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…
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…
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…
Most safety advice assumes you are leaving. Most women are not, at least not yet, and a plan that only works if you walk out of the door tonight is no use at all on an ordinary Tuesday. A…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
