Entrapment of Victims of Spousal Abuse in Ghana

Abstract

Drawing on discursive psychology and positioning theory, this study explores the influence of cultural and familial value orientations on battered women’s identity, agency, and decision to leave or stay in abusive conjugal relationship in Ghana. Two semi-structured focus group discussions and four in-depth personal interviews were conducted with 16 victims of husband-to-wife abuse from rural and urban Ghana. The findings indicate that entrapment of victims of spousal abuse in Ghana reflects their social embeddedness and that battered women’s identities and agency are expressed in the context of familial and cultural value orientations. The primacy of family identity and victims’ apparent implicit moral obligation to preserve the social image of their extended family influence their entrapment. Participants’ discursive accounts further suggest that stay or leave decisions of battered women in Ghana reflect a joint product of negotiated agency between victims and their extended family. It is thus argued that the agency of battered women in Ghana is not constituted by individual psychological states or motives, but instead, viewed as a property of victims who exercise it in a given relational context, and partly constituted by familial relationships and identities. The study suggests that intervention initiatives in Ghana should focus on the phenomenon of conjugal violence beyond immediate victims to include families and the larger communities in which victims are embedded.

Keywords

spousal violence cultural contexts battered women negotiated agency family identity discursive psychology Ghana

Spousal violence continues to pose a global health threat. Globally, almost one third (30%) of all women who have been in a relationship have been physically and/or sexually abused by their intimate partners (World Health Organization, 2013). Africa has a higher rate of intimate partner violence (IPV) with between 20% and 71% of African women reporting abuse by their spouse (Antai & Antai, 2008; Jewkes, Levin, & Penn-Kekana, 2002). In 2011, the domestic violence and victim support unit (DOVVSU) in Ghana reported 15,495 cases of battered women (Ghana—International Federation of Women Lawyers, 2013). Although violence perpetrated by intimate partners generally violates most people’s fundamental hopes and expectations for a close relationship, battered women in Ghana continue to justify and stay in abusive marital relationships (Amoakohene, 2004; Ofei-Aboagye, 1994). A national survey by the Ghana statistical service (GSS) reported that 60% of women and 36% of men think that it is justifiable for a man to beat his wife, with an acceptance rate of 70% for rural women and 51% for urban women (GSS, 2011). Many explanations of why women remain in abusive relationships focus on battered women’s personal dispositions (Rusbult & Martz, 1995) and/or their lack of agency (Semaan, 2004). The most frequently asked pair of questions in the literature on domestic violence and by the general public are “Why do they stay?” and its equivalent, “Why don’t they leave?” (Semaan, 2004).

A cocktail of psychological theories have been proposed to explain why abused women continue to remain with their abusive partners. For example, women who remain in violent relationships are assumed to have depressed self-esteem or have acquired a pattern of learned helplessness (Walker, 2000), have dependent personality disorder (Loas, Cormier, & Perez-Diaz, 2011), or have developed tolerance for violence and maltreatment through repeated exposure to violence during childhood (Rhatigan & Axsom, 2006). Other explanations focus on the belief that battered women are passive, lack agency, and that they simply accept their partners’ abuse (Semaan, 2004). According to Semaan (2004), individual-based explanations invariably equate “staying” and “not leaving” with being docile or with failing to act on one’s own behalf. Although much is known about ideological and dispositional framing of battered women, little is known about the complexities of choices that battered women make particularly in the context of familial and cultural values. Drawing on discursive psychology and positioning theory, this study attempts to fill this void by exploring how embedded interdependence of family identity and battered women’s agency shape stay or leave decisions of victims of husband-to-wife abuse in Ghana. The study challenges the individual-based accounts of battered women’s agency through a view of agency as negotiated.

Discursive Psychology and Positioning Theory

Discursive psychology involves the application of ideas from discourse analysis to the study of social phenomena in psychology (Potter, 2003). Discourse analysis was introduced into social psychology by Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell with the publication of Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour in 1987. Discursive psychology pays attention to action orientation of talk; that is, how participants in social interactions use discursive resources to achieve a certain effect (Wetherell & Potter, 1992; Willig, 2008). Wetherell and Potter (1992) assert that the way people speak about the world cannot be separated from their understanding of the world. Thus, the emphasis is not on whether or not what people say is “true” but rather on understanding how certain “realities” are produced and presented as “true” (Wetherell, 1998). To identify diverse construction of persons and objects in here-and-now social interactions, one must pay attention to interpretative repertoire, that is, terminologies, stylistics, and grammatical features, preferred metaphors and figures of speech and general commonsensical ways used by members of a given community to characterize and evaluate actions (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Though discursive psychology is interested in psychological phenomenon such as agency and identity (Willig, 2008), it conceptualizes these phenomena as discursive actions rather than as cognitive processes. It views identities as constructed in and through talk (Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2011). The construction of self is deeply embedded in social discourses, and discursive analysis is very relevant for identity practices—the study of identity as constructed in discourse, negotiated among speaking subjects in a given social context, and as emerging subjectivity and sense of self (Bamberg et al., 2011). The use of identity in this study thus departs from the traditional essentialist view of identity as something people have to the view of identity as something people do or construct in everyday mundane discursive activities, where identity is open to be studied.

A closely related and important concept for understanding cultural sense-making, agency or “dominant discourses” is a type of discourse analysis called positioning theory (Bamberg, 2003; Davies & Harré, 1990). Generally, positioning and its analysis “refers to the close inspection of how speakers describe people and their actions in one way rather than another and, by doing so, perform discursive actions that result in acts of identity” (Bamberg et al., 2011, p. 182). Positioning entails logical and social possibilities such that a taken-up position of a person reflects a loose set of rights and duties that limit the possibilities of realizing actions (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003). The content of the repertoire of socially possible actions of a person is bounded by taken-up positions because a position implicitly limits how much of what is logically possible for a given person to say or do at a certain moment in a particular context. Discursive psychology emphasizes dialectic relationships in which social realities and subjectivities are constituted historically, politically, and socially at a macro level, whilst being drawn upon and produced in here-and-now dynamic constitutive interactions (Wetherell & Potter, 1992). Thus, to understand identity and the agentive positioning of participants (battered women) and the socio-historical context for conceptualizing available interpretive repertoire in here-and-now social interactions in the present study, I provide below a brief description of family identity and agency as well as marriage and divorce in Ghana.

Family Identity and Agency in Context

Personal identity, the subjective concept of personhood (Vandenbos, 2006), and personal agency, the experience of the self in action (Markus & Kitayama, 2004), are important determining factors in human thoughts and actions, including stay or leave decisions of victims of partner abuse. The family is a unique relationship context that influences both the content and processes of identity (Scabini & Manzi, 2011). The family in sub-Saharan Africa is regarded as prior to every individual in the community and a woman’s status is a derivative one, that is, her identity and status are defined by and inseparably connected to her family (Bowman, 2003). The family in Ghana, as elsewhere, can be categorized as family of procreation (nuclear family) and family of orientation (extended family; Assimeng, 1999; Nukunya, 2003).

Family of procreation involves the father, the mother, and possibly a child or children, whereas family of orientation is made up of other members of the family outside the immediate nexus of procreation; that is, grandfather, grandmother, aunts, and uncle, cousins, nephews, in-laws, among others (Assimeng, 1999). Though the nuclear family exists, the use of family in traditional Ghanaian society usually refers to the extended family or family of orientation because the extended family is particularly important for instilling society’s mores in succeeding generations (Assimeng, 1999). The use of family in this study thus refers to a social arrangement in which an individual has extensive reciprocal duties, obligations, and responsibilities to relations outside his or her immediate nuclear family (Nukunya, 2003).

From a Western conception of (nuclear) family, Scabini and Manzi (2011) defined family identity as a family’s true nature and its unique set of potentials that differentiate the family from other entities and the realization of which represents the best fulfillment it is capable of. Family image or identity in Ghana is the belief in the value of a given family as perceived by others (Osafo, Hjelmeland, Akotia, & Knizek, 2011). In this view, family identity in Ghana is socially conceived because the power to confer or withdraw it depends on social evaluations of other persons in society. Family relationship, the implicit and explicit established (and developing) values, meanings, rituals, and the assignment of roles, binds people together over time, even without their being aware (Scabini & Manzi, 2011). Family membership, unlike other group membership, “cannot be psychologically cancelled” and personal identity always involves being part of one’s family “even if individuals choose to dissociate from it” (Scabini & Manzi, 2011, p. 571).

Despite social change and globalization, the extended family in Ghana has relatively maintained its existence on the pragmatic grounds that one stands to lose by opting out of obligations prescribed by the extended family (Assimeng, 1999). The family in Ghana traditionally exercises social control over its members to ensure adherence to its moral standard because it is believed that a moral deviation of one family member could affect the welfare of the entire family (Assimeng, 1999). Family stigma is considered socially injurious and potentially damaging to the social reputation of the extended family in Ghana (Osafo et al., 2011), including endangering the chances and expectations of both men and women in the affected family for marriage (M. Adinkrah, 2012). Family elders in Ghana exercise significant degree of influence on marriage in ensuring that marital conflicts do not end in divorce because divorce casts the image of the family in bad light. This places huge social and moral responsibility on particularly women in marriage, because a “good” woman is partly defined by one’s conformity to familial norms and value orientations, as well as a successful negotiation of personal identity with family identity to accord the family a good social image.

Human agency can be located according to two contrasting views: subject position that is determined by dominant discourses (Bamberg et al., 2011; Davies & Harré, 1990) and self-creating subject (Bruner, 1990). According to the “subject position” view of agency, individual actions and choices are given to them by social, historical, and/or biological forces, subjecting the person and determining his or her action potential. In other words, the world, the social environment, and dominant discourses embedded in a given social context determine the direction of a subject’s action potential. In this view, positions are available resources that people in a given context are agentively forced to choose, and when practiced for a long time they become repertoires that can be drawn upon to construct self and others (Bamberg et al., 2011; Wetherell & Potter, 1992). The self-creating view of agency, on the other hand, is based on consciousness and free will in which the human subject creates itself, and is capable of making independent decisions and agentively engage in both world and self-making (Bruner, 1990). According to this view, individuals are agents actively and independently engaged in the construction of their own life in free will.

Agency also reflects particular cultural–psychological ecologies, structural social situations, and norms in which individuals are embedded (Adams, Bruckmúller, & Decker, 2012). For example, disjoint models of agency, in which people experience action as the product of discrete actors abstracted from social context, is associated with independent construction of self in Western societies (Markus & Kitayama, 2004). On the contrary, interdependent construction of self (in contexts such as Ghana, see Adams, 2005) is associated with conjoint model of agency, in which individuals experience action as a joint product of contextualized actors in concert with social or relational forces (Markus & Kitayama, 2004). Personhood in West Africa is social based on “relational individualism” (Adams & Dzokoto, 2003), in which individuals make daily interpersonal decisions by taking into account their relational connections (Shaw, 2000). The construction of personhood in Ghana locates self and identity in pre-existing fields of relational force (Gyekye, 1992). Agency of persons in Ghana thus reflects culturally constructed patterns of society and individuals relational connectedness with the family in which they are embedded.

Jazvac-Martek, Chen, and McAlpine (2011) have used the concept of negotiated agency to describe how doctoral students engaged in interactions and negotiated their intentions with their supervisors, friends, and family for support. They described how individual students sometimes had to modify or balance personal intentions to achieve greater outcome, such as changing the structure of their thesis to comply with institutional demands to complete their degree. Negotiated agency thus involves engaging in joint decision making and being responsive to expectations and demands of social others in a network of interconnectedness. This study draws on and explores the concept of negotiated agency to explain how battered women respond to the expectations and demands of the extended family in Ghana in terms of choices they make while in abusive marital relationship.

Marriage and Divorce in Ghana

In Ghana, there are three types of marriages defined by their contractual mode, all recognized as legal: marriage under the ordinance, marriage under the Mohammed ordinance, and marriage under customary law (K. O. Adinkrah, 1980; Nukunya, 2003; Seneadza, 2010). Although customary and Mohammedan marriages in Ghana are celebrated under customary laws of a given ethnic community or Mohammedan laws respectively, ordinance marriage could be either civil or church marriage or wedding (Nukunya, 2003). According to the Marriage Ordinance of Ghana (1951; Cap 127), a civil marriage is established when parties, together with their witnesses, register their marriage with a civil authority at the Registrar General’s Department or the Office of a City Council, whereas church marriage or wedding is performed by legally recognized churches on behalf of a civil authority (Nukunya, 2003; Seneadza, 2010). Though marriage is presumed to be between two consenting individuals, marriage in Ghana is a group affair involving families rather than individuals (Nukunya, 2003). A fundamental practice in all marriages in Ghana is the payment of bride price, popularly called tiri nsa, according to which the family of a prospective husband, through negotiations and consultations, present money and/or gifts to the family of a prospective bride.

Dissolution of marriage in Ghana also involves solemnity, institutionalization, and social recognition (Assimeng, 1999). Among the Akans of Ghana, if parties to a marriage, particularly customary marriage, decide to end the relationship, it usually goes through the customary process of nkurobo (where each party gives his or her case) in the presence of badwafo (assembled witnesses or members) from the two families. If an aggrieved party to the marriage makes a good case, assigning a recognized reason entitling him or her to obtain a divorce, the assembled witnesses confirm the wife’s or husband’s decision to obtain a divorce (Danquah, 1928). It must be added that a wife or a husband may appear before a court for the purpose of effecting a legal divorce, particularly if they are married under the ordinance. However, the party seeking divorce is customarily required to go through the traditional process of marriage dissolution by returning the tiri nsa (head-drink) to the family of the man or the woman (whichever the case may be) before official dissolution of the marriage is granted. This is because those who go through the essentials of establishing legal unions (ordinance marriage) in Ghana try to abide by the traditional requirements before adding other modern embellishments they wish to offer (Nukunya, 2003). In sum, the entry and exit process of marriage in Ghana is not psychologically or individually given activity, it involves negotiations, solemnity, and institutionalization. The decision to stay or leave marital relationships in Ghana is made in historically and culturally produced social and familial relations. As indicated earlier, the purpose of this article is to explore the influence of cultural and familial value orientations on battered women’s identity, agency, and decision to leave or stay in abusive conjugal relationship in Ghana.

Method

As mentioned earlier, the present study is inspired by a form of discourse analysis that has its foundation in social psychology, sometimes referred to as discourse analysis in social psychology (DASP; Wood & Kroger, 2000). The choice of discourse analysis as a persuasive approach for investigating the accounts of victims of spousal abuse in Ghana is its fundamental principle that discourses of people represent their inner lives and emerge out of social, cultural, and historical contexts because participants in a social interaction are both producers and products of culture within their social environment (Adjei, 2013).

Location and Relevant Demographics of Participants

The rural sites for this study were in the Ashanti region while the urban sites were suburbs in Kumasi (Ashanti region) and the capital Accra (the greater Accra region) of Ghana. Total number of participants was 16 victims of husband-to-wife abuse with age ranging from 24 to 60 and an average of 4 to 22 years of marriage. Majority of participants (n = 11) were Akans (the largest ethnic group in Ghana), while the remaining were Kusasi (n = 1), Ga-Adangbe (n = 1), Ewe (n = 1), and unknown (n = 2). They were mostly farmers (n = 6), petty traders (n = 6), and hairdressers (n = 4). While Accra and Kumasi, the urban sites are characterized by heterogeneity, weakened family bond, and traditional values due mainly to urbanization and social change (Nukunya, 2003), the rural areas of Ghana largely consists of indigenous homogeneous ethnic group with deeply entrenched traditional norms and values.

