Of everything said to keep a woman in a marriage, this is the one that works. Money can be earned and injuries heal. The prospect of walking out of your own house and never seeing your children again stops…
Phones leak more than most people realise, and the leaks are usually things switched on for convenience years ago and forgotten about. One warning before anything else, and it is the most important paragraph on this page. If he…
You helped her leave. You made phone calls, you lent money, you had her in your house, you argued with people on her behalf. And she has gone back. This is the moment most helpers stop. It is also…
Where you sleep tonight is a different problem from where you live next year. Confusing the two is why some women refuse a perfectly good short term option, and why others accept a bad long term one because it…
Almost every domestic abuse service is designed around a woman in her thirties with young children. Women in their sixties and seventies experience abuse too, and they are among the least likely people in Nigeria to tell anybody about…
Most Nigerian websites on this subject carry a long list of hotlines. A large proportion of those numbers do not answer, and some have not answered for years. A dead number is worse than no number, because it is…
Most people, including many health workers, treat hands on the throat as one violent act among others. It is not. Of everything that happens in an abusive marriage, this is the one that changes what we say to a…
Ask a woman in a customary marriage what stops her leaving and quite often it is not the beatings, the money or the children. It is that her father would have to find the bride price, and her family…
Very few women marry a man who frightens them. They marry a man who is attentive, certain and quick to commit. The controlling behaviour arrives so gradually that there is never a single moment to point at, and by…
Two things drive this article. Some treatment only works if you get it quickly, and a medical record made at the time is the strongest evidence that exists in this whole subject. You can act on the first without…
