HealBridge works with women and children leaving domestic abuse in Nigeria. Safe shelter, counselling, legal help, and a route back to work.
A great deal of writing about abuse assumes two people in a house. For many Nigerian women that is not the arrangement, and the person making life unbearable is not always the person she married. Before anything else: in-laws being
Read MoreAsk why a woman went back and the answer is usually money. A shelter bed solves one night. A job with a contract solves the year after it, and it is the one thing an employer can provide that no
Read MoreReporting on this subject does real good. It is how the law gets scrutinised, how services get held to account, and how a woman reading a newspaper works out that what is happening in her house has a name. It
Read MorePeople assume Nigerian law is one thing. For domestic abuse it is not, and the difference is not academic — it decides what you can ask a court for, which court you go to, and how quickly anything happens. This
Read MoreThere is an assumption, held by almost everybody including many of the women it applies to, that a woman with her own money is safe. She can leave whenever she wants. Nobody can control someone who pays the rent. It
Read MoreThe Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act, usually shortened to the VAPP Act, was passed in 2015. It is the single most important piece of Nigerian law for anyone experiencing domestic abuse, and it is widely misunderstood in both directions. Some
Read MoreLeaving without documents is normal. People leave at night, or during a window that lasted four minutes, and a birth certificate is not what you are thinking about. The consequence arrives about three weeks later, when everything you need to
Read MoreWhen we ask a woman what is keeping her where she is, the answer is very often her mother. Not a husband's threats, not money, not the police. Her own parents, telling her that every marriage has difficulty, that she
Read MoreA woman reports an assault. Within days there is a complaint against her: she stole from the house, she abducted the children, she is unfaithful, she is mentally unwell, she is the violent one. This happens often enough that it
Read MoreAn account only you can see is the single most useful practical thing a woman in an abusive marriage can have. It is what makes transport possible, what makes a deposit possible, and what turns leaving from a leap into
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HealBridge works with women and children leaving domestic abuse in Nigeria. Safe shelter, counselling, legal help, and a route back to work.
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