieval England. Drawing from a wide variety of legal and literary sources, this book develops a nuanced perspective of the acceptability of marital violence at a time when social expectations of gender and marriage were in transition. As such, Butler's work contributes to current debates concerning the role of the jury, levels of violence in late medieval England, the power relationship within marriage, and the position of women in medieval society.

Every day more than three women in South Africa, on average, are murdered by their male intimate partners. This book looks at the stories of South African women who were subjected to unimaginable periods of fear and terror, who endured sustained physical, emotional and psychological attacks, all at the hands of men.

Dr Nechama Brodie explores decades of brutal domestic violence and coercive control and she examines women’s changing rights and current legal protections.

This book explains violent and abusive behaviour and places it in a social context. It can help readers of any age and sexual orientation to change their own behaviour and to recognise when they are being controlled. "I can honestly say that without reading this book (9 times no less ) I don't think that I would be here today, relaxed in my own home with my children that I love so much."

Xoliswa Nduneni-Ngema loved the theatre and dreamed of being an actress. She soon discovered that acting wasn't for her – managing productions was. She meets rising-star, Mbongeni Ngema and they marry.  As his success grows, they start a company that births the hit Sarafina! But beneath the stardom, Xoliswa experiences constant abuse.  With Fred Khumalo, she tells her powerful story. 

While much has been written about the problematic behaviour of young people and their families, there has been silence on the problem of young people behaving abusively towards their parents, which may take the form of physical, economic and/or emotional abuse. This is the first academic book to focus on adolescent-to-parent abuse and brings together international research and practice literature and combines it with original research to identify and critique current understandings in research, policy and practice. It discusses what we know about parents' experiences of adolescent-to-parent abuse and critically examines how it has been explained from psychological, sociological and sociocultural perspectives. It also outlines how policymakers and practitioners can usefully respond to the problem. This unique book adopts a range of theoretical and practice perspectives. Written in an accessible style, it is an essential tool for academics, policymakers and professionals with an interest in domestic violence, child protection and youth offending.

Transgender survivors of violence tell their stories Transgender people face some of the highest rates of violence in the US and around the world, particularly within romantic relationships. In Transgressed, Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz offers a ground-breaking examination of intimate partner violence in the lives of transgender people. Drawing on interviews and written accounts from transgender survivors of intimate partner violence, he sheds much-needed light on the dynamics of abuse that entrap trans partners in violent relationships. Transgressed shows how rigidly gendered discussions of violence have served to marginalize and silence stories of abuse. Ultimately, these stories of survival follow their unique journeys as they navigate-and break free-from the cycle of abuse, providing us with a better understanding of their experiences. An emotionally compelling read, Transgressed offers new ways of understanding the complexities of intimate partner violence through the eyes of transgender survivors.

Substance Use and Family Violence provides readers with a better understanding of how and why substance use and violent behavior can co-occur and specifically, how the relationship between the two play out across a range of familial relationships. The text focuses on four main domains in which substance use and violence affect families: substance use and interpersonal violence, substance use and intimate partner violence, substance use and child neglect and abuse, and substance use and elder neglect and abuse. Providing both historical context and contemporary evidence, the volume uses peer-reviewed literature, theories, and interdisciplinary perspectives to provide a comprehensive understanding of the scope of each problem, who it impacts, and effective strategies for both preventing violent behavior and intervening to stop its spread. Substance Use and Family Violence is part of the Cognella Series on Family and Gender-Based Violence, an interdisciplinary collection of textbooks edited by Claire Renzetti, Ph.D. The titles feature cross-cultural perspectives, cutting-edge strategies and interventions, and timely research on family and gender-based violence.

Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. This edition includes a new epilogue by the author assessing what has-and hasn't-changed in understanding and treating trauma over the last three decades. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we heal.

Confrontation is a memoir based on real events. Set in the early nineties, it follows the journey of a child growing up in South Africa’s season of change.

But all is not as it seems – biologically, domestically, emotionally – three words that immediately takes shape like the head, neck and tail of a monster brooding beneath the bed. Domestic unrest casts a thick veil over a much greater problem.

“One of your greatest challenges in this world, my darling, would be men... It’s a shame because you think you’re the relationship type?” So-called advice from a friend who suggested being gay might be a better option than what she was contemplating. Not that she had a choice. She wasn’t entirely herself yet, and that was the problem.

Kirsty Steinberg is the pen name for the author. Confrontation is her debut work.