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 to have done to their standing.
It is worth its own page because almost every piece of standard advice is wrong for it. Telling somebody to go home to her family is ordinarily sensible. Here it may be the most dangerous thing she could do.
What sets it off
The trigger is usually a decision the woman made about her own life.
Refusing a marriage that was arranged. Wanting to leave one. Choosing somebody from the wrong family, the wrong faith or the wrong part of the country. A pregnancy outside marriage. A divorce. Being seen with somebody. Dressing in a way that was noticed. Reporting a relative to the police. Sometimes nothing at all happened and a rumour did the work.
The common element is not the behaviour. It is that other people now know about it, and the family’s standing is felt to depend on a response.
How it differs from abuse by a husband
Four things change, and each one changes what a safe plan looks like.
There is more than one person. A mother, brothers, uncles, cousins, sometimes aunts and sisters. Some act, some approve, some simply do not object, and the ones who do not object are what make it possible.
Your own family is not the refuge. This is the hardest part. The people every service assumes will take you in are the ones you need to be away from.
Reach is wider. A husband knows your habits. A family knows every relative you could go to, your village, your school, your church or mosque, and everybody who might hide you. Distance protects less than it does in an ordinary case.
Disclosure raises the risk. In most abuse, telling more people makes a woman safer. Here, the more people who know, the greater the pressure on the family to act, and the more likely somebody passes word back. That reverses the usual advice and it is the single most important thing on this page.
What it looks like before anything serious happens
- Sudden restriction on leaving the house, on the phone, or on who visits.
- Being taken out of school or work abruptly.
- Your documents taken, particularly a passport.
- Pressure to agree to a marriage, with a date being arranged around you.
- A trip planned to the village, or abroad, that you did not ask for.
- Relatives arriving to stay who were not expected.
- Being watched by a younger sibling or cousin who has been given the job.
- A family meeting called about you, at which you are discussed rather than consulted.
- Being told you have disgraced everybody, repeatedly, by several people.
A journey is the one to treat most seriously. Being taken somewhere your family controls, where you know nobody and cannot leave, removes every option at once.
If you think a journey is being arranged
Act before it, because afterwards is much harder.
- Secure your passport and identity documents, or photograph every page if you cannot take them.
- Tell one person outside the family where you are supposedly going, when, and with whom. Somebody at work, a friend, a teacher, us.
- Leave a copy of your details with that person: full name, date of birth, passport number, the address you are being taken to if you know it.
- Agree a check-in and a code word, and agree what they do if you miss it. How to set that up takes five minutes.
- Get advice before you go. A court can make orders about a child being removed from the country, and there are things that can be done quickly if there is time.
Safety planning that fits this
The ordinary plan still applies, with three changes.
Do not go to relatives. Not the sympathetic aunt, not the cousin you trust, not the grandmother. Family loyalty is unpredictable under this kind of pressure, and people who genuinely love you will still tell somebody where you are because they believe it can be resolved.
Tell fewer people, not more. Choose two, outside the family and outside the community, and hold the line even when it feels cold. Every additional person is a route back.
Assume the search will be organised. Several people, with money, contacting everybody you know, over a long period. That means the address, the school, the workplace and social media all matter more than usual — what your accounts give away applies with real force here.
Everything else in the standard plan holds: documents out first, money that is yours, a phone nobody else has handled.
The law
Threats, assault, false imprisonment and forcing somebody into a marriage are criminal, and it makes no difference that the people doing it are relatives. The VAPP Act is written about persons rather than about spouses, so conduct by a brother or an uncle falls within it in the same way a husband’s would.
A protection order can name several people and can require them to stay away from a place. That is more useful here than in an ordinary case, precisely because the risk comes from more than one direction.
Where a marriage is being forced, the age and the consent both matter, and there are routes to prevent it or set it aside. Get advice quickly rather than waiting to see whether it is serious — the free routes exist for exactly this.
If you are helping somebody in this position
Some ordinary instincts are actively dangerous here and it is worth being blunt.
- Do not contact her family. Not to check, not to mediate, not to appeal to a reasonable-sounding relative.
