Most safety advice assumes you are leaving. Most women are not, at least not yet, and a plan that only works if you walk out of the door tonight is no use at all on an ordinary Tuesday.
A safety plan is a set of decisions taken while you are calm, so that you are not taking them while frightened. It works whether you stay for another ten years or leave next month, and the great majority of women who make one never have to use it.
This is the pillar article for everything in this section. Each part below has a fuller article behind it.
Decide where the safe room is
Think through the rooms in your home. Which has a door that locks. Which has a second way out. Which has a window onto a neighbour who would hear.
Then think about which rooms are dangerous. The kitchen and the bathroom are where injuries most often happen, for opposite reasons. One is full of knives, hot oil and gas. The other is small, hard surfaced and has only one door.
Decide now which room you move towards if things escalate, and walk the route in your head a few times. In an emergency people do what they have already decided, not what they work out at the time.
Decide who you call, and what you say
Pick one neighbour, one relative and one friend. Tell each of them, separately, that you may need them.
Agree a phrase that means come now or call the police. It should be ordinary enough to say in front of him without drawing attention. Has my parcel arrived. Did you find my blue scarf. The words do not matter. What matters is that somebody other than you knows what they mean.
Put 112 in your phone. Put our number, 2348025170267, in your phone under a name that would not attract attention if he scrolled through it. If you are worried that he checks the handset, read Keeping your phone and your messages private before you save anything.
Decide what leaves the house early
The single most useful thing you can do this month is move documents out of the house, one at a time, so that nothing is ever missing on any particular day.
Birth certificates for you and the children. Marriage certificate. National identity slip, voter card, passport. School records and immunisation cards. Bank details and any property or land documents. Photographs of injuries and any medical reports.
Where you cannot remove an original safely, photograph it and email the photograph to an account he does not know about. Paper can be taken from you. An email account he has never heard of cannot. The full list, and where to keep the bag, is set out separately.
Decide about money
Money is the reason women return more often than any other single factor. An account in your own name, at a bank he does not use, with paper statements switched off, changes what is possible more than anything else on this page.
Small and regular beats large and visible. Aim first for transport, one night somewhere and food for the children. That is the amount that turns a crisis into a manageable evening. Opening a bank account in your own name covers what documents you need and what to do if you have none of them.
Decide what the children do
Children need one instruction, not a plan. Old enough to use a phone means old enough to learn to call 112 and to say their full address. Younger than that means one instruction only, usually go to the neighbour, or go to your room and stay there until I come.
Do not give a child the job of protecting you. Children who try to intervene are injured, and older children in particular will try. Tell them directly that it is not their job and that going to get help is the bravest thing they can do. Safety planning when you have children covers this properly, including what to say afterwards.
Decide what you do in the moment
If it starts, the goal is not to win the argument or to be understood. It is to end the incident with as little harm as possible.
- Move towards the door or the safe room, not away from them.
- Do not go into the kitchen or the bathroom.
- Avoid fighting back where you can. It rarely helps physically and it gives him an account in which you were the aggressor.
- Get out if you can. Take the children if they are with you and it is safe.
- Afterwards, get any injury seen the same day and ask for it to be written down.
Any pressure to the neck needs medical attention the same day even with no marks. Why that is is worth knowing in advance.
Review it when something changes
Look at the plan again after anything that alters the shape of your life. A new job, a new house, a new phone, a child starting school, and above all a pregnancy.
Pregnancy in particular is a point at which violence often begins or escalates, and a plan made before it may no longer fit.
When the plan becomes a decision to leave
If and when you decide to go, the planning changes character, because the period around leaving is the most dangerous point in an abusive relationship. Planning to leave safely deals with that specifically, and the most important line in it is to tell somebody before the day rather than on it.
Questions people ask
Is making a plan a betrayal of my marriage?
No more than knowing where the fire exit is at work is a betrayal of your employer. Most women who make a plan never use it.
Where can I keep the plan itself?
Nowhere written down in the house. Keep it in your head, and keep the documents and the bag with somebody you trust.
He would never actually hurt me. Do I need this?
A plan costs you nothing if you are right. Many of the women we work with would have said the same thing a year earlier.
Can you help me make one?
Yes. That is one of the commonest reasons people contact us, and it does not commit you to anything else.
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.
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