Design and Procedure

The empirical material analyzed in this study was obtained through semi-structured focus group discussions (FGDs) and in-depth individual interviews conducted with 16 victims of wife-abuse in Ghana for a period of 7 months. I sampled participants through home and community visits, contact with DOVVSU and other snowballing contacts provided by participants who had come to DOVVSU to seek help. DOVVSU is a specialized unit of Ghana Police Service responsible for preventing crimes against women and children, and to particularly provide them with protection from domestic violence. The unit was created by an Act of Parliament, Act 732, in 2007. It was formerly Women and Juvenile Unit (WAJU) established in 1998 (Amoakohene, 2004). Contact with DOVVSU and community leaders who settle cases of marital abuse ensured that participants with right attributes for the study were sampled. The inclusion criterion was women with (self-reported) experiences of physical and/or sexual abuse from current or past marital partner. Generally, it is believed that no one knows more about abuse than those who experience it (DeKeseredy & Dragiewicz, 2007) and regardless of how one explains violence in intimate relationships, the perspectives one offers may remain irrelevant to those who actually experience it (DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997). Other subtler forms of abuse (e.g., psychological, emotional) was excluded because they might not be regarded by participants in this context as abuse, especially in view of the fact that some men and women in Ghana believe it is justifiable to physically beat a wife.

For purposes of confidentiality, analysis, and reporting, I adopted codes for FGD participants to reflect their status, interview site, and ordinal position. For example, RV1 and UV1 represented rural victim number one and urban victim number one respectively. All interviews and discussions were conducted in Twi, the most widely spoken Ghanaian language belonging to the Akans. The use of Twi facilitated the study in two useful ways: first, it relatively created a power balance between the researcher (a native speaker of Twi) and the participants on one hand, and among participants on another. There is a relationship between language and power in Ghana; people who speak English, particularly in the rural areas, are mostly considered more powerful because they are regarded as belonging to the elite class in the Ghanaian society. Second, Twi enabled respondents to express themselves with some degree of flexibility and finesse, which enhanced the credibility of the data. The FGD lasted between 45 and 60 min, whereas individual interviews lasted between 25 and 35 min. Participants signed written consent forms to indicate their voluntary participation. The interviews were held at convenient locations selected by participants. All FGDs and individual interviews were audio-recorded with the consent of participants and later transcribed word-for-word. Additional non-participatory observation of customary and church or ordinance marriage and marital dispute arbitration were conducted, as well as field notes (including information on facial and other body gestures) taken by the researcher to augment the interview data.

Data Analysis

The overall analysis of the data in the present study reflected my primary concern, that is, exploring the influence of cultural and familial value orientations on battered women’s identity, agency, and decision to leave or stay in abusive conjugal relationship in Ghana. I carefully listened to all interview recordings (in Twi) with intermittent back and forth movement to check and recheck for data accuracy, confirmability, and dependability (Easton, McComish, & Greenberg, 2000). I then translated and transcribed greater part of the interviews from Twi into English for purposes of conceptual formulations and reporting. I iteratively read the transcribed data to have an intimate and interpretive familiarity with the data set. Transcripts were then imported into NVivo 10 for inclusive coding, that is, searching and grouping of extracts related to the study aim (Potter, 2003. Different words or phrases that were repeatedly used and pointed to the regularity and patterns of participants’ experiences of spousal abuse were assigned to data corpus. For example, participants’ agentive constructions and familial embeddedness, relative to stay or leave decisions, were identified, coded, and mapped for further analysis and formulations. Selection of extracts for analysis then became focused based on the context of what was said, how participants said it, and why they may have said it. Particular attention was paid to what was said by participants, their choice of words and expressions, voice tone, as well as facial and other bodily gestures—they all reflect discursive practices embedded in participants’ cultural milieu (Potter & Wetherell, 2001). Instances of discourses on agency, identity, and stay or leave decisions from the data crystallized into different categorizations and naturally emerged patterns and concepts were formulated and interpreted in view of contextual features such as history, values, beliefs, and culture. Beyond the linguistic realm of discursive analysis and negotiation of meaning in here-and-now interactions, I also attended to the wider socio-cultural meanings of marriage embedded in the context of Ghana. Extracts from interview transcripts alongside interpretations that have been made of them are presented below as findings. These selected extracts represent the experiences of interviewed participants in the study.

Trustworthiness of the Study

Research that employs discourse analysis should fundamentally make its claims accountable to the detail of the empirical materials, and the empirical materials should be presented in a form that allows readers to make their own judgments (Potter, 2003). Presentation of “raw data” or empirical materials in the present study will enable readers to assess both participants’ orientation to the phenomenon of interest (battered women’s entrapment and agency) as well as the researcher’s interpretations made of them. This analytical approach offers a degree of public quality control. Again, selected extracts and my interpretations of them were presented to three other research colleagues to engage with and subject the data to thorough and careful evaluations in relation to the overall aim of the study. Discussions from meetings I had with them provided valuable insights and credibility to the analytical processes of data as it helped in developing intersubjective consensus on both selected data and their interpretations.

Finally, data collected from individual and group interviews as well as informal observations provide a confluence of evidence that breeds data credibility and integrity. Data from FGDs were enriched with personal interviews to allow for triangulation of issues and participants’ discursive accounts. During analysis, I compared and examined data both within and across interview sites (rural and urban) and interview procedures (FGD and individual level) to ensure confirmation of responses and meanings within interview procedure and site, and between interview procedure and site. This provides precision, credibility, and trustworthiness of the current findings.

