For a great many Nigerian women, the first person told is not a police officer or a doctor. It is a pastor or an imam. What happens in that conversation very often decides what happens over the following ten…
Clinicians see women experiencing abuse years before a lawyer or a charity does. Very often the presentation is not an injury at all, which is why it is missed. What to look for Injuries that do not match the…
Children in a violent home already know. Parents almost always underestimate this, and the underestimate is understandable, because the alternative is unbearable to think about. Children who were supposedly asleep describe arguments in detail years later. Children who were…
Most women who contact us begin with a version of the same sentence. I am not sure this counts. Other people have it worse. He has never put me in hospital. Sometimes he is the man I married and…
It usually starts as something that can be read as flattering. He minds who you talk to. He wants to know where you were. People say it means he cares, and early on it is genuinely difficult to tell…
Some women describe a marriage in which almost nothing dramatic has ever happened, and in which they nonetheless cannot make an ordinary decision without first calculating the consequences. There is a name for that. It is called coercive control…
Most writing about Nigerian family law describes the High Court. Most women never go near one. They end up in a Customary Court or a Sharia Court, because that is what governs their marriage, and because those courts are…
Abuse in a first relationship is routinely dismissed as drama, on the grounds that it is not a marriage, there are no children and nobody is trapped. The patterns are the same, the harm is real, and it sets…
This is the hardest article on this site to write honestly, because the truthful version contains a sentence nobody wants to read. The period around leaving is when women are most often seriously hurt or killed. That is not…
Every piece of advice about getting help assumes a private moment. Call this number. Send a message. Have a look at this website. A great many women have none of that. The phone is his, or is checked. There…
