A great deal of what is written about domestic abuse assumes a marriage, and women who are not married frequently conclude that none of it applies to them, that nobody will take it seriously, and that there is nothing…
The most useful feature of a protection order is not what it forbids. It is that breaching it is itself an offence, which means the police can act on the breach without having to prove the original abuse all…
A woman reports an assault. He is arrested. By evening he is home, and often angrier than before. Most women read this as proof that the complaint failed and that the police did nothing. Usually that is not what…
Almost everything frightening about a first court appearance is the not knowing. This is a plain description of the shape of a day, so that nothing on it is a surprise. Procedure varies between courts and between states, and…
Almost nothing is written for this, and it is one of the commonest situations there is. A woman leaves, and then the money runs out, or the room ends, or a child cannot lose another school term, and she…
Ask anybody who works in this field which weeks are worst and they will name the same ones. Christmas and the New Year. The end of Ramadan and Sallah. The long visit to the village. Any extended holiday when…
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…
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…
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…
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…
