Summary
The report argues that the abuse suffered by survivors of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) often continues, or even escalates, as they attempt to leave due to a patriarchal system rigged against women. Using the case of Nigerian celebrity Regina Daniels and her billionaire husband, Ned Nwoko, the author highlights the historical and ongoing tactic of character assassination and institutionalised labelling of women as crazy or mentally unstable to divert attention from the abuser's violence and silence the survivor.
One would think that a woman’s abuse ends the moment she leaves, but reality shows us that there’s an even darker side to leaving that leaves survivors of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) at the mercy of an almost insurmountable patriarchal institution that is rigged against women.
A few days ago, a disturbing video trended. A Nigerian celebrity, Regina Daniels, was seen fighting with people whom she claimed were vigilante men/thugs whom her billionaire husband, Ned Nwoko, paid to beat her up. She kept repeating that she is sick and tired of the constant physical abuse.
In response, her husband replied, stating that Regina Daniel was into drugs and alcoholism and should be institutionalised in a mental facility for her safety.
In the long paragraph calling for her institutionalisation, what struck me was the fact that he never once denied hitting her or paying thugs to beat her up, because all that was needed was a claim to divert our attention.
Diversion has been a veritable tool in the patriarchal toolbox. We have seen this play out repeatedly. When news broke out of young women who were murdered for ritualistic purposes with missing body parts, men celebrated it and accused those women of being prostitutes who chase fraudsters for money while rejecting the advances of ‘honest guys’.
Next, the family of those girls spend so much time defending their deceased daughter’s honour instead of fighting the injustice done to her.
Like we say, a woman is killed twice— first her body, next her character. Ned allegedly beat her, and in his defence, he assassinated her character without having to affirm or deny the allegations of battery.
Now, this article is neither refuting nor alleging that Regina is a drug addict. In fact, that premise is irrelevant to this discussion today. The main focus of this is a practice as old as men themselves— the institutionalisation of women for men’s benefit.
We need not even go far; we have heard men refer to women or even ourselves as “crazy ex” whenever we vacate an abusive relationship or marriage, or when we call them out for abusing women. This practice of labelling women as crazy has a dark and gory past, and I will begin it with a story.
Historical perspective
In 1860, Elizabeth Packard did something ‘utterly crazy’- she dared to oppose her husband’s strict Calvinist religious belief. The very act of expressing her mind led to her husband sending her to a mental facility.
No doctor’s examination was needed. At that time, all that was needed was the family/ husband’s signature and a word that a woman was crazy, and she would be confined.
Upon her arrival at the mental hospital, Elizabeth was confronted with a grim reality. She expected to meet crazy women; instead, it was packed full of women like herself, whose only crime was having a mind of their own and expressing independent thoughts.
The ‘correctional institution’ was pack full with women who were labelled crazy for refusing to marry the man chosen by their families, single women, women who wanted to child free, be educated, leave their abusive marriages, women’s right activists, women accused of witchcraft and heresies, lesbians, women whose husbands wanted to get rid of them and bring in another women… basically, there was no limit to the things a woman can be institutionalised for.
All that was needed was the signature and words of the man in charge, who can be either a father, male relative in charge or husband.
Elizabeth started documenting the stories of these women, and when she was released three years later, her husband, who thought she was not transformed enough, wanted to keep her in confinement within their house, but she fought. She sought a jury trial. She fought, not just for herself but for the right of a woman to have a mind of her own.
It took the jury seven minutes to rule that Elizabeth was not insane.
This led to long activism and lobbying before, finally, the lawmen made it more difficult for a man to institutionalise a woman without proof of insanity.
Next time a man calls you crazy, remember that he once had the right to label you insane and throw you into a mental facility for daring to speak out.
Next time you, as a woman, form an independent thought, such as me writing this very blog post, speaking up at events and sharing your thoughts with the world, do so in remembrance of the millions of women who were institutionalised for the crime of being seen and heard. Women fought for that right!
