For 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.
For women
Faith is a real source of strength and this article is not an argument against it. It is an argument against one specific idea, which is that endurance is the whole of what is being asked of you.
Submission is not the same as submitting to harm. Forgiveness is not the same as remaining within reach. Patience is not the same as accepting injury. A marriage can be honoured and a person can still be protected, and those two things are not in competition.
If your religious leader tells you to go home and pray, and nothing else, you are entitled to seek a second opinion, exactly as you would with a doctor who gave you an answer that did not fit. Doing so is not a lack of faith.
You are also entitled to ask a specific question rather than a general one. Not what should I do about my marriage, but is it acceptable for me to be afraid in my own house. That question is much harder to answer with endurance.
For pastors and imams
You are frequently the first person told, and sometimes the only one. That places real weight on the next few minutes, and most of what follows costs nothing.
- Believe her. Disclosure is rarely exaggerated and is very often minimised. What she is telling you is usually the smallest version she thinks you will accept.
- Do not counsel them together. Joint counselling in a violent relationship is dangerous. She cannot speak freely and she may be punished afterwards for what she did say.
- Do not send her home with only prayer. Pray with her and also help her make a plan and reach a service.
- Do not tell him you have spoken to her. This is the single most common way women are seriously hurt after seeking help, and it is almost always done with good intentions.
- Ask about the children. They are almost always affected and almost never asked about.
- Keep one number. If you keep one telephone number for this, keep ours, and keep 112.
The sentences that close a conversation are worth reading before the next one, because several of them are said most often by people in a pastoral role.
What a congregation can offer that nobody else can
Two things, and both are unusually valuable.
A room where a woman can make a telephone call unobserved. Many women have no private moment in a week. A room, a closed door and twenty minutes is a genuine intervention.
Somebody who can hold documents or a bag. A place of worship is one of the few locations a woman can visit regularly without explanation, which makes it ideal for keeping an emergency bag that cannot be kept at home.
Neither costs anything and both remove practical obstacles that stop women acting.
The reconciliation meeting
The instinct to bring both parties together and restore the marriage is strong and well meant. In a violent relationship it usually makes things worse.
She cannot say what is true in front of him. He performs remorse convincingly, often more convincingly than she performs fear. The meeting concludes with an agreement she did not want, and she goes home with somebody who now knows exactly what she said.
If a meeting must happen, see them separately first, and never let the first thing he hears about her disclosure come from you.
Where family and faith overlap
For many women the same people appear in both conversations, which means a single word from a religious leader travels through the whole family within a day.
That is worth knowing in both directions. It makes confidentiality more important than in almost any other setting. It also means a religious leader who supports her can shift a family position that nothing else would move. How that pressure works is covered separately.
What we ask
We are not asking anyone to counsel divorce. Many of the women we work with stay, and we help them either way.
We are asking that endurance is not offered as the entire answer to a woman who is frightened in her own house, and that nobody tells her husband she came to see you.
Questions people ask
Does your organisation tell women to divorce?
No. We are not here to judge anyone’s marriage or to tell anyone to leave it. Many of the women we work with stay, and the support is the same.
Can our church or mosque work with you?
Yes. Training for congregations and a route to refer somebody quickly are both things we can arrange.
She asked me not to tell anyone. What if I think she is in danger?
Keep her confidence unless somebody is in immediate danger or a child is at risk of serious harm. If you must act, tell her you are doing it and why.
Is it wrong to pray with her?
No. The problem is prayer offered as the whole answer. Pray with her and also help her reach a service.
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.
Also worth reading:
