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…
Housing is where leaving most often fails. A woman can have a job, a lawyer and a protection order, and still return to a violent home because no landlord will take her. Why she gets refused No guarantor, because…
Work is often the only place a woman being controlled goes alone. That makes colleagues unusually well placed to notice, and unusually likely to say nothing for fear of interfering in something private. What you might notice Frequent calls…
Two things get confused constantly, and separating them makes everything easier. Child maintenance is money for the children. It is owed because they are his children, and it does not depend on the marriage, on who left, on whose…
An emergency bag is the difference between leaving with your life and leaving with your life plus the ability to prove who you are. Women who leave without documents spend months rebuilding an identity while also trying to stay…
The problem this solves is narrow and very common. Something is happening, or about to happen, and you can make a call — but you cannot say anything that sounds like asking for help, because he is in the…
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…
The most disorienting thing about the first months is not the practical difficulty. It is that the symptoms frequently get worse once you are safe, which nobody warns anybody about. Women describe it the same way: I coped for…
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…
Ask why a woman went back and the answer is usually money. A shelter bed solves one night. A job with a contract solves the year after it, and it is the one thing an employer can provide that…
