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Good morning. An average of 137 women across the world are killed by a partner or family member every day, according to the United Nations. This isn’t a faraway problem. Domestic violence afflicts one in five women in the UK. It’s society’s best-kept and most-prevalent secret. The secret is not that it takes place: it often emerges in the media. But these portrayals enhance the assumption that violence against women is exceptional, and that the perpetrators are monsters. The real secret is that control and degradation, abdication of responsibility by the man and attribution of blame to the woman, are widespread. A deeper secret is that the perpetrators tend to be regular, recognisable, otherwise-respectable men. Domestic violence is inextricable from a web of social norms that make women vulnerable to violence by undermining their dignity and inhibiting their agency. The fact that rape within marriage has only been a crime for the last 25 years shows how deep the problem lies in the social imagination. Christianity has often been invoked to legitimise the domination of women by men. A misdirected spirituality has encouraged women to bear their sufferings without complaint and share their oppression with Christ in his passion. It’s easy to forget that the church grew so quickly among women and slaves in the first century precisely because it offered an ethic that liberated them from the untrammelled domination of the master of the house, who in a conventional Roman villa could with impunity lie with or take advantage of any member of the household at any time he chose. The question for the church is how it may once again be seen as a haven of respect and sanctuary as it was in the time of the early Christians. One thing that needs to change is the almost universal assumption that domestic violence is a women’s issue. It’s a men’s issue. Take the analogy of drink-driving. A generation ago if you’d clearly had too many and picked up your keys to drive home, your friends would shrug their shoulders but do nothing. Any challenge would undermine the friendship. Today, your friends wouldn’t let you leave unless you let them take you home or ordered a taxi. There’s a place for law, constraint and even ostracism. But perpetrators of violence are like addicts: they deny, deceive, and repeat-offend. However much they’re called out, deserted, prosecuted, or isolated, the only person that can change their behaviour is themselves. It’s like a process of conversion. But it’s not just an individual transformation that’s needed: it’s the dismantling of a credibility structure that too often treats domestic violence as justifiable, understandable, or negligible – until it’s too late.