Courses › When home is not safe
After harm
When home is not safe
What harm actually looks like, why it does not feel like harm from the inside, and how to reach people who do this work.
If you are in danger right now, stop reading. Get to a room you can leave, or to a neighbour, or call your local emergency number. Read this later. Also: this browser keeps a history, and the device you are holding may be checked. If that is a risk, use a private window, or a phone that is not yours, or a computer at a library or a clinic, and clear the history when you finish. Nothing here is scored, stored as a verdict, or shown to anyone.
What this course teaches
Stabilisation and grounding, and nothing else
This course does one thing: it helps you name what is happening and get to somebody who can help. It teaches grounding to use when you need it. It does not ask you to process anything, and it does not ask you to change how you think about it.
Why this one
The evidence here is about recognising coercive control and about what raises danger, particularly around separation. What is deliberately absent is any therapeutic technique, because in current danger the priority is safety and not insight.
What this course will not do
Everything else. No processing, no exposure, no couples work, no examining your thoughts. Danger is not avoidance and must never be treated as it. This course points to a service, and that is its whole job.
Six short lessons that name harm at home and point you towards real help. It covers the parts that leave no mark, control over money and papers and worship, and why control is a pattern rather than a row. It explains why the question about why you have not left is the wrong question. It takes apart the use of sabr as an instruction to stay quiet, it says what a safety plan is in general terms, and it says plainly which moment carries the most danger.
Who this is for
Anyone who has started to wonder whether what happens at home is normal. Anyone who has never been hit and cannot work out why they are so careful all the time. Anyone helping someone else and trying to understand what they are looking at. It assumes no clinical background and no training in the sacred sciences.
What this is not
This is not couples work and it never becomes couples work. It teaches no communication skill, no repair skill and no way to manage the person harming you, because where there is control those things become tools for the person doing the harm. It does not process what happened to you, does not ask you to write out or retell any incident, and does not ask you to confront anyone. It gives no fatwa and no diagnosis. It does not assess your danger and produces no score. It cannot tell you what your ruling is on divorce or custody, because that depends on your school and your country, and that needs a scholar and a lawyer.
The lessons
6- Where you left off. What we are actually talking aboutThe full range of it, including the parts that leave nothing to show anyone.6 min
- Control is a pattern, not an incidentNobody counts the rules. That is why the rules work.6 min
- Why it does not feel like harm from the insideWhy did you stay is the wrong question, and here is the right one.5 min
- What sabr is, and what it is notPatience is not silence, and no text makes you the container for another person's cruelty.6 min
- Getting real about safetyWhat preparation means, and the one thing about danger that nobody says out loud.6 min
- Who to tell, and how to reach themWhat a helpline actually does, what to expect, and what to do where none of it exists.5 min
What this course is built on
- Qur'an 2:229, 2:231, 2:233, 2:286, 4:19, 4:75, 4:148, 16:90, 30:21, 65:6. Translation throughout: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004. 4:34 is not quoted and not argued in this course. Learners are routed to a scholar of their own choosing instead. 2:286 is addressed only to correct its use as an instruction to endure harm.
- Sardinha L, Maheu-Giroux M, Stockl H, Meyer SR, Garcia-Moreno C (2022). Global, regional, and national prevalence estimates of physical or sexual, or both, intimate partner violence against women in 2018. The Lancet, 399(10327), 803 to 813. Modelled estimates from over 300 surveys across 161 countries. Regional figures for several Muslim majority regions rest on thinner survey coverage than the global headline implies, and no national figure is presented here as a hard count.
- Stark E (2007). Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press, New York. The named framework behind lesson 2.
- Myhill A (2015). Measuring coercive control: what can we learn from national population surveys? Violence Against Women, 21(3), 355 to 375. Identifier unverified, so none is published. Cited for the instrument point only.
- Sunan Abi Dawud 2146; Sahih al-Bukhari 5204, 5273, 7257; Sahih Muslim 2328; Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3895. Only reports graded sound or good are used, and each carries its grading and grader on its own entry. Four reports commonly quoted on this topic, on prostration, on a husband's pleasure and on a wife's refusal, are held back pending a written scholarly treatment and are not quoted here. The maxim la darar wa la dirar is referred to in the tradition as a juristic maxim graded hasan by al-Nawawi through the collective force of its chains rather than as a single sound narration, and it is not cited as a hadith in this course.
- Johnson MP (1995). Patriarchal terrorism and common couple violence: two forms of violence against women. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 57(2), 283 to 294. Identifier unverified, so none is published. Cited for the typology only.
- Campbell JC, Webster D, Koziol-McLain J, and others (2003). Risk factors for femicide in abusive relationships: results from a multisite case control study. American Journal of Public Health, 93(7), 1089 to 1097. Identifier unverified, so none is published. This is the evidence base behind the Danger Assessment. No risk assessment is delivered in this course and no score is produced.
- Dar al-Ifta al-Misriyyah, English fatwa 8168, on a husband who claims a right to beat his wife. dar-alifta.org, fetched 4 September 2026. Cited for the position that beating is not a husband's right and that domestic violence is prohibited. This platform asserts no ruling of its own.
- Postmus JL, Hoge GL, Breckenridge J, Sharp-Jeffs N, Chung D (2020). Economic abuse as an invisible form of domestic violence: a multicountry review. Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 21(2), 261 to 283. Identifier unverified, so none is published.
- Emergency numbers verified 5 September 2026 against national regulators and emergency authorities, not against aggregator sites. The 112 caution follows 3GPP TS 22.101, which places the requirement on the handset rather than on any network, and the National Emergency Number Association's statement that 112 provides no special emergency call handling in the United States. This course names no charity and no directory on purpose. A charity can close and a directory can go stale, and a dead number in a domestic abuse course is worse than no number. Institutions that exist in every country are named instead. These numbers should be re-checked once a year.