“Correcting an Erring Wife Is Normal”: Moral Discourses of Spousal Violence in Ghana

Abstract

This study draws insights from discursive psychology to explore moral discourses of spousal violence in Ghana. In particular, it investigates how sociocultural norms and practices are invoked in talk of perpetrators and victims as moral warrants for husband-to-wife abuse in Ghana. Semi-structured focus group and personal interviews were conducted with a total of 40 participants: 16 victims, 16 perpetrators, and eight key informants from rural and urban Ghana. Participants’ discursive accounts suggest that husbands have implicit moral right and obligation to punish their wives for disobedience and other infractions against male authority in marriage. Both perpetrators and victims build their talk around familiar normative discourses and practices that provide tacit support for spousal violence in Ghana. While perpetrators mobilize culturally resonant and normative repertoires to justify abuse, blame their victims, and manage their moral accountability; victims position husband-to-wife abuse as normal, legitimate, disciplinary, and corrective. These moral discourses of spousal violence apparently serve to relieve perpetrators of moral agency; prime battered women to accept abuse; and devastate their agency to leave abusive marital relationships. The findings contribute to our understanding of how cultural and social norms of spousal violence are morally constituted, reproduced, and sustained in talk of perpetrators, victims, and other key members of society.

Keywords

spousal violence spousal abuse IPV moral discourse moral accountability sociocultural norms discursive psychology Ghana

Spousal violence is an endemic social phenomenon that resonates in many societies. The social science has seen a burgeoning number of studies in recent times aimed at unraveling the paradox of violence between loved partners in a dyadic intimate relationship. It is estimated that as high as 38% of all femicidal killings occur in intimate relationships (World Health Organization [WHO], 2013). The WHO’s (2013) global report further indicates that Africa has the highest prevalence of physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) with approximately 37% of ever-partnered women having experienced physical and/or sexual violence at some point in their lives. Research in Africa reports that about 50% of all ever-married women in Zambia, 46% in Uganda, 60% in Tanzania, 42% in Kenya, and 81% in Nigeria have experienced one form of violence or the other in conjugal relationships (Heise, Ellsberg, & Gottemoeller, 1999; Kishor & Johnson, 2004). A 1998 survey on domestic violence in Ghana indicated that one in three women had been physically abused by a current or former partner (Coker-Appiah & Cusack, 1999). The Women and Juvenile Unit (WAJU) of the Ghana Police Service, now Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU), recorded 1,869 incidents of spousal battering between January 1999 and December 2002 in Ghana (Amoakohene, 2004). In 2009 and 2010, DOVVSU recorded 14,428 and 12,316 cases of abuse against women, respectively (GhanaWeb, 2011). The International Federation of Women Lawyers—Ghana (FIDA; 2011) reported 15,495 cases of spousal abuse in Ghana in 2011.

Cultural and social norms—rules or expectations of behavior within a given cultural and social context—can encourage IPV (WHO, 2009). For example, sociocultural norms have been noted to prime women in Africa to accept their subordinate position to their husbands, giving men the right to punish wives if they disobey them in marriage (Lawoko, 2008). Fiske and Rai (2015) argue that most violence is morally motivated in the sense that the person doing the violence subjectively believes that what he or she is doing is right. Different cultures choose different moral principles to regulate behavior depending on ideology and religion (Graham & Haidt, 2010) and whether an action (such as spousal violence) is considered right or wrong depends largely on distinct motives for social relationship (Rai & Fiske, 2011). Moral judgments of perpetrators of violence are largely consistent with the sentiments and judgments of their cultural communities (Fiske & Rai, 2015), and violence in all forms and manifestations (including spousal violence) requires justifications and institutional or personal discourses that reduce the inhibitions against violence and rationalize its conduct (Lamnek, 2003). A person may deploy moral language to justify violence and appeal to others in a specific cultural context in such a way that the justification reveals the moral standards of the context or those to whom he or she appeals (see Fiske & Rai, 2015).