Unfortunately, this practice of institutionalising women is still very much alive with us. In fact, all it takes is to be labelled a crazy ex.
Two years back, I read Dr Jessica Taylor’s book Sext But Psycho, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so unsafe like I did reading how this practice is very much in place through the help of psychologists who were very quick to label a woman with one of numerous psychological issues and have her confide.
Even more sinister, these women were subjected to conversion therapy, performance of forceful procedures like hysterectomy, lobotomy, etc, to ‘cure them of their insanity.’ Apparently, it is insane for a woman not to be accepting of her chains.
Like I stated earlier, this post is not concerned with whether Regina is, in fact, a drug addict. She might, in fact, need medical attention; however, the big question is- why is Ned disclosing this barely 3 days after he was accused of domestic violence, which he never denied?
This leaves us with a pertinent question: Why are women marrying men sane and vacating their marriages as the insane ones?
What are the husbands doing to drive their wives insane, and why aren’t they incarcerated or institutionalised?
It is not enough to say that she behaved a certain way. The real question is, what is it that drove them crazy and who is to be held accountable for it?
Note that Billionaire Ned married Regina, a teen actress, when she was just 19 years old and he was 59. There is a whopping 40-year age gap between them, and there are allegations flying around that. Ned had even encouraged Regina’s wildness by turning a section of the house into a bar because it boosts her sexual prowess (allegedly).
If women are driven to insanity after encountering men or marriage, then the men have questions to be answered.
According to Cutie Julles, Ned’s ex-wife, Chante, who accused him of domestic violence, was also accused of drug abuse and craziness and was locked in a room for days. This only happened after she spoke about domestic violence.
And to make matters worse, three days after the accusation, he was seen making a public appearance with his 5th wife.
The imperfect victim
If indeed Regina is in need of medical attention, her immediate family should take care of her, not her estranged husband, Ned Nwoko, who has been accused of domestic violence. The reason is that there is no perfect victim.
If we are expecting Regina to have no vice or fault of her own before we believe and protect her as a victim of GBV, then it makes a mockery of everything we stand for.
In fact, Regina is a woman I will ordinarily not make a post about because she has, in time past, made comments like:-
“It is better to cry in a Ferrari than in a keke napep (tricycle)” and
You leave your husband because of a small beating…”
She has publicly used her husband’s enormous wealth to justify GBV, which, unbeknownst to us, she was a sufferer of the same.
However… however, it is pertinent to note that GBV is never a punishment, not even for women who uphold it. If we must condemn GBV, then we must condemn it in its entirety and not applaud it when it happens to women who uphold and support it because we know there is no limit to sexism. Both the good and the bad will be whipped just as much.
And it is on the basis of my belief that there is no perfect victim that I am writing this post in solidarity with Regina Daniel.
Outsourcing violence.
Another topic I want to touch on, because sexism is an interconnected network and often times multifaceted, is the outsourcing of GBV.
In fact, this practice is so common yet manages to be swept under the carpet.
Late last year, a dear friend of mine finally decided to leave her boyfriend because she saw his WhatsApp message where he told a female friend of his that he would pay boys to rape her. Men have always used violence to ‘put women in their place’.
This outsourcing of GBV is also done on an institutionalised level!
Institutionalisation of women in mental homes is also a form of outsourcing GBV by taking advantage of systemic oppression, where a man’s word is taken as gospel and a woman is punished for resistance.
A man can outsource violence by paying the police or making false claims to the police to make it difficult for her to leave. He can even take advantage of the justice system!
The case of Fani-Kayode comes to mind. His young wife (his 4th marriage) left him due to a series of abuse. Not only was he accused of depriving her access to her four children for over a year, but before long, we heard that he had, in fact, instituted an action against her for attempted murder.
