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 For teachers and schools

For teachers and schools

Schools see this earlier than anybody. Before a police station, before a clinic, usually before any relative outside the house. The child is in front of you five days a week and something changes. Most teachers notice and do not

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  • Comments Off on If you are Nigerian and experiencing abuse abroad

If you are Nigerian and experiencing abuse abroad

Abuse abroad carries an extra layer that is hard to explain to anyone who has not lived it. You may be thousands of miles from family, unsure of your rights, dependent on his immigration status, and genuinely afraid that reporting

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  • Comments Off on Abuse during pregnancy

Abuse during pregnancy

Many women first experience violence while pregnant. For many others, pregnancy is when existing violence becomes more severe or changes character. Midwives and obstetricians know this pattern well. Most women do not, and discover it alone at a point when

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  • Comments Off on Child custody after leaving an abusive marriage

Child custody after leaving an abusive marriage

Fear of losing the children keeps more women in violent marriages than almost anything else. In most cases that fear is based on something a husband has said rather than on anything a court would decide. He is not usually

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  • Comments Off on Staying safer without leaving

Staying safer without leaving

Almost everything written about domestic abuse is written for the day somebody leaves. That is a small fraction of the actual problem. Most women in an abusive marriage are still in it, many will be in it next year, and

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  • Comments Off on Evidence: what counts, and how to keep it

Evidence: what counts, and how to keep it

Women arrive at lawyers and police stations with a great deal that happened and very little that can be shown. That is not a failure on their part — nobody documents a marriage while living in it — but it

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  • Comments Off on Emotional abuse and gaslighting

Emotional abuse and gaslighting

Women who have experienced both often say the same thing. The beating healed in two weeks. What he said took years. Emotional abuse is a sustained pattern of behaviour designed to make you smaller, more doubtful and easier to manage.

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  • Comments Off on For pharmacists and patent medicine vendors

For pharmacists and patent medicine vendors

A hospital sees somebody once it is serious. You see them the same week, repeatedly, and for things nobody would go to a hospital for. For a very large number of Nigerians the pharmacy or the patent medicine shop is

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  • Comments Off on Keeping copies of your documents

Keeping copies of your documents

Ask people what stops a woman leaving and they say fear, or money, or the children. Those are all real. But the thing that most often stops the practical machinery from working, weeks later, is paper. You cannot enrol a

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