A woman moves into a compound to get away from somebody. Everything has been arranged — the lawyer, the school, the order from the court. Then a man arrives at the gate, says he is her husband and that…
Formal services reach a fraction of the women who need them. Markets reach almost everybody. A market association knows who has stopped coming, whose husband collects her takings, who arrived with a swollen face and said she fell. It…
Clinicians see women experiencing abuse years before a lawyer or a charity does. Very often the presentation is not an injury at all, which is why it is missed. What to look for Injuries that do not match the…
Housing is where leaving most often fails. A woman can have a job, a lawyer and a protection order, and still return to a violent home because no landlord will take her. Why she gets refused No guarantor, because…
Ask why a woman went back and the answer is usually money. A shelter bed solves one night. A job with a contract solves the year after it, and it is the one thing an employer can provide that…
Reporting on this subject does real good. It is how the law gets scrutinised, how services get held to account, and how a woman reading a newspaper works out that what is happening in her house has a name…
Economic abuse is one of the most common forms of domestic abuse and one of the least recognised. It runs almost entirely through financial institutions, which means bank staff observe it regularly without having a name for what they…
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…
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…