Despite existing ecological perspectives on IPV, there are calls for research approaches to the study of men’s abuse of women that focus on identifying individual perceptions and attitudes to further integrate broader social and cultural issues (Lea, 2007; Yllo & Bograd, 1988). This call is important because the mundane practices through which familiar “meanings become sedimented, and everyday relations of power” in intimate relationships are “produced and become taken for granted” remain largely unexplored (LeCouteur & Oxlad, 2011, p. 6). A few discursive works have shown how men use self-control as a discursive device to manage accountability for violence in intimate relationships (Walker & Goodman, 2017), and how men deploy a range of discursive devices to justify, camouflage, and maintain their dominance in intimate relationships (Adams, Towns, & Gavey, 1995) and to excuse aggressors, blame victims, define aggression, and render the intimate nature of aggression invisible (Lloyd & Emery, 2000). Others have focused on how men routinely invoke membership categorization and normative expectations in talk as moral warrants of violence toward their female partners (LeCouteur & Oxlad, 2011). While these few discursive studies in Western societies investigate morality and accountability management in men’s talk about their abused partners, there is a general dearth of research on moral discourses of spousal violence in African contexts. A few studies that report on the impact of social norms on spousal violence in Africa do not account for the ways in which these norms are morally constituted, reproduced, and sustained in talk of perpetrators and victims. The empirical focus of this study is to fill this void to produce a comprehensive cross-cultural understanding of the subject. This article further extends the focus of discursive work on abusive men’s moral talk to include moral accounts of perpetrators (men), victims (women), and key informants in the Ghanaian cultural context.

Morality, Social Norms, and Spousal Violence in Ghana

Morality has specific meanings in particular cultural contexts and within the African worldview, morality is not primarily justice morality that tends to focus on individual rights; neither is moral rules given in Kantian categorical imperatives and strict absolutes of right and wrong as the case in the West (Verhoef & Michel, 1997). Morality in Ghanaian (African) society is intrinsically social which emerges from and is anchored in people’s beliefs about right and wrong behavior (Gyekye, 1996). Moral assessment of behavior in Africa takes into account variables such as who did what to whom, under what circumstances, and what were the consequences? (Verhoef & Michel, 1997). Thus, morality in traditional African societies reflects the dynamics of social positions or status hierarchy, and moral expectation of the community— what the community expects of a person— reflects one’s status in the community. Morality in Ghana is normative, rooted in what the group (community) specifies as acceptable more than what individual thinks (Osafo, 2012).

Apparently, the morality of spousal violence—whether husband-to-wife abuse is right or wrong—is shaped by normative and moral discourses within a given cultural context. For example, wife beating in Ghana may be considered by the extended family as “little” or “insignificant” that should not merit mention (Ofei-Aboagye, 1994). Nukunya (2003) notes that wife beating is quite a common form of punishing women in many societies in Ghana and may occur in the event of a woman’s adultery, her failure to cook for the husband on time, and anything the man considers to merit such a treatment. There is a general expectation that it is a husband’s right and duty to secure the Ghanaian culture and “to secure the obedience and fidelity of a wife by disciplining her if the ‘need’ arises” (Ofei-Aboagye, 1994, p. 931, emphasis in original). Uxoricide (wife killing) is sometimes portrayed as justified by Ghanaian media, through cultural framing of men’s rights and privileges, particularly those related to their roles as family heads and primary providers (Adomako-Ampofo & Boateng, 2007). Out of 50 women interviewed, Ofei-Aboagye (1994) reported that majority of them regarded “some” beating from a husband (e.g., beating a wife in private; beating which does not leave a scar or deformity; or if beating is just a slap or two) as acceptable and disciplinary because it does not transcend the norm.

Most recently, the United Nation (UN) Women’s 2011/2012 report indicates that more than 40% of Ghanaians think that it is justifiable for a man to beat his wife (UN Women, 2011). According to Ghana Statistical Service (GSS; 2011), 60% of women and 36% of men believe that it is justifiable for husbands to beat their wives in Ghana, with an acceptance rate of 70% and 51% for rural and urban women, respectively. Although research in Ghana suggests that women who justify wife beating have higher odds of experiencing physical and sexual violence (Tenkorang, Owusu, Yeboah, & Bannerman, 2013), discourses both within and outside the family in Ghana suggest that when a woman is physically and/or sexually abused, it is not too unusual to warrant divorce (Adjei, 2017). The objective of this study is to examine how perpetrators and victims draw upon normative repertoires to morally account for and construct violence in marital relationships in Ghana.

Discursive Psychology

Discursive psychology involves the application of ideas from discourse analysis to the study of social phenomena in psychology (Potter, 2003). It focuses on the action orientation of talk (Edwards & Potter, 1992); that is, how participants in social interactions use discursive resources to achieve a certain effect (Adjei, 2013; Willig, 2013). It has been pointed out that how people speak about the world cannot be separated from their understanding of the world (Wetherell & Potter, 1992), and thus discursive psychologists analyze discourse as a social practice of mundane life activities rather than treating it as a result of mental processes (te Molder & Potter, 2005). Discursive process affords specific positions for speaking subjects, and thus allows analysts to investigate the cultural repertoire of discourses available to speakers in a given interactional social context (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008). Discursive psychologists 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).

The moral reprehensibility of conduct is not intrinsic or automatic but it is constituted through reasoning practices, “through accounts of events and behaviour, and thus in a general way through discourse” (Drew, 1998, p. 312). Accountability and issues of blame are usually performed not by overt attributions but through seemingly straightforward accounts of the “world-as-it-is” (Abell & Stokoe, 1999; Edwards & Potter, 1993). Discursive analysis seeks to understand human actions such as spousal violence in terms of its accountability (LeCouteur & Oxlad, 2011) and examines the complex ways by which people attempt to make their actions intelligible or to accomplish issues such as blame, responsibility, and minimization (Edwards & Potter, 1992). As mentioned, this study utilizes insights from discursive psychology to examine how perpetrators, victims, and key informants habitually draw on embedded dominant cultural discourses and practices to provide moral warrants, attribute blame, diffuse responsibility, and manage personal accountability for spousal violence in Ghana.

Method

Location and Participants

The rural sites for this study were in the Ashanti region, whereas the urban sites were suburbs in Kumasi (Ashanti region) and the capital Accra (the greater Accra region) of Ghana. The total number of participants was 40 adults comprising 21 (52.5%) males and 19 (47.5%) females. This was made up of 16 (40%) perpetrators, 16 (40%) victims, and eight (20%) key informants (5 men and 3 women). The ages of victims and perpetrators ranged from 24 to 60 with between four and 22 years of marriage, whereas the ages of key informants ranged from 35 to 70. The majority of the participants (n = 31) were Akans (the largest ethnic group in Ghana), and the remaining were Ewes (n = 4), Ga-Adangbe (n = 1), Dagomba (n = 1), and unknown (n = 3). More than 80% of the participants were Christians (n = 33), and the rest were Muslims (n = 4) and unknown (n = 3). Most of the victims and perpetrators were farmers (n = 11), and the rest were petty traders (n = 7), commercial drivers (n = 6), hairdressers (n = 4), and teachers (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 consist of indigenous homogeneous ethnic group with deeply entrenched traditional norms and values.

Design and Procedure

The data for the present study were obtained through semi-structured focus group discussions (FGDs) and in-depth individual interviews conducted with 40 participants in Ghana over a period of 7 months, beginning from January to July 2014. I sampled participants through home and community visits, contact with DOVVSU, and other snowballing contacts. The purpose of the study was explained to DOVVSU and community/opinion leaders who usually settle cases of spousal abuse. They in turn assisted in identifying potential participants to seek for their consent. Additional recruitments were made through snowballing contacts provided by recruited participants. The 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 the WAJU established in 1998 (Amoakohene, 2004). Contact with the DOVVSU and community/opinion leaders ensured the recruitment of participants with richer knowledge and insights into the phenomenon of spousal violence.

I explained to all prospective participants the purpose of the study and informed them that their participation and/or answering of questions were voluntary. The inclusion criteria were women with (self-reported) experiences of physical and/or sexual abuse from current or past marital partner and men who had inflicted physical and/or sexual abuse on a current or past partner. As has been pointed out, no one knows more about abuse than the people 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). The selection of key informants was purposive based on explicit and thoughtful sampling of cases that were in line with the purpose of the study (Patton, 1999).

A semi-structured interview guide was used for both the FGDs and personal interviews. Interview topics included participants’ description of themselves and their marriage; their general views about husband-to-wife abuse; whether or not spousal violence was normal; abuse and divorce; and family interventions. In total, four FGDs were held, two each for rural and urban victims and perpetrators; six all perpetrators (men) group and six all victims (women) group in each case. Single-sex FGD allows discussants to share their views honestly without any inhibition from members of the group (Ellsberg & Heise, 2005). And again, putting males and females in a mixed group in a hierarchical society of Ghana would hinder women from freely expressing their views—they may have been overshadowed by their male counterparts because of power imbalances (Adjei, 2012). I conducted eight additional in-depth personal interviews with victims and perpetrators (different from FGD participants) from rural and urban settings to help triangulate issues and patterns. In order not to compromise the safety of victims, I selected only one member from the same marriage/household (either the husband or the wife) as participant in the study. To further shed light on institutional, traditional, and religious perspectives, eight key informants selected from religious and traditional groups, and government and non-governmental institutions were interviewed.

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 1 and Urban Victim Number 1, respectively. I conducted interviews in Twi, the most widely spoken Ghanaian language belonging to the Akans. However, two key informant interviews were conducted in English, the official language of Ghana and the language of instruction in Ghanaian schools, and for government business. The use of Twi created a relative power balance between the researcher (a native speaker of Twi) and the participants on one hand and among participants on the other. All FGDs lasted between 45 and 60 min, while individual interviews lasted between 25 and 35 min. Interviews were held at convenient locations selected by participants; audio-recorded with the consent of participants; and later transcribed into English by the researcher. Interview transcription emphasized readability rather than details of Jeffersonian notation that indicates pitch, prosody, timing, and pauses (LeCouteur & Oxlad, 2011; Wetherell, 1998).

Data Analysis

The analysis of data in the present study focused on the “action orientation of talk” (Edwards & Potter, 1992) and in particular, paid attention to participants’ talk as doing a moral work—“as providing a basis for evaluating the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of [spousal violence] whatever is being reported” (Drew, 1998, p. 295). I first of all carefully and iteratively listened to recordings (in Twi) with intermittent back and forth movement to check and recheck for data accuracy. I then translated and transcribed greater part of the interviews from Twi into English for purposes of conceptual formulations and reporting. However, I stayed in the source language (Twi) as long and as much as possible through repeated listening of audio recordings to avoid potential meaning losses and translation limitations. Transcripts were imported into NVivo 10 for inclusive coding; that is, searching and grouping of extracts related to the overall focus of the study (Potter, 2003). Different words or phrases that were repeatedly used and pointed to the regularity and patterns of participants’ discursive orientation were assigned to data chunk. For example, participants’ moral constructions of spousal violence, relative to embedded social norms and meanings, were identified, coded, and mapped for further analysis and formulations.

The 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. I paid particular attention to what was being said by participants, their choice of words and expressions, as well as voice tone as they all reflect discursive practices embedded in speakers’ cultural milieu (Potter & Wetherell, 2001). The assembled discursive patterns were further pruned down and/or merged. Instances of normative discourses and how they were routinely invoked by participants to talk about spousal violence crystallized into different categorizations. The emerged patterns and concepts were formulated and interpreted in view of participants’ contextual features such as history, values, beliefs, and culture. Selected extracts and my interpretations of them were presented to two 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. Beyond participants’ immediate discursive practices and negotiation of meaning in the interviews, the analysis also attended to the broader social and institutional contexts of gender relations in Ghana, as well as social consequences and background normative conceptions of morality that shape participants’ discursive deployments (McMullen, 2011; Wetherell, 1998). Examples of extracts from interview transcripts alongside interpretations that have been made of them are presented below. These examples were chosen because they provide clear and inclusive illustrations of the major ways in which participants deployed moral discourses to talk about spousal violence (see Walker & Goodman, 2017).