- Do not suggest a family meeting. It is the mechanism by which decisions about her get made without her.
- Do not tell anybody in the community, however discreet they are.
- Do not send her to relatives for a safe place to stay.
- Do believe the level of fear she is describing, even where the specific threat sounds unlikely to you.
- Do write down what she tells you, with dates. Independent records matter and she may not be able to keep her own.
The general guidance on helping applies otherwise, and the sentences that close a conversation are worth reading first.
What we do
Accommodation away from where your family looks, which sometimes means further away than a woman expects. Legal advice, quickly, including about a marriage being arranged or a journey being planned. Documents held. And no contact with anybody, ever, without your permission — which in these cases includes your parents and your siblings.
You do not have to be certain that something will happen. Coming to us because of a feeling that things are being arranged around you is a completely reasonable reason to make contact, and it is a much better time to talk than after a journey has been booked.
Questions people ask
My family would never actually hurt me. Am I overreacting?
You may well be right, and it is still worth having documents out of the house and one person outside the family who knows what is happening. Nothing is lost by a precaution you never use.
Should I not tell my relatives at all?
In this specific situation, no. Family loyalty is unpredictable under this kind of pressure, and people who love you will still pass on where you are because they believe it can be settled.
They want to take me to the village. Is that a problem?
Treat it as the most serious sign on the list. Being taken somewhere your family controls removes every option at once. Secure your documents, tell somebody outside the family, and get advice before the date rather than after.
Can the law do anything when it is my own family?
Yes. Threats, assault, false imprisonment and forced marriage are criminal regardless of who does them, and a protection order can name several people at once.
Can you help if I am not sure anything will happen?
Yes, and that is a much better moment to talk than after a journey is booked. We will not contact anybody, including your parents.
If you need help now
If you are in immediate danger, call 112. To talk to HealBridge, call or send a message to +2348025170267, or use the form on our contact page. Every page on this site has a Quick Exit button at the top right, and pressing the letter E three times does the same thing.
Before you rely on anything on this page
We publish these articles so that you can understand a subject and work out what to ask for. They are written carefully and in good faith. They are still general information about how things usually work, and not advice about your situation, which we do not know.
- This is not legal advice.
- We are not a law firm. Criminal law in Nigeria is largely a state matter, the VAPP Act applies in a state only if that state adopted it, and statutory, customary and Islamic marriages are governed by different law and different courts. Two people with the same facts can have genuinely different options. Get advice from a lawyer who practises where you live — and if cost is the obstacle, ask us, because arranging that is part of what we do.
- This is not medical advice.
- Nothing here is a diagnosis and nothing here replaces being examined. Do not delay seeing a doctor, nurse or pharmacist because of something you read here, and do not start, stop or change any treatment on the strength of it. If something is time critical, go and be seen.
- This is not counselling, and it is not financial advice.
- Articles about trauma, sleep, money, debt, renting or starting a business describe what commonly helps. They are not therapy and they are not a recommendation about your own money. Speak to a counsellor, a qualified adviser or your own bank about your circumstances.
- It may be out of date, or wrong for where you are.
- Law changes, services close, numbers stop answering and practice varies by state. We correct what we find, and we cannot promise that every page is current on the day you read it. Where we do not have something confirmed, we say so rather than fill the gap.
- Reading this does not make us your lawyer or your doctor.
- No professional relationship is created by reading an article, and we cannot accept liability for decisions taken on the strength of one. What we can do is help you reach somebody who is qualified to advise you, which is what the legal and health parts of our work exist for.
- We cannot promise an outcome, and we cannot make anybody safe.
- A protection order is a piece of paper backed by an enforcement system that is inconsistent. A plan works until the day it does not. Anybody in this field promising safety is selling something, and the promise itself is dangerous because it stops people planning.
Do not let this notice stop you acting. If you are in immediate danger, call 112. If something is medically urgent, go to a hospital — you do not need a police report to be treated. And if you do not know where to start, that is a normal way to begin: use the contact page and we will take it from there.
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