Feminist Harriet Wistrich had been a solicitor for 20 years, many of them with the noted human rights firm Birnberg Peirce (the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six) when, aged 55, in 2015, she decided to have a rethink. She and her partner, campaigner Julie Bindel, embarked on a three-month sabbatical tour visiting Canada, South Korea, Cambodia and Vietnam, during which Wistrich developed the idea of a legal charity that would “tackle state accountability for all types of violence against women by undertaking the litigation specifically aimed at system reform through legal action”. In short, she would set out to remodel parts of the law so that it offered justice not just to men, as it has done for generations, but also to women who, all too often, have been abused, traumatised and discriminated against long before an appearance in court.
So in 2016, Wistrich founded the Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ) to tackle a system that is not fit for purpose. Staffed by a tiny team, it’s powered by Wistrich’s tenacity, compassion, focus and inventiveness, evidenced in the 10 cases stretching back to the 1990s she describes in the book. The cases powerfully lay bare the appalling inadequacies of the police, the duplicity, arrogance and bone-headedness of the Met particularly and the blindness of the patriarchy to the female experience.