Findings

Accounts of participants interviewed in this study revealed four discursive patterns: (a) normative discourses of justification, (b) discourses of collective rationalization and social expectations, (c) “I married her”: discourses of entitlement, and (d) discourses of managing accountability, transferring blame, and gendering violence. These discursive patterns are not mutually exclusive.

Normative Discourses of Justification

Both victims and perpetrators draw on social norms to construct spousal violence as a standard practice and integral part of every marriage in Ghana. Their accounts seem to justify and disguise spousal violence in culturally benign discourses. For example, one perpetrator indicated that “I think it is not unusual for a man to slap or abuse his wife to teach her lessons if she goes wrong [ . . . ]” (Urban perpetrator, FGD). Here, husband-to-wife abuse is constructed as natural and morally necessary to “teach” a perceived erring wife some “lessons.” This quote highlights the normative belief that husbands in Ghana have an implicit moral obligation to discipline their wives by their own or societal set standard of wifely behavior. As evident, it is suggested that when violence is used by “a man” against his wife, it is “not unusual” because such violence serves moral and worthy social purposes. By mobilizing culturally resonant resources to systematically (re)formulate spousal violence in socially benign and acceptable discourses, the perpetrator succeeds in minimizing his sense of personal agency, thereby exonerating himself from moral self-sanctions. Rhetorically, this discursive practice provides a convenient tool for the perpetrator to mask his abusive conduct and confer upon it a morally worthy status of “teaching an erring wife some lessons.”

Discourses of victims also portrayed spousal violence as normal and justified: “I am not worried if my husband disciplines me once a while; correcting an erring wife is a normal practice. But when it is persistent and intense I get worried” (Rural victim, personal interview). As in the case of the perpetrator in the earlier quote, the victim also invokes similar cultural repertoire to construct husband-to-wife abuse as “normal” and “disciplinary,” especially if it is used in moderation to “correct an erring wife.” It can be argued that there appears to be a discursive consensus between the perpetrator and the victim in terms of husbands’ culturally assumed moral right to punish their erring wives, such that when abuse occurs, it is masked in sanitizing language, ostensibly absolving abusers from guilt and moral sanctions. The apparent discursive consensus about the morality of spousal violence is largely implicated in normative and shared sociocultural and moral meanings associated with marriage in Ghana. These discursive practices also mirror embedded gender practices in Ghana, and are reflective of perpetrators’ and victims’ intersubjectivity and communal forms of sense-making—the shared belief that the head of the conjugal family (husband) has a guaranteed moral right over his wife (see Adjei, 2016).

Discourses of Collective Rationalization and Social Expectations

Accounts of perpetrators and victims also draw on social expectations and collective beliefs associated with gender-appropriate behavior to justify spousal violence. For instance, “I am not the only man in Ghana who beats his wife for suspected or actual wifely infidelity. How would people even regard me if I don’t take action?” (Urban perpetrator, FGD). As implied, the perpetrator constructs spousal violence as a legitimate punishment for a perceived or actual adulterous wife by invoking embedded social norms and expectations. He apparently distances himself from his violent misconduct: “I am not the only man in Ghana who beats his wife” by diffusing personal responsibility in collective social expectations of male-appropriate behavior. The appeal to normative gendered expectations allows the perpetrator to downgrade his own blameworthiness in ways that manage his moral accountability and culpability for violence.

