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…
Women arrive at shelters with an idea formed from films and leave within days because it was nothing like it. Others avoid them entirely because they imagine something much worse than the reality. This is a plain description of…
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…
Almost everything written about supporting somebody in an abusive relationship is about her. This is about you, because the most common way support fails is not that the helper did the wrong thing. It is that the helper ran…
This site is written for women, because that is who our programmes are built for and because the overwhelming majority of people we work with are women. Men are also abused, the ones who are get very little, and…
Of everything said to keep a woman in a marriage, this is the one that works. Money can be earned and injuries heal. The prospect of walking out of your own house and never seeing your children again stops…
Phones leak more than most people realise, and the leaks are usually things switched on for convenience years ago and forgotten about. One warning before anything else, and it is the most important paragraph on this page. If he…
You helped her leave. You made phone calls, you lent money, you had her in your house, you argued with people on her behalf. And she has gone back. This is the moment most helpers stop. It is also…
Where you sleep tonight is a different problem from where you live next year. Confusing the two is why some women refuse a perfectly good short term option, and why others accept a bad long term one because it…
Almost every domestic abuse service is designed around a woman in her thirties with young children. Women in their sixties and seventies experience abuse too, and they are among the least likely people in Nigeria to tell anybody about…