Findings

From the accounts of participants in the present study, two relevant discursive patterns were identified as framing the entrapment of victims of spousal abuse in Ghana: (a) staying to protect family image and (b) staying or leaving as a joint product of negotiated agency. In the following sections, I first present the relationship between family identity and entrapment of victims, followed by negotiated agency of victims under three sub themes: (a) positioning and being positioned: the agency dilemma of victims, (b) balancing agency with social or family embeddedness, and (c) asserting personal agency and resisting dominant discourses.

Discursive Pattern 1: Staying in Abusive Marriage as an Implicit Obligation to Preserve and Protect Family Image

As mentioned in the background, when a family in Ghana has a bad reputation for divorce— when marriages involving its daughters mostly end in divorce—it is often construed as bad omen that threatens the identity and social image of the family, including jeopardizing the expectations of its members for future marriage opportunities. Based on these familiar normative discourses, victims in the study explained that they orient toward family identity and continue to stay in abusive marital relationship to preserve the social identity of their family.

They [the family] always tell me that after so many years of marriage why leave your marriage now [ . . . ] I think they advised me against divorce because it might also affect the family name. No family wants people to say that their daughters do not succeed in marriage, I think that will be a bad image for the family so I had to stay. (Rural victim 4, FGD)

The quote highlights the victim’s enmeshment in the extended family and her apparent lack of self-other differentiation. The victim appears to position family identity as a key component of her self-concept; that is, she would rather suffer abuse than bring the family image into disrepute. She draws on the “divorce-family name” interpretative repertoire to explain why the family “advised [her] against divorce” and why she “had to stay.” The victim discursively rationalizes the position of the family; “No family wants people to say that their daughters do not succeed in marriage,” and simultaneously justifies her decision to stay by specifying the need to protect and preserve the family identity; “I think that will be a bad image for the family so I had to stay.” She situates the “advice” or suggestion by the family and her apparent acquiescent behavior in dominant discursive practices and embedded meaning systems of marriage in the Ghanaian community. In the quote above, dishonor to “family name” is not located in the act of violence against women in marriage, but in the act of divorce or unsuccessful marriage of women of a given family. It thus appears that both the family and its members, particularly women, have an implicit moral obligation to ensure that they (women) “succeed in marriage” to accord the family a good social image.

The victim’s decision to stay highlights the primacy of her family identity and the important role of family relationship and values to the expression of personal identity. Family values may, through social discourses and suggestions, become integrated into the personal value system of women through constructive internalization, such that when abuse occurs, both victims and their extended family of orientation may prefer peaceful intervention to divorce. It is important to mention that family values and identity in Ghana, as the quote above suggests, are not expressly enforced on its members—they are negotiated (I will return to agency negotiation in the next section) and co-constructed by individual members of the family through social suggestions in a form of “advice.” Familial values and collective meaning systems operate and interact with human agency or personal meaning systems to constructively produce specific meanings and actions that regulate the conduct of battered women in abusive marriages in Ghana.

Participants’ discourses however showed that in many respects, stay or leave decisions of battered women in Ghana may be tied to the extended family. For instance, the following victim emphasizes how stay or leave decisions largely depend on expressed support of the family: “I discussed the possibility of divorce with my family when my husband’s violent behavior was unbearable but they all advised against it saying it does not cast a good image for me and the family” (Rural victim, Personal interview). The quote indicates the pre-eminent role that the extended family plays in negotiating stay or leave decisions. The general indifference of the extended family to divorce appears to stem from the belief that divorce “does not cast a good image” for a woman and her family of orientation. Consequently, victims of spousal abuse may remain in abusive relationships partly due to the perception that women and their families of orientation may be shamed and stigmatized if their daughters are known to be consistently subject to divorce in the Ghanaian community.

Discursive Pattern 2: Staying or Leaving Abusive Relationship as a Joint Product of Negotiated Agency

This section describes, under three subheadings, how stay or leave decisions of battered women are negotiated in the context of familial and cultural value orientations.

Positioning and being positioned: The agency dilemma of victims

Discourses of participants revealed that though abuse is experienced by individual women, stay or leave decisions are not psychologically given to or determined by affected victims alone, rather, they involve structurally negotiated actions between individual victims and their extended families of orientation.

I don’t think I will feel ashamed [for leaving him]. Of course, people will always talk about me but I will not mind, after all it is my life not theirs. But the problem is that I cannot take this decision alone, I have to consult with my family because I didn’t give myself into marriage; they did. (Rural victim 5, FGD)

The quote indicates a discursive shift of agency from positioning to being positioned. The victim positions herself as capable of making independent decisions while simultaneously seeing her actions and choices as given to or influenced by the extended family. The victim’s belief in her personal influence to assert her decision to leave abusive relationship, that is, “I will not mind, after all it is my life not theirs,” show the discursive construction of herself as highly agentive who comes across as in control and self-determined. However, she shifts the focus from highly agentive or personal influence to less agentive; “I didn’t give myself into marriage; they [the extended family] did.” In the light of her opening comment; “I don’t think I will feel ashamed [for leaving him],” the victim discursively disclaims her agentive position and personal responsibility for staying in abusive relationship by referring to a higher authority of the extended family to fend off potential attribution of acquiescence or passivity. By this discursive shift, the victim views the self and her action potential (stay decision) as positioned by the extended family and thus loses her agency to become less influential, powerful, and accountable or responsible for her entrapment.