From his rhetorical question, “How would people even regard me if I don’t take action?” the perpetrator seems to imply that others expect him to act aggressively toward a perceived or real adulterous wife because others (will) act culturally appropriate aggressive scripts in similar situations. In the light of the rhetorical question, he suggests that infidelity-induced violence is morally appropriate because it is used to ward off potential negative social evaluations of members of the collective and/or to comply with community expectations. Rather than accepting moral responsibility, the perpetrator can be seen systematically attributing and deferring personal responsibility for violence to declarative social norms that implicitly endorse wife abuse. It can be said that this attribution strategy serves as social and moral inducements for the perpetrator to rationalize violence, obscure and diffuse personal responsibility in collective gendered beliefs.

Ironically, some victims also rationalized wife abuse and constructed it in terms of collective beliefs and social comparisons:

I think this [wife-beating] should not be grounds to leave him. I am not the only wife whose husband has beaten me; it’s common in our community and some men even kill their wives especially if a woman sleeps with another man. (Rural victim, FGD)

The victim in the quote above constructs wife abuse as “common” and not sufficient “grounds to leave” abusive relationship, and further contrasts wife beating with worse violations such as uxoricide (“some men even kill their wives”). She justifies her entrapment in terms of acceptable norms of wife abuse in Ghana and diffuses her agentive action in collective thought; “I am not the only wife whose husband has beaten me.” While this discursive strategy may have been mobilized by the victim to fend off potential attribution of her acquiescence or passivity, notions of social comparisons may be drawn upon by victims as both adaptive and norm conforming strategies to adjust their own behavior to social norms and cope with abusive marriages. Consequently, such victim-provided tolerant discourses about spousal violence may prime them to accept abuse and devastate their agency to leave abusers. Victims’ warranting accounts may be indicative of how dominant cultural norms of spousal violence become internalized part of women’s socialization or “discursive apprenticeship” (Wetherell, 2003) and discursive “habitus” or “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1992), to the extent that they may become accustomed to marital abuse by forming expectations of a prototypical behavior of married men in Ghana.

“I Married Her”: Discourses of Entitlement

In Ghana, official establishment of marriage is marked by the payment of bride price (popularly called tiri-nsa in Akan) by a groom and his family to a prospective bride and her family. The practice of bride price was implicated in participants’ accounts as engendering a sense of entitlement in terms of which men talk about spousal violence. For example, one perpetrator explained, “I think I deserve the right to discipline [beat] my wife because I married her; I paid for her hand in marriage. I didn’t just pick her from her family; they demanded tiri-nsa which I accordingly paid” (Rural perpetrator, FGD). Note how the perpetrator positions bride price as a “demand” which if fulfilled, guarantees him “the right to discipline” his wife for offenses he considers as demanding such treatment. The practice of bride price and discourses of entitlement can be seen here as providing the cultural repertoire for the perpetrator to construct violence and make sense of his relationship to his wife.

The perpetrator suggests that “disciplining” (beating) his wife for wifely infractions is a legitimate and “deserved right” because he invested in (“paid for”) his wife, he did not “just pick her from her family.” It can be argued that the customary practice of bride price appears to engender entitlement awareness that enhances perpetrators’ view about the moral worthiness of violence in marriage. While entitlement discourses are worked up in talk to “objectify” women in marriage and implicitly position them as “properties” of their husbands, they equally reinforce the belief that spousal violence is morally warranted and necessary. These discourses resonate with a familiar moral order and dominant cultural discourse in Ghana that suggest that men “marry” but women are “married.” The obviousness of this moral order is to underscore the binary opposition between femininity and masculinity, while contrasting women’s apparent passivity and lack of agency with men’s activity and agency in marriage. It can be said that discourses such as “I have married her” or “I have paid for her hand in marriage” are invoked in perpetrators’ talk to evoke a sense of deservingness and portray wives as those without individuality, agency, and self-determination in marriage. In this view, we find evidence of a form of talk in which implied sense of entitlement is invoked in ways that serve to justify or warrant spousal violence and shoot down moral attribution of blame. Accounts of some victims also echoed and emphasized mundane constructions of wives as objects or “properties” of their husbands:

But haven’t your husband ever told you [referring to a discussant] that your family did not give you to him free of charge? [ . . . ] some men also think that we are their properties; that they have acquired us with money and other items from the family. (Rural victim 6, FGD)

