Ellen Moran

Moran works in communities delivering poetry and spoken word performances on topics such as feminist protest, power, the housing crisis and inspirational community change. She took the Great Northern Slam title for spoken word in 2018 and was a semi-finalist at the Hammer and Tongue UK Grand Finals in 2019.

After over a decade of austerity, domestic violence services in the United Kingdom have been decimated. The effects of drastic funding cuts have been felt deeply by organisations which found themselves under-funded and under-staffed, pre-Covid-19. The pandemic has only worsened the ability of these organisations to provide support to domestic violence survivors and to act as mechanisms to police domestic abuse. Due to the ongoing crisis, we find ourselves in a situation where women are trapped at home with their abusers; their freedom further impinged and their access to support wiped out.

Now more than ever, the average member of the public has a sense of the effect containment has on the mind and sense of self; we have had our freedom to gather and work degraded, forced to remain indoors. This new understanding could be harnessed to provide sympathetic insight into the lives of domestic violence survivors.

Using this as a starting point for the State of Emergency Commissions and, in dialogue with women’s groups and online resources revealing anonymous stories of domestic violence, Moran has produced a spoken word piece which explores bodily autonomy, patriarchal control of bodies, physical containment and domestic slavery.