A woman is widowed and within days it becomes clear that a set of arrangements has been made about her. She is to marry his brother. Or she is to leave the house, which belongs to the family. Or…
This is written for two people. A woman who was married before she was grown, and is now perhaps nineteen, perhaps forty-five, and has never had a place to ask about it. And somebody who knows a girl this…
If I go, he will kill himself. And then it will be my fault, and his mother will say so, and the children will know. This stops more women than the threat of violence does, because violence is something…
Most descriptions of abuse assume it was there from early on, hidden at first and then revealed. That is the usual pattern and it is not the only one. A significant number of women describe something different: fifteen or…
Most of this site describes one person harming another inside a marriage. This is about something with a different shape: harm carried out, or approved of, by several members of a family, because of what a woman is believed…
Parents often decide to say nothing, on the grounds that the children did not see much and will forget. Children almost always saw more than adults think, and what they do with silence is invent an explanation. The explanation…
Women arrive at shelters with an idea formed from films and leave within days because it was nothing like it. Others avoid them entirely because they imagine something much worse than the reality. This is a plain description of…
Two opposite fears turn up in this conversation, often in the same woman. That she will never trust anybody again, and that she will walk straight into the same thing without seeing it. Neither is inevitable. This is what…
Almost everything written about supporting somebody in an abusive relationship is about her. This is about you, because the most common way support fails is not that the helper did the wrong thing. It is that the helper ran…
This site is written for women, because that is who our programmes are built for and because the overwhelming majority of people we work with are women. Men are also abused, the ones who are get very little, and…
