CURTAILING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN NIGERIA
One of the highly misconstrued issues about women development is women empowerment. Many things referred to as women empowerment are not; they are just hand-outs or ‘peanut’ that only guarantee momentary relief but never lead to women emancipation from poverty. This misconception, therefore, is one of the reasons for the deep-seated poverty among Nigerian women. To be sure, women empowerment is a process of awareness and capacity building leading to greater participation, to greater decision-making power and control, and to transformative action (Rahman, 2013:11). It is said to be a process of positive change that improves women’s fallback position and bargaining power within a patriarchal structure, and identify different causal pathways of change; material, cognitive, perceptual and relational. This implies that any women empowerment programme, project and/or policy that do not guarantee greater women participation in decision-making that positively changes the course of ...