Jalna Hanmer, who has died aged 91 of heart failure, was a leading feminist campaigner and scholar. In 1977 she founded the MA programme in women’s studies at the University of Bradford, an influential course that helped establish feminist studies as an academic field within sociology, both in the UK and internationally.
Hanmer saw academic research and publishing as a way of influencing the policy and practice of state agencies in tackling domestic violence and sexual assault and was a founder of the national charity Women’s Aid.
She is best known for her work influencing police to improve their response to domestic abuse. Hanmer’s research on this topic, published as Women, Violence and Crime Prevention (1993), included numerous interviews with victims and criminal justice agencies. Alongside this, she founded an activist group that helped raise public awareness.
Her efforts resulted in changes to policing policy in Yorkshire and nationally, including a specialist unit of trained officers (the start of Domestic Violence Units), and the directive that guidelines be issued to all officers attending domestic violence callouts. Additionally, police officers were mandated to classify domestic violence as a crime rather than a family dispute or a civil matter, and to offer information on support available, such as women’s aid refuges, to the victim.
I began working with Hanmer at Bradford in early 1996, helping organise what remains the largest ever feminist gathering in Europe focused on tackling male violence towards women and girls. The week-long conference, Violence, Abuse and Women’s Citizenship, was held in Brighton that November, hosting speakers from across the globe including Andrea Dworkin on pornography, and Teboho Maitse, an adviser to Nelson Mandela’s government. Delegates came from more than 130 countries, and numerous international and regional networks were set up during that week, many of which still exist.
One UK-based conference speaker was Irene Ivison, whose daughter Fiona was abused into prostitution as a child and subsequently murdered. Alongside Ivison, Hanmer founded the Leeds-based Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (CROP), now known as Parents Against Child Exploitation(Pace), an organisation that was key in exposing the prevalence of grooming gangs in the north of England.
Inspired by Norma Hotaling’s keynote speech in Brighton on setting up in the US the first perpetrator programme for kerb crawlers, Hanmer and I devised a similar scheme in West Yorkshire, launched in 1999. During the one-day course for first-time offenders, speakers including police officers, health workers and women who had escaped street prostitution themselves would address the men, with an aim to dispel the myths about prostitution being “harmless” and to expose them to the consequences for the women and wider society of their actions.
Born in Walla Walla, Washington state, Hanmer spent her childhood on the west coast of the US. Her father, Nevin Alderman, was a newspaper printer, while her mother, Marie Donley, owned a restaurant. When they divorced in 1944, Hanmer moved to California, eventually attending Berkeley and graduating with a BA in sociology in 1956.
In the late 1950s she moved to Europe, spending a year in La Rochelle, France, where she met and married Charles Hanmer, an English artist. They moved to the UK, and were then divorced. During the 60s, Hanmer worked for a tenants’ housing association and as a community organiser, before beginning her academic career as a lecturer in sociology at the London School of Economics. During this period she lived with the playwright Leonard Webb, with whom she had two children, Stephen (who died in an accident in 1979) and Laurence.
She was involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement, chairing what became known as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. But she found her true calling in the burgeoning women’s liberation movement of the 70s. She played a leading role in the annual national conference and in 1974 helped found the National Women’s Aid Federation, later known as Women’s Aid, which grew into a national network of refuges for women escaping domestic abuse.
From her early days of activism and academic study, Hanmer’s work centred on the victims and survivors of male violence, describing these women as “the experts”. In 1976, she took a number of women from Women’s Aid refuges to the international tribunal on crimes against Women in Brussels, attended by 2,000 women from 40 nations, where they spoke about the realities of living with domestic violence.
In 1977 Hanmer moved from London School of Economics to the University of Bradford. She introduced a unique requirement for acceptance on the women’s studies course: every student had to volunteer at a feminist project (such as Women’s Aid or Rape Crisis) throughout the year. She firmly believed that feminism could not be learned through academic theory alone.
Her publications include Well Founded Fear (1984), written with her longtime partner, Sheila Saunders, a founder of Jewish Women’s Aid, with whom Hanmer lived from 1980 until her death in 2013.
In the early 80s, Hanmer set up Feminist Archive North (FAN), to record the history of women’s activism in the north of England, a resource that is currently based at the University of Leeds.
Hanmer once told me she would campaign to end male violence “until they carry me out in a box”. As recently as 2018 she founded the Campaign to Eliminate the Leeds Sex Trade (CELST) to protest against the “managed zone” - the UK’s first designated legal prostitution area.
In 2020 Hanmer moved to live with her family, initially in Germany and subsequently in Spain.
She is survived by her son Laurence, and by her younger sister JoAn.
• Jalna Alyce Alderman Hanmer, feminist scholar and campaigner, born 29 May 1931; died 25 May 2023
