For many Nigerian women the hardest conversation is not with the police or a lawyer. It is with her mother.
Why families say stay
Rarely out of cruelty. Usually out of some combination of the following, and it helps to know which one you are dealing with.
- Fear of shame, for her and for the family.
- A genuine and often accurate fear that a woman alone with children will not survive financially.
- A belief that marriage is endured rather than enjoyed, frequently based on their own marriage.
- The bride price, and what returning it would mean.
- Concern about what happens to the children.
- A real hope that it will pass, because for some couples the difficult years did pass.
Almost none of that is about not loving you. Most of it is about a different assessment of risk, made with less information than you have.
Understanding it does not mean accepting it
You can hold both things at once. My mother loves me. My mother is wrong about what is safe for me.
Those do not contradict each other, and you do not have to win the argument in order to act. A great many women wait for family agreement that is never going to come, and lose years waiting.
What tends to work
Pick one ally first
Not the whole family at once, which becomes a meeting and then a verdict. One person, usually the one who has already noticed something and said nothing.
Describe behaviour, not conclusions
Saying he is abusive invites a debate about the word, and the word is easy to argue with. Saying last month he took my phone and I could not call anyone for two days invites a response to the fact.
Keep a written list. Describing the rules rather than the incidents is more persuasive to a family than an account of the last row.
Name the fear behind the advice
Ask directly. Are you worried about what people will say, or about how I would live.
Both of those have answers. The unspoken version does not, and it keeps producing the same conversation.
Bring an outside voice
A pastor, an imam, a respected aunt, a doctor. Families very often accept from an authority what they will not accept from a daughter. What to expect from a religious leader, and what to do if the answer is only prayer, is covered separately.
The bride price question
It comes up constantly and is asserted far more confidently than the law supports. Whether anything is repayable depends on the community and the customary court, and it is frequently used as a lever rather than as a legal position.
Get advice before accepting that you owe anything. Which court applies to your marriage determines almost everything about this.
When there is no support at all
Some women have no family who will help, or a family actively pressing them to stay, or a family closely connected to his.
That is harder and it is not hopeless. What it means is building support outside the family, which is slower and does work.
Practically, three is enough to act on. One friend who knows. One professional who knows, which can be a doctor, a teacher or a lawyer. And one organisation that knows, which can be us. Those three between them cover almost everything a family would have provided.
If you decide to stay
Many women do, at least for now, and there is no judgement here.
Do the things that make staying safer. A safety plan. Documents out of the house. An account of your own. One person who knows. All of those are useful whatever you decide next year, and none of them requires you to announce anything.
For families reading this
If your daughter or your sister has told you something, the most useful thing you can do is believe her and stay reachable.
You do not have to agree with every decision she makes. You do have to remain the person she can call. Women are seriously harmed in the gap between telling somebody and being taken seriously, and that gap is usually made of well meant advice.
The sentences that close the conversation are worth reading before the next one.
Questions people ask
They say I will bring shame on the family. What do I say?
Nothing will settle it in one conversation. What tends to move families over time is the specific rather than the general, and an outside voice they already respect.
Do I have to return the bride price?
It depends on the community and the customary court, and it is asserted more confidently than the law supports. Get advice before accepting that you owe anything.
My family is close to his family. Who can I tell?
Somebody outside both families. One friend, one professional and one organisation is enough to act on.
They say the children need their father. Is that not true?
Children benefit from a safe relationship with both parents. Contact is a separate question from whether you remain in the house, and a court can arrange it safely.
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:
