Shaul M. Gabbay
This article explains why formal legal protections in Nigeria frequently fail to provide meaningful safety for women and girls exposed to gender-based and honor-related violence. Drawing on network theory, political economy, public health research, and African empirical scholarship, the paper develops the analytical distinction between social capital and social liability as a framework for understanding informal governance. It demonstrates how authority grounded in family structures, honor norms, and gender regulation routinely overrides statutory law in everyday life. Using demographic data, public opinion research, documented cases of lethal violence, and comparative analysis, the study shows why violence persists despite legal prohibition, why institutions repeatedly hesitate to intervene, and why commonly proposed remedies—particularly internal relocation—rarely produce durable protection. Building on this analysis, the article shows that social capital in network-dense societies functions as a primary infrastructure of survival, while its coercive reversal—social liability—operates as a mechanism of discipline when conformity to gendered norms is perceived to break down. Effective protection, the paper argues, requires confronting the social mechanisms through which social belonging is converted into coercion and perceived non-conformity into collective liability enforced through coordinated social sanction and violence.