In the midst of the victim’s agency dilemma (Bamberg, 2010)—that is, the apparent contradiction between the victim as positioning herself as agent, and her being positioned as a victim or object of socio-cultural or familial constraints—lies a negotiated agency. Rather than a personally given activity, the victim positions her stay or leave decision as something that has to be negotiated with the family and contextualized others. As indicated earlier, divorce in Ghana involves traditional structures and processes through which the party asking for divorce must navigate. By indicating her willingness “to consult with her family,” the victim seems to be mobilizing the familiar repertoire of customary consultations and structural negotiations that usually characterize divorce in Ghana. She thus appears to position the activity of divorce as not an individual property based on personal agency but a collective decision, which emerges in specific interactional context of personal beliefs of women and the value system of their extended family of orientation. In this view, “personal” activity of divorce, even in the face of abuse or personal pain, is depersonalized in the above quote to become a joint and negotiated activity (agency) between individual victims of abuse and the extended family.

In terms of stay or leave decisions, battered women in Ghana cannot function effectively in judgment and choice without prior negotiations with the extended family. Their agency is not constituted by individual psychological states or motives, but instead, agency is a property of victims who exercise it in a given relational context, and partly constituted by familial relationships and identities. It thus becomes a structural “problem” for victims of spousal abuse in Ghana to leave abusive partners because such “decisions cannot be taken alone” in free will—it involves interpersonal-consensus that takes into account personal meaning systems of individual victims and collective value orientations of the extended family in Ghana. In this view, battered women’s entrapment is positioned as a “decision” rather than a choice—implying that victims may not have many options to freely choose from—and indicating ways by which familial values shape and constrain battered women’s agency in Ghana.

Balancing agency with social or family embeddedness

Participants’ discourses also indicated that victims’ personally initiated actions to obtain necessary external or public help may be truncated by the towering influence of the extended family. According to these discourses, prior negotiation may be required to assert personal agentive positions or report incidents of abuse to public authorities:

[ . . . ] In my own case for example, I couldn’t take his behavior any longer and reported him to the police because I thought that might change things for the better. But the family advised me to withdraw the case and said I should avoid reporting every single incident to the police. I listened to them and withdrew. (Urban victim 4, FGD)

The quote above presents the challenge for battered women in Ghana to balance agency with social embeddedness and pre-existing relational force of the extended family. The victim constructs her agency, her purposefully initiated action aimed at “changing things for the better,” as both constituted by self and constrained by the extended family. While asserting her sense of self and agency without recourse to the family, an indication of person-to-world direction of agency, the victim also acquiesces to and aligns herself with her extended family and its moral values, suggesting a world-to-person direction of control. The quote indicates how battered women in Ghana resist abuse in ways that illustrate the co-existence of agency and relational embeddedness. The victim orients toward consensus formulation; “I listened to them and withdrew,” by modifying her personal intentions and being responsive to the expectations and demands of the extended family. In this view, personhood is discursively positioned as belonging to a shared social category (family) in which there is effectively no psychological separation between the self of the victim and her family of orientation. She thus constructs her sense of agency in relation to the meaningfulness of the relationship between the self and the extended family. Rather than exercising personal influence, it is suggestive in the above quote that victims exercise agency by social adjustment or conforming to norms of the extended family.

As evident, help seeking behavior of victims may require negotiation through the extended family in which victims are embedded. The exercise of personal resilience by victims, without prior negotiations, may be interfered with (though the family may consider such action as a duty rather than interference) and constrained by the value orientations of the extended family. The suggestion “to withdraw the case and . . . avoid reporting every single incident to the police,” draws on culturally resonant discursive repertoire in Ghana that regards marital conflicts as “private” and not be publicized. For example, “That is very true [ . . . ] Even if you complain, people will tell you that you don’t have to wash your dirty linen in public; marital matters must remain in the bedroom and so many things [ . . . ]” (Rural victim 6, FGD). The central goal of the expression; “you don’t have to wash your dirty linen in public” is to culturally frame wife abuse as a “private matter” that should not be publicly discussed with “strangers” (see Ofei-Aboagye, 1994). The metaphor of “dirty linen” effectively constructs unpleasant aspects of marriage, including abuse, as matters that should not be brought to public arenas because such acts traditionally amount to “washing” or exposing one’s filthy garment in public. Women who step out of convention to report spousal conflicts to the police may be condemned and stigmatized for having taken marital issue outside the sphere of the matrimonial home. By drawing on this interpretative repertoire, the victim situates her seeming consent to the demand by the family “to withdraw the reported case” (urban victim 4 above), and avoid taking similar action in future, in specific meaning system of marriage in Ghana. The victim’s apparent lack of agency could thus be understood within relational conditions of meaning embedded in the Ghanaian society.

