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…
Most women who contact us begin with a version of the same sentence. I am not sure this counts. Other people have it worse. He has never put me in hospital. Sometimes he is the man I married and…
It usually starts as something that can be read as flattering. He minds who you talk to. He wants to know where you were. People say it means he cares, and early on it is genuinely difficult to tell…
Some women describe a marriage in which almost nothing dramatic has ever happened, and in which they nonetheless cannot make an ordinary decision without first calculating the consequences. There is a name for that. It is called coercive control…
Abuse in a first relationship is routinely dismissed as drama, on the grounds that it is not a marriage, there are no children and nobody is trapped. The patterns are the same, the harm is real, and it sets…
This is one of the most common things women tell us, and it is almost always said in a particular tone. He is a good man. He is not like that normally. It is only when he has been…
Almost everything written about leaving assumes a body that can walk out of a door, a voice that can make a telephone call, and a route that does not depend on anybody's cooperation. For a great many disabled women…
A great deal of writing about abuse assumes two people in a house. For many Nigerian women that is not the arrangement, and the person making life unbearable is not always the person she married. Before anything else: in-laws…
There is an assumption, held by almost everybody including many of the women it applies to, that a woman with her own money is safe. She can leave whenever she wants. Nobody can control someone who pays the rent…
Polygamous marriage is lawful in Nigeria under customary and Islamic law, and a very large number of women live in one. This article is not an argument about the institution. It is about a set of mechanisms that appear…
