taking back control
Professor Katy Mullin, University of Leeds
In April 2024, we visited Thin Ice Press with five service users of Staying Put, a Bradford-based charity that supports survivors of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence. Our visit was part of our ongoing Coercive Control: From Literature into Law project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2015, domestic violence legislation in England and Wales was extended to make ‘controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship’ an offence. Although coercive control has only recently become a crime, it has a long and disturbing history in imaginative literature. Our project aims to enrich understandings of the telltale signs and patterns of coercive control through an engagement with a diverse range of literary representations.
At Staying Put, we have facilitated eight guided reading and creative writing workshops, spaced over the course of six months. We have discussed fiction, poetry, and life writing by the Brontës, George Gissing, Bernardine Evaristo, Leah Horlick, Imtiaz Dharker, Maya Angelou, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Carmen Maria Machado, using accounts of coercive control as prompts to help the women to put their feelings into words. Reading and writing about coercive control has, to quote members of the group, “enabled me to access parts of trauma that felt stuck and been a massive part of my healing experience”, “shown me that how domestic abuse was written about historically is still very relevant to domestic abuse today”, and demonstrated that “coercive behaviour has gone on for years. I've learnt more about it, I didn't know anything about it until I found myself being coercively abused”. The group was inspired by the belief that imaginative writing can make a difference, that it can serve both an educative and a therapeutic purpose, and, crucially, that it can help to prevent future abuse.
The highlight of our series of workshops was our visit to Thin Ice Press. Our writers were able to set up lines of their own poems in wood type; choose fonts, ink colours, layouts, and design; and see their writing transform from handwritten drafts and edits to polished print. It was a strenuously physical process, the production of prints involving mastering techniques of pressure and release. The day was a creative pleasure, but it also told a moving story about taking back power and control.
A workshop participant inking wood type
We learned about the history of print, and, specifically, about the Orphans Printing Press, the Victorian philanthropic organisation from which most of Thin Ice Press’s wood type was acquired. As we worked with the type, we considered the difficult histories of those who had used them before us—child workers who were trained as printers as a route to independence. The letters themselves bore the signs of long use and rich history. Some had sharp edges smoothed by wear, some printed unevenly, others were slightly irregular, but the overall effect was beautiful. The wood type felt appropriate to the group’s purpose, bearing testimony to how past trauma could be transformed into creative recuperation.
Getting hands-on: a workshop participant cleans
Staying Put’s name comes from their mission to tackle domestic abuse by removing the perpetrator from the home where possible, and leaving the survivor, and often her children, in place. Prints from the workshop were framed for our writers to hang in their homes as testimony to how far they had come in reclaiming their spaces and making them their own. Further copies will be displayed in exhibition spaces in Keighley and Bradford, alongside extracts from our reading groups, to help to raise awareness and recognition of coercive control.
