HealBridge works with women and children leaving domestic abuse in Nigeria. Safe shelter, counselling, legal help, and a route back to work.
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 out.
Read MoreYou 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, in
Read MoreFor a great many Nigerian women, the first person told is not a police officer or a doctor. It is a pastor or an imam. What happens in that conversation very often decides what happens over the following ten years.
Read MoreAlmost everything on this list is said with good intentions, usually by somebody who genuinely wants to help. That is exactly why it is worth naming, because nobody corrects a sentence they think is kind. Why did you not leave
Read MoreWork is often the only place a woman being controlled goes alone. That makes colleagues unusually well placed to notice, and unusually likely to say nothing for fear of interfering in something private. What you might notice Frequent calls or
Read MoreWhen we ask a woman what is keeping her where she is, the answer is very often her mother. Not a husband's threats, not money, not the police. Her own parents, telling her that every marriage has difficulty, that she
Read MorePeople who suspect something usually do one of two things. They say nothing for years, or they say leave him and are never told anything again. There is a middle path, and it works considerably better than both. Ask once,
Read MoreYou hear it. Most weeks, or some weeks, through a wall or across a compound. Shouting, then something else, then a child crying, then quiet. And then the ordinary paralysis: it is not your business, you might be wrong, you
Read MoreFor many Nigerian women the hardest conversation is not with the police or a lawyer. It is with her mother. Why families say stay Rarely out of cruelty. Usually out of some combination of the following, and it helps to
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HealBridge works with women and children leaving domestic abuse in Nigeria. Safe shelter, counselling, legal help, and a route back to work.
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