Founded by Jade Maria Burrowes, The Women’s Railroad is a free digital guide that provides women with practical advice for escaping domestic abuse. It provides legal and safety information in plain English, can be accessed anonymously, and leaves no trace on monitored devices.
Launched on 21 March 2026, The Women’s Railroad is a free, practical guide for women experiencing domestic abuse. The title is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. Get Money. Get Out. Get Rid. Three steps. Financial preparation. Safe departure. Legal protection. Written in plain English, accessible anonymously, and designed to leave no trace on a monitored device.
One in four women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. In England and Wales alone, there were 49,557 offences of coercive control recorded by the police in the year ending March 2025. And yet many of the women living inside those statistics do not know what their legal options are, or do not even know that options exist at all. That is the gap The Women’s Railroad was built to close.
Get Money. Get Out. Get Rid.
It does not start with a dramatic scene, and it’s not always bruises and plates being smashed, this isn’t a TV series. There is no single moment a woman can point to and say, “That’s when it began. It starts with something that looks like care. ‘Stay home, you are not feeling well.’ ‘You do not need that job, I will look after you.’ ‘She is not a good friend to you.’ Each moment, individually, looks like love. Taken together, over months and years, they constitute something else entirely. By the time a woman recognises the pattern, she has already lost the things she needs to leave behind. Her money. Her friends. Her sense of who she was before him.
Generations of women before us spoke about this and were told it is just how it is, deal with it quietly, as if it were simply part and parcel of being married, along with being barefoot and pregnant.
Remember when gran used to say: ‘Keep a bank account he doesn’t know about’? Because gran was indirectly telling you the first way a woman can be controlled by her partner. Gran was not wrong. She was just working with what she had. It was never enough. It never should have been.
Leaving is not simply a matter of courage or readiness. It is a matter of resources and information. – Jade Maria Burrowes, Founder, The Women’s Railroad.
A woman whose finances have been controlled for years, whose friendships have been quietly dismantled, whose confidence has been eroded until she barely recognises herself, does not need to be told that what is happening is wrong. She needs a route out. She needs a strategy. She needs to know how much money she can access, what legal rights she has, and how to get out safely. The Women’s Railroad gives her that.
Who Built It and Why
I founded The Women’s Railroad; I did not come to this work from a distance. I saw domestic abuse as a very young child, in her own family, and understood before I had the words for it that something was wrong and that nobody was giving women a way out. I experienced coercive control myself. I watched, across generations of women she loved, what happens when a woman has never been shown that a route out exists or educated in her options. Without that knowledge, the conclusion is reasonable: if I cannot stop this on my own, there is probably no way to stop it at all.
Years later, studying for an LLB, I found the legal framework that could have changed everything for those women. While the protections exist, they are real and available; they are not accessible. Legislation is a mindfield without the guidance of someone in the know, written in a language that means nothing to a layperson. We can’t all Erin Brockovich it. For a woman in a dangerous relationship, even going looking for answers carries its own risk. If he finds out she has been searching, everything gets worse.
The women I loved were not weak. They were uninformed and dealing with a Jekyll and Hyde.
“Women experiencing domestic abuse are not lacking courage. They are lacking a clear, practical route. The Women’s Railroad exists to give them that.” – Jade Maria Burrowes, Founder, The Women’s Railroad.
The Jekyll and Hyde Effect
The man who is one person in public and another entirely behind closed doors is not a literary device. He is a type. A profile. At The Women’s Railroad, we coined the term and named him.
The Jekyll and Hyde Effect: the deliberate use of a charming, well-liked public persona as a tool of abuse, coercive control, and isolation. He is generous at socials. He is warm to her friends. He is the last person anyone would suspect. The reason nobody believed her when she tried to tell them is not that she was unconvincing; it is because he spent years making himself unimpeachable in every room she was not in.
This is not a personality quirk or the result of a stressful week at work. Years of Research in psychology have documented the mechanism. While academia gave it an acronym, nobody had given it a name that every woman who has lived through it would immediately recognise. He’s a Jekyll and Hyde.
When her mother says, “but is he really that bad?”, she is not a bad mother. She is caught in the same architecture. That confusion is the intended outcome of a strategy that began long before she found the courage to say anything at all.
His likability is not a character reference. It is his alibi. – Jade Maria Burrowes, Founder, The Women’s Railroad.
He never shouted. He didn’t have to.
Restricted financial independence, being denied access to money, being prevented from working, a partner sabotaging employment, being denied access to joint bank accounts, and coerced debt are all recognised examples of controlling or coercive behaviour under the government’s statutory guidance framework. Monitoring phone use, isolating a woman from her support network, controlling where she goes and who she sees. All of it is abuse. All of it is illegal. Most women experiencing it do not know either of those things.
Her loyalty was never meant to cost her everything.
The Law Exists. Most Women Don’t Know It.
The Serious Crime Act 2015 created the offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate or family relationship, carrying a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment. The Domestic Abuse Act 2021 extended those protections further. The strides in law have been made, but who’s letting the women know? Is anyone walking them through it? It’s all a little abstract in that way. The legal tools are there. The problem is that most women in dangerous relationships will never find them in time, if at all. Maybe she will leave him eventually without help, or sadly, as is the reality for so many suicide is their exit. The Women’s Railroad exists because that is not good enough.
More than 40% of civil legal aid providers have exited the sector between 2011 and 2024, creating legal aid deserts across large parts of the country. In January to March 2025, no legal representation was present in 40% of private law cases. In Poole and Dorset, there is reported to be a single firm of solicitors with a family legal aid contract to service over 140,000 people. The Law Society of England and Wales has stated that increasing numbers of domestic abuse survivors are being forced to represent themselves in court, describing the scale of the problem as pointing to an urgent need for government investment.
The right to legal aid exists on paper. In practice, the firms that provide it are vanishing. The Women’s Railroad is a direct answer to that gap. Accessibility and transparency of law, in plain English, for the women who need it most.
A former senior figure at the Law Society of England and Wales, on seeing The Women’s Railroad guide, described it as important and necessary and committed to sharing it within their network. Legal professionals across England and Wales are now licensing it for distribution to clients and employees.
The rule of law holds that justice is a right, not a privilege. The Women’s Railroad holds that principle to account. – Jade Maria Burrowes, Founder, The Women’s Railroad.
A Resource Without Borders
Seven weeks after launch, The Women’s Railroad has been downloaded by women across England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and has reached women internationally. Downloads have been confirmed from Greece, Colombia, Germany, Canada, and the United States. An independent journalist in America wrote about The Women’s Railroad Guide, sending a wave of readers to the site from North America.
Women in Bogotá are downloading a guide about English and Welsh law. Not because they are looking for jurisdiction-specific answers. Because they are looking for proof that a route exists.
Those working with survivors in the UK have described the guide as a vital safety plan that places life-saving information directly into the hands of women who may not yet know their options exist.
The guide is waiting whenever she is ready.
The Women’s Railroad is a free resource, find out more below. Get Money. Get Out. Get Rid.