“THE thing I’m really called to do is enable women to own their lives.”
That conviction sits at the heart of everything that Natalie Collins does. An activist, writer, and safeguarding campaigner, she has spent more than two decades challenging Churches and wider society about their responses to abuse. And she has developed programmes to help women to recover from domestic abuse and coercive control.
But that emphasis on regaining agency has not always sat comfortably in the Christian spaces that she inhabits, she finds: it can be a lonely campaign.
Her work is rooted in an abuse, but she no longer leads with this information. For years, she began public appearances by talking about what she endured, but she began to feel that she was treated as a “story” rather than an expert on domestic violence.
She recalls appearing twice on the BBC show The Big Questions. The first time, she was invited as an activist and subject expert, and was expected to contribute across a range of debates. The second time, she was invited to speak about forgiveness from her personal experience.
“I was no longer somebody with a brain who can think,” she says. “I was somebody who was there as a demonstration. I became objectified and dehumanised.”
Her story of domestic abuse and coercive control by her first husband, Aaron Swan, jailed in 2024, remains widely known, however, and was the subject of the recent BBC2 documentary Lover, Liar, Predator (TV, 6 February). This covered her campaigning work, in collaboration with the three other women who were victims of Swan’s abuse, to bring him to justice. In a review for The Guardian, the writer Lucy Mangan called for the programme to be shown in every school.
AFTER Swan moved on to his next victim, Ms Collins had to build a new life. Her experiences shaped her conviction that women need not just empathy, but the tools, resources, and confidence to reclaim agency over their lives.
She began running groups for women who had experienced abuse. Listening to their stories, she concluded that information and advice for girls should start much earlier, at age 12. Her sheltered upbringing in a Christian home had left her vulnerable to a predator.
In 2011, she launched the Day Programme, a preventative course for young people, which explores healthy relationships, exploitation, and abuse.
What distinguishes it from many relationship programmes is its emphasis on culture. Ms Collins believed that it was not enough simply to teach young people how to behave. They also needed help to understand the messages that they absorbed from films, music, pornography, advertising, and social media. “What are the messages around you, in songs, films, and social media? How are those messages affecting what you think is normal?” the course asks.
The Day Programme continues today, using a train-the-trainer model, and through practitioners has reached thousands of young people.
In 2019, she launched Own My Life, a programme to help women to reclaim their lives after suffering domestic abuse and coercive control. More than 21,000 women have participated, and more than 1,600 people have been trained to deliver it across the UK and Ireland. It has been translated into Welsh and Polish.
The programme title reflects Ms Collins’s belief that abuse is fundamentally about entitlement and ownership. Someone (usually a man) is exercising control over another person’s (usually a woman’s) life. Recovery, therefore, requires reclaiming ownership of your own life. “When somebody is abusive, they believe they own their partner,” Ms Collins says. “If we want to move forward from abuse, we need to take ownership of our lives.”
This extends beyond relationships to wider social phenomena, including unrealistic beauty standards, sexualisation, pornography, and cultural expectations about gender. Owning your life means recognising those influences and making conscious choices about how to respond to them, Ms Collins says.
OWN MY LIFE is delivered not only through specialist domestic-abuse services, but also through police forces, community organisations, and professional settings. Social workers, police officers, and health professionals take part.
Many of those professional women, Ms Collins says, have themselves experienced abuse. “How do we expect them to respond to domestic abuse when a higher proportion than average of them are experiencing it themselves?”
She is also critical of elements of Christian teaching that may encourage women to embrace self-sacrifice before developing a healthy sense of self.
Natalie CollinsNatalie Collins
The language of surrender, service, and kenosis (self-emptying) can become dangerous to women who have been taught that other people’s needs matter more than theirs, she says. “The Christian call to give up ownership of our lives for women has to be predicated on women being given the resources and being on a journey to owning themselves first.”
As she went about delivering training, Ms Collins repeatedly met Christians working in social work, housing, youth work, and community services who voiced their frustration at church responses to domestic abuse.
She began building networks and resources to help churches to engage with the issue. That work eventually contributed to the development of Restored, now one of the best-known Christian organisations addressing domestic abuse in the UK.
Another strand of her work has been as an online advocate for women. She has been active in speaking up about cases of church-related abuse, including the Mike Pilavachi Soul Survivor scandal. “That activism became a second full-time job,” she says.
During that time, she was also navigating the court case connected to her former husband, which finally concluded in his conviction in 2024.
She felt compelled to speak out after the Soul Survivor revelations because “I ended up being this lone voice in the Christian world, which went completely silent — all these voices which had platformed Mike Pilavachi and given him status. To this day, I think it is absolutely abhorrent that Christian leaders abdicated their responsibility.”
She is critical of a 21st-century Christian culture that has created a “toxic dependence” on attending worship events, listening to worship music, and buying Christian books. This is “anathema” to the gospel and simply about making money, she says.
Her views often leave her feeling uncomfortable and isolated in the Church. “As much as I’m too feminist for the Christians and too Christian for the feminists, I’m too Evangelical for the liberals,” she says.
She even feels that she does not belong at the Greenbelt Festival, contrary to her expectations — but she is not the only woman to feel this way, she says. “I’m theologically homeless and I think there’s a lot of us women, who are feminist, who care deeply about women’s rights, and care deeply about honouring Jesus and living lives for Jesus, but don’t see Christian feminist spaces are where we belong. I’ve accepted that I don’t really belong anywhere.”
She draws a parallel with Josephine Butler, the Victorian campaigner against prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts. Ms Collins regards her, also, as too Christian for the feminists and too feminist for the Christian society of her day. Much of Ms Collins’s work has involved challenging institutions she remains deeply committed to and pressing them to face questions about power, abuse, and accountability. Despite the uneasiness that results, she is certain that Christian faith and advocacy for women are inseparable commitments.
And she still attends an Evangelical church, describing herself as “Charismatic to the core” and believing that her work is directed by God. She offers one example of a particularly bleak family crisis, when, she says, God reminded her that she needed to continue loving him, regardless of whether her child survived.
“The God that I know is pretty uncompromising and demanding, and incredibly loving and good, and really not very safe, but also everything you ever need or could imagine.”
Asked about the Church of England’s progress on safeguarding, she replies that she welcomes the increased attention given to policies, training, and procedures, but worries that institutions can become too dependent on processes.
“Policies and systems are absolutely necessary. But we have to work on changing hearts and minds.” Abuse, she argues, is not simply a procedural problem, but one of power, entitlement, and culture. “The process isn’t going to get us very far.”
Lasting change comes, she says, when people are willing to confront difficult truths about themselves, their communities, and the ways in which power is exercised. “We are not going to see a utopian future where no man ever rapes a woman. What we can do is work to make women’s lives better.”
After two decades of campaigning, training, and advocacy, she remains convinced that change begins when women recognise that their experiences are neither isolated nor inevitable. “We can’t ever lose spaces where women come together and go, ‘Me too. You too,’” she says.
ownmylifecourse.org
dayprogramme.org