by ROSIE BOYCOTT

Last updated at 10:55 02 February 2007

They are all famous faces - and yet almost unrecognisable, lost under a welter of savage bruises.

This is the shocking new campaign from Women's Aid using celebrities to highlight domestic violence, which sees two women a week killed by current or former partners.

Here, a former national newspaper editor says domestic violence must not be ignored, and reveals - for the first time - her own experiences at the hands of a violent man.

Domestic violence is the guilty secret that no one likes to confess. Being beaten up by a husband or partner fills women with shame, not the anger the crime deserves.

Even though the police receive 1,300 calls a day from women saying they have been physically abused, even though a horrific two women a week are being killed by their partners, there is still a stranglehold of shame and guilt that hangs over the crime.

Why? Because if you beat someone up for long enough, promising yet more beatings if they dare to open their mouths to complain, that person begins to believe that is what they are really worth. This vicious cycle only gets worse.

The new Women's Aid campaign, showing celebrities made up to look as though they have been battered, literally hits you in face. Honor Blackman with her eye bruised and bloodied. Fiona Bruce with her mouth puffed up and swollen.

It says, loud and clear, that domestic violence can happen to anyone. Even the rich, powerful and famous can fall victim to a man's fist.

I remember when Chiswick Women's Refuge opened, in 1971, a year before we started the feminist Spare Rib Magazine. I remember, too, my jaunty, cocky, overconfident self going for a visit.

Till that moment, I naively believed that the main task of the feminist movement was to improve the working opportunities for women, transforming them from stayat-home mothers into workplace dynamos.

Now I was confronted by young mothers, with bruised cheekbones and swelling black eyes, huddled together on the few sticks of furniture and mattresses that the centre had scraped together from locals who cared. They clutched their little ones to them, clearly scared, but also relieved.

For the first time, they had somewhere safe to go with their children, where their stories of domestic violence back home would be believed.

In those days, the police never wanted to intervene in 'domestics' and many a woman told a tale of being turned away by the police.

I remember one saying to me that the policeman she complained to more or less told her to go home, stop nagging and make sure she got a good hot dinner on the table before her husband came home.

Her situation, she told me, was made so much worse because her husband was a popular man, liked by his friends, affable and civilised to everyone but her.

Thankfully, the attitude of the police has changed. Now, they do listen and they will arrest a man who thinks his wife or partner is his to abuse.

Sadly, though, the staggering extent of domestic abuse continues.

In the early Seventies, it was incredibly hard for women, who had never had a job and who were wholly financially dependent on their partners, to leave home with their children.

But even though it is now far easier for a woman to bring up her kids on her own, the cycle continues. Staggeringly, one in four women experience domestic violence at some point heir lives. It can happen to any of us - regardless of our age, wealth, race or religion.

It can range from verbal abuse to full-scale physical violence and rape.

It happened to me in one relationship I had in my 20s; my partner's periodic drunken rages flared into fists smashed into my eyes. I remember being scared, but mostly I remember being ashamed.

The first time it happened I told everyone that the black eye I was hiding behind dark glasses was the result of a suitcase falling off the top of a cupboard.

The second time it happened, the excuse sounded increasingly feeble. The third time, I didn't go out until make-up could cover up the fading bruise. The fourth time, I left him. And still I didn't talk about it.

I loved my boyfriend. We were living in America and planning to get married. I suspected he was seeing another woman and after the first time he thumped me, I stayed silent about his savage assault, somehow convinced that it was my fault, that something I had done had brought on this rage; that I had, perversely, invited the beating.

I can see now how absurd that was. I was intelligent and financially independent. I'd founded a feminist magazine.

I was ashamed that this had happened to me and I remember thinking that maybe this was what victims of torture felt when they said that their abuse made them feel guilty, as though in some way they had asked for it.

Yet when it comes to domestic violence, that is often the way that society thinks. 'She asked for it, she is always nagging him,' goes the warped opinion of those who would excuse such assaults.

When it happened to me, I found myself vowing inwardly not to nag, and even believed my boyfriend the mornings after he'd hit me, when he'd ply me with ice packs and kisses and apologies, vowing that it would never, ever happen again.

Stupid me, I let him convince me, I suppose because I wanted to be convinced, and hoped that he would never do it again and that we could be happy. But by keeping silent, I colluded with his behaviour, giving him the licence to go on and do it again and again.

Outwardly, we may have seemed a charmed couple: he was gregarious, the life and soul of the party. How could I dispel this false picture which I so wanted to believe in by telling my friends and my family that he was a beast?

Surely, I reasoned, people would think less of me, too, if they knew I'd chosen to be with such a man.

My silence was not unusual. It's what victims of domestic violence do: ashamed at what has happened to them, desperate to believe it won't happen again, perversely anxious to try to please your tormentor, because then, if you never nag and always have dinner ready, do everything in your power to please and placate your partner, then maybe it won't happen again.

But while women behave like this - like I did - the problem will only continue and it will never be confronted.

No one has a problem saying their bag was stolen in the street, but to say your husband has smashed your face in is a whole other issue.

The time has come to rip away the veil of secrecy that surrounds the issue of domestic violence. Only by talking about it and owning up to it will we ever change the situation.

No one, absolutely no one, deserves to feel frightened in their own home.

No child should ever have to grow up to see his dad hit and abuse his mum - but 750,000 children witness such scenes every year.

Even though 570,000 women report incidents of domestic violence to the police annually, it is reckoned some 60 per cent of cases go unreported. That's a damning statistic of which we should all be ashamed.

So what can we do? For a start, support Women's Aid with the funds they urgently need to ensure that there is always someone at the end of a phone who will listen, and a place for women in trouble to go with their children.

Raise the issue when and where you can, and, if you suspect that a friend or relative of yours is suffering, ask her and see if you can help.

We will only combat this by speaking out and confronting the facts.

Until we do, another two women will carry on dying every week, as what we like to call our civilised society continues to turn its face the other way.

For more information, visit womensaid.org.uk, or call the domestic violence helpline on 0808 2000 247