HealBridge works with women and children leaving domestic abuse in Nigeria. Safe shelter, counselling, legal help, and a route back to work.

Contact info

Ikeja, Lagos State, Nigeria +234 802 517 0267 hello@healbridge.org Support line hours: Mon to Fri, 8am to 6pm WAT Emergency: call 112 any time
  • Comments Off on Planning around a court date

Planning around a court date

A court date is one of the few occasions when somebody who has lost track of you knows exactly where you will be, on which day, at roughly what time, and that you will be there for hours. It is

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  • Comments Off on If he takes your phone

If he takes your phone

Taking the phone is one of the commonest things that happens, and it is usually treated as an argument about a phone. It is not. It is the removal of your only private line to everybody outside the house, and

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  • Comments Off on Safety when you work or trade from home

Safety when you work or trade from home

Most safety advice quietly assumes you leave the house. Work is described as the one place a woman goes alone, the place a colleague might notice, the place a private call can be made. For a woman who sews at

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  • Comments Off on When faith is used to control you

When faith is used to control you

Faith is a genuine source of strength for a great many of the women we work with, and nothing here is an argument against anybody's religion. A household organised around worship, with a husband who takes headship seriously, is an

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  • Comments Off on Widows: being inherited, and being dispossessed

Widows: being inherited, and being dispossessed

A woman is widowed and within days it becomes clear that a set of arrangements has been made about her. She is to marry his brother. Or she is to leave the house, which belongs to the family. Or she

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  • Comments Off on If you were married very young

If you were married very young

This is written for two people. A woman who was married before she was grown, and is now perhaps nineteen, perhaps forty-five, and has never had a place to ask about it. And somebody who knows a girl this is

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  • Comments Off on When he threatens to kill himself if you leave

When he threatens to kill himself if you leave

If I go, he will kill himself. And then it will be my fault, and his mother will say so, and the children will know. This stops more women than the threat of violence does, because violence is something done

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  • Comments Off on When it starts after many good years

When it starts after many good years

Most descriptions of abuse assume it was there from early on, hidden at first and then revealed. That is the usual pattern and it is not the only one. A significant number of women describe something different: fifteen or twenty-five

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  • Comments Off on When the family is the one punishing you

When the family is the one punishing you

Most of this site describes one person harming another inside a marriage. This is about something with a different shape: harm carried out, or approved of, by several members of a family, because of what a woman is believed to

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  • Comments Off on Talking to your children about what happened

Talking to your children about what happened

Parents often decide to say nothing, on the grounds that the children did not see much and will forget. Children almost always saw more than adults think, and what they do with silence is invent an explanation. The explanation they

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