According to Punch, she was also accused of making false allegations on November 24, 2018, with doctored pictures with the intent to deceive members of the public and make them believe that the injuries in the pictures were inflicted on her by her ex-husband…
She was alleged to have carried two kitchen knives, threatening to kill Fani-Kayode, the children and other occupants of the house at Asokoro on November 24 2018, within the court jurisdiction.
Interestingly, as reported by Vanguard, Fani-Kayode withdrew the charges against her on the grounds that the parties have settled amicably amongst themselves. Only for him to return with a post praising his ex-wife for returning to him. The same woman he had arrested for attempting to murder him with a kitchen knife.
In the post detailing their reconciliation, he showered her with matchless praise and tales of how they bonded over good times. Meanwhile, she had earlier detailed how she suffered a series of beatings, even while pregnant, as well as cheating. In the picture celebrating their reconciliation, she was pictured with her children, whom she said were deprived of her.
As to what happened behind the scenes, we cannot say, but you can agree with me that this trail of events leaves many troubling questions unanswered. You don’t move from depriving a wife of her kids for a year to taking happy family photos. You don’t move from “she sleeps around with many men and tried to kill me” to “I do not have the words to express just how wonderful you are and just how precious you are to me, but you know exactly how I feel.”
People laughed it off and claimed that this is exactly why they don’t like to interfere in husband-wife relationships, but I have worked with survivors of GBV long enough to know that is just a shallow excuse for complacency in a country heavily riddled by GBV.
We can see situations where men can outsource violence to institutions by even following the due process of the law. They use the law, not as a shield but as a sword against a weaker victim.
There is a reason why it is said that many IPV cases start for the very first time after marriage or childbirth, because we know that the main battle is not even with the man himself, but with the institutions she has to face.
Even people who will frown at a man or boyfriend hitting his girlfriend will turn the other way if it is a husband doing it because it is carried out within the confines of marriage. It is now “family affairs.”
We saw the same in the case of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, where all the alleged abuser needed to do was out-muscle his victim by getting a better lawyer despite the overwhelming evidence.
As said earlier, Amber was far from being a perfect victim; nonetheless, it would be a slap in our faces and all the clips we saw to claim that Depp was faultless in our opinion.
Even when an abuser knows he is wrong, he can take advantage of the due process of the law to torment his victim.
We have seen women forced by the law to carry the baby of their rapists to term and co-parent with their rapist or abusers. We have seen how the law has made it incredibly hard for victims of rape to prove their case in court.
In fact, my law professor once said that it is easier to prove murder than to prove rape. That is how hard it is, even though murder is a capital offence and rape isn’t.
We have cases like that of Cynthoia Brown, Kizer, Judy Norman and the like who suffered greatly at the hands of the law for defending and killing the men who trafficked, raped and beat them for years. Survivors of GBV are often tasked with an Extra burden of surviving the law that is said to exist for their protection, yet mightily rigged against them.
All these are instances of institutionalised outsourced violence. Many loopholes remain unaddressed, allowing victims to take advantage of them, and we must bring an end to this menace.
Conclusion
Systems have created an enabling environment for abusers to take advantage of the law to outsource their violence. Any loopholes that allow perpetrators of GBV to take advantage of the law to bully their victims invariably allow for institutionalised outsourcing of violence.
A survivor of GBV is not insane; she is, in fact, reacting naturally to the harm she suffered. If a man breaks his leg and cries out in pain, that is a natural reaction to harm, but if a survivor of GBV has a public meltdown, that is deemed unnatural and insane, worthy of being institutionalised?
In hindsight, wouldn’t it be unnatural for survivors of GBV to behave ‘normally’ in the face of abnormal hardship?
What she needs is not to be labelled and sectioned in a mental facility, but for the problem itself (the abuser) to be taken out of the picture. Then, she can get help with daily appointments to aid her healing process, not an institution that would label her insane for reacting naturally to prolonged harm.
Editor’s note: The author first published this article on Sheresonance.