Asserting personal agency and resisting dominant discourses

Some victims also pointed out that the value orientation and dominant discourses of the extended family may be contested by self-conscious actions of victims. For example,

The family provides support for settlement but not for divorce [. . .] if I insist on leaving him maybe they can’t do anything except to advise me about possible consequences of divorce. Generally they will not support me in terms of asking me to leave my husband because of an abuse. (Rural victim, Individual Interview)

As evident in the quote, the value orientations of the family may be contested by victims to reassert personal control. The victim positions stay or leave decisions as dependent on her agentive role, whereas positioning familial role as less influential. Though the victim acknowledges that the value orientation of the family is toward “settlement of disputes [and] not divorce,” the construction of herself as highly agentive and in control suggests how normative beliefs of the family may be negotiated in the interest of victims. The quote highlights the view that if battered women personally “insist on leaving” abusive relationships, the extended family “cannot” bind them to it except to exercise its implicit moral responsibility of proffering “advice about possible consequences of divorce.”

Discourses such as “if I insist on leaving him maybe they [the extended family] can’t do anything” provide traces of victims’ counteraction and resistance to established norms of society and further give indication of how stay or leave actions may be contingent on individual resolve and personal meaning systems. This agentive positioning demonstrates that stay or leave decisions may not be necessarily pre-determined by unconscious adjustment of personal agency to normative possibilities and value beliefs of the extended family but also, dependent on victims’ conditional acceptance of negotiated terms. Clearly, the response of entrapped victims of spousal abuse in Ghana is complex and dynamic. While they act self-consciously in ways that demonstrate their agency and self-determining capacity to change their experiences of abuse, their actions are also circumscribed by familial values and identities. It thus appears that a decision to terminate an unsatisfying marital union in Ghana is not personal, it is a socially negotiated decision that takes into account the expectations and contributions of the extended family. How well battered women are able to negotiate their pursuit of personal goals in marriage and relational commitments may depend on both self-chosen and familial influences.

Discussion

Victims of spousal abuse in Ghana face several structural challenges that impede the exercise of self-influence and personal agency. This study examined family and relational ties in terms of their effects on battered women’s identity and agency in negotiating stay or leave decisions. Discursive accounts of victims revealed that experience of spousal abuse is personal but behavioral decisions of victims are relationally expressed to reflect family identity. Battered women in Ghana situate the extended family as an extension of their individual self, which specifies values, goals, and norms of marital life and guides their interface with the surrounding world. Though the extended family does not enforce its identity and values on its members, family identity is apparently primary to personal identities of battered women in Ghana. The relationship between women and their family of orientation in Ghana goes beyond ordinary relational exchanges between family members in here-and-now social interactions. The family appears to be the established template against which women derive and articulate personal identities and values. The fact is that a person’s choice in life is an extension of his or her personal identity but it may be impossible to form a personal identity without a collective identity to serve as a reference point (Taylor, Bougie, & Caouette, 2003). Generally, marriage involves two principal participants who agree to come together as one personality to forge a common future. However, in Ghana, neither the husband nor the wife entirely leaves his or her “consanguine family” to form a merged household on the Western legal conception or the biblical understanding that the two shall become one (K. O. Adinkrah, 1980).

Although family elders in Ghana have a moral responsibility to ensure that their daughters succeed in marriage to accord the family honor and prestige, its members, particularly women, have equal reciprocal duties and responsibilities to preserve the social identity of the family and to bring good omen to future brides in the family. In line with positioning theory and associated rights and obligations connected to actors in a given context (Harré & Moghaddam, 2003), battered women’s discursive orientation to family identity could be understood as bounded up by culturally resonant and contextual repertoire of meaningful acts in the extended family in Ghana in an unfolding episode of which they form part. In view of this, victims acquiesce to and align with the value orientation of the family to stay in abusive marriages in fulfillment of implicit moral obligations to the family, the collective social unit that provides direction and discipline to personal identities, social and moral order of its members. Experience of the self as relationally connected to others in Ghana is not a value belief but an ontological belief—the self is experienced as inherently connected to a relational order as a default state of being (Adams & Dzokoto, 2003). The apparent acquiescent behavior of victims to belief systems of their extended family emphasizes the view that personal identity of women in Ghana is derived from and connected to the collective identity of the family and/or community (Bowman, 2003). Women’s sense of identity and dignity appears to be inextricably connected to their general attitude toward the extended family and community, and their self-respect comes from being members of the family (Adjei, 2015). Thus, stay or leave decisions of victims are regulated by mutually upheld familial norms and shared collective worldview within the cultural ecology of Ghana. The perception of the self as an identical exemplar of a woman’s family of orientation in Ghana, coupled with the implicit moral demand to defend and protect this identity has profound implications for whether or not victims of spousal abuse leave abusive conjugal union. To understand how battered women become entrapped in abusive marital unions in Ghana, it may be necessary to take into consideration the structural dynamics of marriage in Ghana and to pay close attention to the web of relational and familial influences in which the self is enmeshed.

Consistent with the primacy of family identity, agentive positioning of victims of spousal abuse in Ghana reflects their experiences of embedded interdependence. Stay or leave decisions of battered women in Ghana mirror a structurally negotiated agency, influenced but not determined by value orientations of the extended family. In negotiating their agency in decisions to stay or leave, battered women in Ghana are viewed as simultaneously determined or positioned and determining or positioning subjects. They are situated between levels of responsibility toward their extended family or norms of marriage and personal agentive commitments, negotiation of which results in their becoming ideal women in society. The negotiated sense of agency of victims departs from the all-agent or all-victim conceptual dichotomy of agency, where agency and victimization are each known by the absence of the other; that is, a person is either an agent if he or she is not a victim and a victim if he or she is not an agent (Mahoney, 1994). Rather than perceived as helpless victims, abused women in Ghana could be seen as those who act in ways that illustrate the co-existence of agency and entrapment.

