Onjali Q Raúf is an absolute force of nature. She’s written two children’s books based on two of her major interests – The Boy at the Back of the Class, which is about a refugee child settling into a British school and making new friends, and The Star Outside My Window – a story about a family going through domestic abuse. And she’s worked in multiple human rights organisations throughout her life.

She’s been aware, since being a child, of the powerful problems and complications in the world. “Two things happened to me when I was seven. The first was that I grew up in the poor end of London, and every Friday my mum would take us to the library and we’d choose books for the week. Otherwise we couldn’t afford books of our own.

“My brother and me loved the Tintin comics – none of the characters I’d read about were like me, or talked like me or my aunts, or my mum, and the comics made me see the world clearly and made me want to travel to China, or to the moon…

“And the second thing was that in my class, there was a really cool kid called Bobby. And Bobby was a genius – he’d always find cool ways of making money. He’d bring in a portable radio, and he’d charge us our sweet money for the day to get two minutes on it. We thought it was the coolest gadget in the world. We’d go to the back of the playground, form a massive circle so none of the teachers could see, and give him 20p or 5p or however much it was and we’d have a few minutes with the radio.

“And the first time I did it, the song that came onto the radio was Michael Jackson’s The Man in the Mirror. And I loved it, I loved the message about changing the world. And everything came from there – I became a feminist, went on my first protest march at fourteen – and all these things filtered in, while I was always writing stories, always the ditzy one at the back of the class with massive plans and a map of places I wanted to travel.”

Onjali worked for many years with Women for Women International, a women’s rights organisation. While working there in 2011, her mother received a call from Onjali’s aunt in East London, a call from a police station where she’d taken refuge. She’d been subjected to intense and frequent domestic violence from her ex-husband “from day one of their marriage”.

“My mum worked with a grassroots women’s organisation, and immediately said she’d do all she could to help.”

But their pleas for justice were not taken seriously. She tried to leave her husband, and it was almost impossible to ask for help. “Nobody listened to her. There’s actually a transcript from Bow County Court where the judge called her ‘a silly woman’ for saying ‘my husband’s going to kill me’.

“I’d done women’s studies for my masters, I’d been a feminist since the age of seven – all of this stuff – but I never, ever thought anything like this could ever happen in my family.

“The last thing I ever did for her was book her in for her first driving lesson. Her dream was to be totally independent – to get a car, take her kids out around the world, to go to college and university – and he just couldn’t take it.”

“She told him that she was changing the locks on the doors, didn’t want any contact with him, didn’t want the kids to have contact – and he broke in after the kids had gone to school one day, and killed her.”

Onjali was inspired by a quote from Tony Benn. “He said, ‘Action is always one of two things: anger and hope. Anger at the situation – and hope, that you can change it.’ I was furious at everything. They did a special Home Office report on her case, this massive document about all the evidence they had on her case. Police had evidence, doctors had evidence, children’s services had evidence – and none of them shared it with one another. And none of them shared it with her. So, when she went to court, she had nothing to hand to say, ‘This is what he’s doing to me and my children’. And I was angry enough to start something.

“I think it was about three months after it happened – I was in a deep depression, and my friends were helping me out of it. They were like, ‘You have to do something, you can’t just go crazy.’ ”

They helped her set up a book group to raise money for organisations protecting women against violence. “I was thinking, if I can raise just twenty-five quid from a group, we’ll talk about feminism, women’s rights, what’s going on in the world today, and we’ll give the money to a shelter in my aunt’s name. And then people started coming to me with their stories – a friend I’d known for decades came to me with something she’d gone through at university, and I’d never known.

“I could see all these people need help, but they’re not going anywhere to get it, they don’t know what resources were available to help them. I wanted to signpost organisations, I started doing lots of research, so if we see other people getting hurt, we can help.”

But finding the resources was only half of the problem. She found the women’s shelters often don’t even have enough money for toothbrushes – funding’s been cut so much they can’t offer more than room and a bed. So she started fundraising for these organisations too, in any way she could.

She spoke in schools about misogyny and violence, drawing attention to issues affecting people, and it snowballed. As a result of her work, she developed her own organisation, Making Herstory.

“What angers me the most is that there still isn’t a bridge between the main agencies and people on the ground. Ordinary people can save lives, they’re completely capable – your local postman, your doctor, your corner shop, even your ice cream man – they all notice stuff, but there’s no information, nowhere for them to go. We need to change that.

“We’ve just finished a piece of research, a pan-London borough-wide study, monitoring the number of beds available against the numbers of women applying for help, and we’ve found over 1300 women being turned away every single week, in London alone.”

Gloucestershire has a single women’s refuge, and Yorkshire and Humber have recently lost the only one they had.

“The thing I find deeply frustrating is the idea that men aren’t affected, that boys aren’t affected. They need to be in the room alongside women. I love Patrick Stewart, who set up his own organisation as a victim of domestic violence. Terry Crews has spoken about this in America – and we need the boys in the room as well saying, ‘Look, we’ve been through this, it’s not great for us either.’”

While in the middle of all this work, in 2015 she was affected by the story of Alan Kurdi, who drowned in the Mediterranean.

She initially used her charity to investigate why she wasn’t hearing about refugees in the media, as she realised there was a whole crisis that wasn’t being properly reported, and then set up O’s Refugee Aid Team – a separate organisation from Making Herstory that collects aid goods, and brings them to organisations like Mobile Refugee Support, Refugee Women's Centre, and Maison Sesame. Families with babies and young children are living in makeshift accommodation in Northern France, and they urgently need supplies to get them through harsh conditions and bad weather.

Altogether, she works in schools to share information and promote her books, works tirelessly within different organisations to protect refugees, abused women, and the people who aren’t necessarily welcomed so widely across our society. She wants to see greater understanding and kindness for vulnerable people who are living invisibly in our communities.

“Please, please, please don’t other someone. Remember there’s a human being in front of you. Doesn’t matter the colour of their skin, doesn’t matter their gender – if they need help, they need help. And we can’t be so cowardly as to deny that help… We need to think beyond what we’re being told, be like Tintin! Ask the questions that aren’t being asked, look for the answers that aren’t being given – it’s so important we’re brave enough to do that.”