Ask anybody who works in this field which weeks are worst and they will name the same ones. Christmas and the New Year. The end of Ramadan and Sallah. The long visit to the village. Any extended holiday when…
A court date is one of the few occasions when somebody who has lost track of you knows exactly where you will be, on which day, at roughly what time, and that you will be there for hours. It…
Taking the phone is one of the commonest things that happens, and it is usually treated as an argument about a phone. It is not. It is the removal of your only private line to everybody outside the house…
Most safety advice quietly assumes you leave the house. Work is described as the one place a woman goes alone, the place a colleague might notice, the place a private call can be made. For a woman who sews…
Faith is a genuine source of strength for a great many of the women we work with, and nothing here is an argument against anybody's religion. A household organised around worship, with a husband who takes headship seriously, is…
A woman is widowed and within days it becomes clear that a set of arrangements has been made about her. She is to marry his brother. Or she is to leave the house, which belongs to the family. Or…
This is written for two people. A woman who was married before she was grown, and is now perhaps nineteen, perhaps forty-five, and has never had a place to ask about it. And somebody who knows a girl this…
If I go, he will kill himself. And then it will be my fault, and his mother will say so, and the children will know. This stops more women than the threat of violence does, because violence is something…
Most descriptions of abuse assume it was there from early on, hidden at first and then revealed. That is the usual pattern and it is not the only one. A significant number of women describe something different: fifteen or…
Most of this site describes one person harming another inside a marriage. This is about something with a different shape: harm carried out, or approved of, by several members of a family, because of what a woman is believed…
