Spotlight: Violence Against Women - Nigeria's Private War

Nigeria is a nation fond of grand slogans. “Renewed Hope” is the latest. Yet for millions of Nigerian women and girls, hope ends at home. New data suggest that the living room, not the battlefield or the back alley, has become the country’s most reliable site of violence. Three in four cases of gender-based violence (GBV) now occur in domestic settings. In other words, Nigeria’s safest space has quietly become its most lethal; in the country’s most dangerous place, the front door closes. The finding comes from the latest Womanity Index, compiled by Invictus Africa, a civil-society watchdog with an increasingly uncomfortable habit: measuring what governments promise against what they actually do. Now in its third edition and released during the annual 16 Days of Activism, the report asks a deceptively simple question - what has changed? The answer, in short, is: not nearly enough.

 

Violence with a Familiar Face

Intimate partner violence remains the dominant form of abuse, but the category hardly captures the scale of the problem. Physical assault, rape, psychological cruelty and economic coercion spill into one another with miserable efficiency. What makes the trend especially alarming is not merely its scale and persistence, but its normalization. Violence has retreated from the shadows of public spaces and entrenched itself behind family walls, where social stigma and economic dependence do the work of silencers. The state, meanwhile, is largely absent; even when it is nominally present. Nigeria has laws. It has policies. It has solemn declarations. But it does not, in most places, have shelters, referral centers, trained responders or budgets that are more than decorative line items.

 

Laws Known to Fewer and Fewer

One might assume that as legislation improves, public awareness would follow. The opposite has happened. Knowledge of GBV laws has fallen from 61% in 2023 to 51% in 2025. Only 41% of Nigerians report awareness of any GBV education or information program at all. The reversal is not accidental. Awareness campaigns flourished when donors paid for them. When donor funding dried up; as donors reliably do, so did the campaigns. What remains is a cautionary tale in development economics: systems built on external generosity collapse the moment the cheques stop. This has practical consequences. Although 68% of Nigerians say they would prefer to seek justice through formal channels, nearly 60% do not know what legal support services exist in their states. Many states have not bothered to simplify or translate the Violence Against Persons Prohibition (VAPP) Act into local languages. Rural communities, unsurprisingly, are the most ignorant, and the most exposed.

 

Shelters That Exist Mainly on Paper

Support services reveal the same pattern of half-commitment. No Nigerian state has a functional Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) or shelter in every local government area. Two states -Abia and Kogi-have none at all. Where centers do exist, they are usually built, staffed or sustained by NGOs and donors rather than by state governments. Only 18 states have a structured, multi-agency reporting and referral system, and most of these are clustered in cities. In Nigeria, safety is urban; vulnerability is rural.

 

Perhaps the most damning numbers concern money. States allocate, on average, just 0.6% of their budgets to Women’s Affairs ministries. Only six states manage even 1%. Worse, states spend only 39% of what they allocate. Some spend less than 10%. In 2024, Nigerian states collectively earmarked ₦120.22bn for GBV prevention and response - just 0.66% of combined state budgets. Of this already paltry sum, only 37.9% was actually released, a sharp drop from the previous year. The result: Nigeria spent about ₦365.60 (roughly the price of a modest lunch in Lagos) per woman or girl on GBV response.

Bukky Shonibare, Invictus Africa’s executive director, puts it bluntly: “The problem is no longer allocation; it is spending.” Laws without funding, she notes, are not laws at all. They are press releases.

Powerless by Design

Women’s Affairs ministries, tasked with leading the response, are structurally weak. They lack political weight, budgetary clout and, often, permission to complain. As Ms. Shonibare observes, civil servants cannot loudly demand accountability without risking their jobs. Civil society, therefore, must shout where ministries whisper. Donors, for their part, are signaling fatigue. Dr Chichi Aniagolu-Okoye of the Ford Foundation warns that external funding will continue to shrink. Facilities have been built. What is missing is the political will to maintain them. Addressing GBV, she argues, does not require fiscal heroics; merely prioritization.

 

Islands of Competence

A few states show that improvement is not just theoretical. Lagos, Akwa Ibom and others have demonstrated that political will and leadership matters. Where governors care, systems emerge: laws are operationalized, referral pathways clarified, budgets released. Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, former first lady of Ekiti State, calls GBV a collective problem with clear solutions, if leaders choose to implement them.

The tragedy is not ignorance. Nigeria knows what works and what does not work. The Womanity Index lays it out in granular detail, complete with benchmarks and gaps. Some states use it. Others ignore it. Progress, in Nigeria, is optional.

 

A Quiet Emergency

Nigeria is fighting many crises - economic, security, political. Gender-based violence rarely tops the list. Yet its scale rivals any insurgency, and its consequences seep into health systems, labor markets and future generations. When violence is tolerated at home, it teaches cruelty early and widely. The alarm is not merely about women. It is about a state content to legislate without enforcing, to allocate without releasing, and to outsource responsibility until nothing remains when the contractors leave. Nigeria’s private war does not lack laws. It lacks resolve. Until that changes, the most dangerous place in the country will remain heartbreakingly ordinary: the home.