Two fears sit on either side of this. That telling an employer will cost you the job, and that not telling them means nothing can be arranged when you need a morning for court. Both are reasonable. The answer…
Six or eight months in, when the practical things are working and the worst is over, a great many women describe the same experience: a week where they cannot function, for no reason they can identify, having been fine…
Leaving a marriage in Nigeria is rarely a matter between two people. Within days there is a delegation, or a series of calls, or elders arriving at your parents' house, and the process of bringing you back begins in…
One of the more predictable things about this work is that a woman arrives needing help with housing, money and a lawyer, and turns out to have a health problem she has been carrying for years. Not an injury…
Losing a school place is one of the most damaging things that happens to a child in this situation, and it is one of the most avoidable. A child who has lost their home, their room, their father's presence…
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…
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…
The most disorienting thing about the first months is not the practical difficulty. It is that the symptoms frequently get worse once you are safe, which nobody warns anybody about. Women describe it the same way: I coped for…
Leaving without documents is normal. People leave at night, or during a window that lasted four minutes, and a birth certificate is not what you are thinking about. The consequence arrives about three weeks later, when everything you need…
An account only you can see is the single most useful practical thing a woman in an abusive marriage can have. It is what makes transport possible, what makes a deposit possible, and what turns leaving from a leap…