Human beings, whether they are in subordinate or dominant positions, do act assertively, but they act within historically produced social relations (Semaan, 2004). Given the mainstream view that humans are supposed to be active subjects (agents), the apparent acquiescent behavior of victims and their continued stay in abusive conjugal relationships in Ghana, without critical reflection of the context, could be construed as lack of agency. The agency of abused women, as this study has shown, reflects their social embeddedness and stay or leave decisions are socioculturally situated and structurally mediated. In this view, stay or leave decisions may be a product of a joint negotiation between individual victims and their families of orientation—a situation which reflects conjoint form of agency—in which divorce is jointly negotiated with other contextualized others to promote an experience of embedded interdependence. Thus, agency of battered women in Ghana cannot be viewed as polar opposites but it should be understood as part of a dialectic that is full of contradictions and tensions (Semaan, 2004). A persistent one-sided focus on victimization of women may leave little conceptual space for discovering the subtle and ambivalent ways by which women may be negotiating differential power relations and structural constraints (Davis, 1983).

The view of negotiated agency resonates with the embedded meaning systems of marriage and the family in Ghana. For example, it is the family of a woman that traditionally gives its daughter in marriage, the same reason for which bride price is paid by a prospective suitor and his family to a bride’s family. The process of marriage and divorce in Ghana is based on intersubjectively shared belief systems and value orientations manifested through negotiations, concessions, and compromises made by individuals and the family. Thus, judging the stay or leave behavior of victims in Ghana in terms of individual psychological dispositions (e.g., personality traits, self-determination, or self-efficacy), without a corresponding investigation of the socio-cultural norms that ground it, might result in a dispositional attribution bias. Such attribution may have an unintended implication that victims of spousal abuse in Ghana are impervious to situational factors or that they are expected to ignore the socio-cultural constraints that impact on personal behavior and choices.

The notion of womanhood and its related concepts in African feminist scholarship attempts to establish a kind of unity and collective strength (i.e., agency) among African women. It shifts the focus away from individualist drive or agency and rather emphasizes and recognizes agency within a collectivity and the important place and contribution of all those who constitute the collectivity such as kinship, ethnic groupings, and the family (Morrell & Ouzgane, 2005). An uncritical acknowledgment of the self as the dynamic center of its universe will reduce entrapment of victims of partner abuse in Ghana to individual level of analysis rather than structural explanations. Rather than being unhealthy or treated as second-best ways of being, negotiated agency may be seen as an adaptive process (see Adams et al., 2012), in which victims’ coordination of action and working together with the extended family serves as a motivational social structure for divorce-prevention in Ghana. Through socialization or what Wetherell (2003) calls “discursive apprenticeship” of people, the “external” and acceptable normative discourses of marriage become internalized and form part of the discursive “habitus” or “cultural capital” available to and deployed by women in social interactions (Bourdieu, 1992). An understanding of gender relations in Ghana as personally constructed through human creativity as well as through patterns of social organization in the community and the extended family is central to understanding entrapped women’s agency. Thus, instead of asking why battered women remain in abusive marriages, we should possibly ask what social and structural factors constrain them from leaving (Bograd, 1988).

Implications for Abuse Prevention and Future Research

Most advocacy campaigns in Ghana are victim-based, targeted at empowering individual victims to seek appropriate legal help. Much as this may be a necessary step, it may only serve to scratch the surface of the problem of spousal abuse. Rather than “waiting mode” campaigns that attempt to find solution after the fact, proactive- and preventive-focused campaigns that advocate for cultural and structural changes and tackle the very root cause of marital conflicts in Ghana is hereby suggested. Preventive and deliberate community-based initiatives should look at the phenomenon of wife-abuse in Ghana beyond immediate victims to include families and the larger communities in which victims are embedded. Research on battered women’s agency and stay or leave decisions need to be informed by contextual and familial possibilities, and focus on the multiple and complex ways by which women negotiate and respond to partner abuse.

Conclusion

Women’s responses to spousal abuse in Ghana are complex and dynamic. There are structural challenges to be navigated by victims despite their individuality and personal aspirations. Battered women’s expression of agency and personal identities in Ghana is mediated by cultural, structural, and contextual possibilities. Collective meaning systems and identity of the extended family in Ghana operate and interact with battered women’s agency and personal meaning systems to influence their entrapment in violent relationships. The value orientation of the family—its general preference for divorce prevention to preserve its social reputation appears to take psychological precedence over personal identities of victims. Battered women orient toward family values and identity in terms of negotiating their agency in decisions to stay or leave abusive marriages in Ghana. Their actions reflect both personal value systems and relational conditions of meanings embedded in the family and community. Thus, stay or leave decisions and actions in abusive relationship in Ghana do not entirely lie with victims or their psychological states or motives but involve coordinated actions between women and their extended family. Rather than conceive battered women’s entrapment as a sign of passivity, we must understand the choices women make in abusive marriages in Ghana as a reflection of negotiated agency and social embeddedness.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all participants who spent their time to talk about their personal and difficult experiences of spousal abuse.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Stephen Baffour Adjei, MPhil, is a PhD fellow at the Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research explores the psychosocial, cultural, and structural accounts of spousal abuse in Ghana, West Africa.

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