Royal Family News: Queen Camilla’s Secret Reason For Helping Domestic Violence Victims

British royal family news divulges that Queen Camilla is a long-time advocate for victims of domestic violence.

Shortly after becoming Queen, Camilla hosted a conference at Buckingham Palace focused on addressing the growing problem of violence against women.

In attendance were Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Health Secretary Steve Barclay, as well as the queens of Jordan and Belgium, and Ukraine’s first lady Olena Zelenska.

Camilla’s poignant speech touched on her meetings with victims and their families, and it could be that her passion in this area stems from personal experience.

Royal Family News: Queen Camilla’s Passion

According to The Mail on Sunday, Camilla’s own family suffered domestic violence that deeply affected her father’s (Major Bruce Shand, who died aged 89 in 2006) childhood.

Last week the outlet obtained documents from the National Archives which reveal that “Camilla’s paternal grandfather was a wife-beater and serial philanderer, leaving a trail of destruction across three marriages.”

Camilla’s father was the son of the writer Philip Morton Shand and his first wife Edith. The couple married in April 1916 and Edith was soon pregnant.

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The outlet reports that “when Edith was four months pregnant with the baby who’d grow up to be Camilla’s father, her husband attacked her in their mansion flat overlooking Battersea Park in south-west London.”

Edith filed for divorce in 1919 and those documents state that “Shand violently assaulted [his wife] by dragging her by her arms out of bed into a spare room in her night-dress, bruising her breast and knees and knocking her head, as a result of which [she] fainted.”

One of Shand’s biographers wrote that he was impatient and intolerant as well as “racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic – though he was undeniably clever.”

Edith eventually remarried but in the interim Camilla’s father experienced “an unsettled, unhappy and peripatetic childhood, living some of the time with his grandparents, other times with his mother and stepfather.”

Sadly, in his own biography, Previous Engagements, Camilla’s father made no mention of his mother and barely acknowledged his father: “In his mind, he had grown up as an orphan.”

No doubt Camilla would be aware of the circumstances of her father’s life, and perhaps it has informed her incredible dedication to helping domestic violence survivors. Whatever the reason for Camilla’s devotion to helping others, she deserves recognition for shining a light on a devastating social circumstance.

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