Intimate partner violence among immigrant Nigerian women in the United States: An analysis of internet commentaries on the murders of nine Nigerian women by their male spouses

From 2005 to 2008, nine Nigerian female nurses were murdered in the U.S. by their husbands. Other than media (notably internet) information on the incidents, this situation and the general issue of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the Nigerian immigrant community is yet to gain awareness in scholarship. This paper is a discussion of IPV in the context of internet commentaries posted by Nigerians in the wake of the murder incidents. The commentaries mostly attribute the murders to acculturative tensions in Nigerian patriarchal gender relations and economic-based gender role-reversal in U.S-based immigrant Nigerian families. The paper commences with a narrative of Nigerian immigration into the U.S. in order to situate Nigerian nurses in the migration process and to position Nigerian immigrants in IPV literature. It transitions into a description of data collection and analysis of internet commentaries upon which the paper is based, findings and discussion of findings, and a conclusion.