Intersectional Violence, Social Work Intervention, and Justice Outcomes for Women in Northern Nigeria

Violence against women in northern Nigeria operates through multiple intersecting axes including gender, poverty, ethnicity, and religious normativity, creating forms of harm that single-axis social work intervention frameworks are inadequate to address. This doctoral study theorises intersectional violence against women and analyses social work intervention and justice outcomes across Kano, Katsina, and Sokoto States in North West Nigeria. A critical feminist paradigm employing intersectional research methodology underpins the study, combining a mixed-method survey of 280 women survivors of violence with 50 qualitative interviews with social workers, legal aid actors, and community leaders, and structural analysis of gendered violence legislation and its implementation. Structural equation modelling and intersectional thematic analysis are applied. The study's original theoretical contribution is the Intersectional Violence-Justice Framework, which maps the mechanisms through which gender, poverty, and religious normativity interact to shape women's experiences of violence and constrain their access to justice and social work services. An original empirical contribution documents, for the first time, the specific pathways through which intersectional disadvantage mediates social work intervention uptake and justice outcome among northern Nigerian women survivors. Transformative recommendations include redesigning social work violence response services around intersectional vulnerability assessment and developing Muslim-feminist social work practice models. Keywords: intersectional violence, social work, northern Nigeria, feminist theory, justice outcomes