The victim’s question “But haven’t your husband ever told you that your family did not give you to him free of charge?” to a fellow victim/woman presents men’s talk about their wives as “properties” and their sense of ownership as predictable pattern and commonplace experiences that are (or should be) knowable to women in marriage. She provides further accounts to demonstrate how this entitlement posturing of some men constructs wives as “acquired properties” who are expected to be at the beck and call of their husbands. It might be argued that the accounts of the perpetrator and the victim in the above extracts are suggestive of how the cultural practice of bride price may constitute and be constitutive of moral discourses in terms of which men’s acts of violence toward their wives are constructed and sustained in the Ghanaian society.

Discourses of Managing Accountability, Transferring Blame, and Gendering Violence

Perpetrators in this study also offered accounts designed to minimize their moral accountability for violence by appealing to traditional gender norms that their victims’ behavior has violated. In one interview, a perpetrator emphasized that “she deserved to be beaten. If a woman fails to submit to the authority of her husband, then that is what happens, and you cannot blame men” (Rural perpetrator, personal interview). The perpetrator details gender norms violated by his wife to manage his accountability for violence. He uses what Sneijder and te Molder (2005) call “conditional formulation” (if-then scripting or inferences) to suggest that men cannot be blameworthy for violence “if women fail to submit to their [men’s] authority.” By referencing “women” instead of his wife and “men” (“You cannot blame men”) rather than himself (“You cannot blame me”), the perpetrator appears to be “gendering” violence as he diffuses his moral responsibility for violence in gendered notions. He positions his conduct in gendered expectations by exonerating men who abuse perceived non-submissive wives, while blaming women who do not acquiesce to men’s authority. The rhetorical robustness of this gendered accounts lies in the fact that it allows the perpetrator to successfully manage his personal sense of guilt in ways that make him appear credible and warranted.

Another perpetrator, in a focus group, invoked normative gendered expectations to question the impropriety of spousal violence: “How can anybody suggests that beating my wife for failing to cook for me is wrong?” (Urban perpetrator, FGD). In this quote, the perpetrator seems to blame his wife for transgressing a gender norm and thus, rhetorically challenges the immorality of his violent conduct as it is used against a non-conforming wife. Rather than immoral, he seems to suggest that violence against one’s own (ed) wife for not complying with gendered behavioral prescriptions (“failing to cook”) is a legitimate moral duty of a husband. It can be inferred that both perpetrators (urban and rural) in the above extracts offer moral accounts that construct them as without fault but driven to violence by non-conforming behavior of their victims. In a similar fashion, one key informant corroborated the gendered accounts of violence:

You see, it is a duty of every woman to submit to the authority of her husband, for he is the head of the family. The Bible even teaches that. If a woman is punished for disrespecting the husband, everyone will blame her. (Traditional leader, key informant)

Here, the informant’s description conveys a moral reasoning that is deeply implicit and embedded in normative ideals of conjugal power relations in Ghana. In formulating women’s submissiveness to husbands’ authority as “a duty of every woman,” the key informant makes it clear that men’s abusive behavior toward their “disrespectful” (non-submissive) wives offends no communal ethos of the Ghanaian society. It is significant to note the discursive use of “punishment” by the informant to conceal and portray wife beating as a culturally and morally worthy act of discipline. The metaphor of “punishment” is mobilized to construct wifely disrespect in Ghana as, ab initio, a gendered transgression as it contradicts normative expectations of “womanly” behavior in marriage. The informant’s use of conditional account (“if a woman is punished for disrespecting the husband . . . ”) seems to transform spousal violence into a consequence of a prior neglected normative duty (“It is a duty of every woman to submit to the authority of her husband”) and further construct abused women as morally accountable for abuse because they neglected this duty. The use of “punishment” is thus designed to justify husband-to-wife abuse and position it as deterrence to offending wives. The informant also invokes cultural and religious ethos to imply that violence against non-submissive wives is a moral duty of men, in much the same way as women’s submission to their husbands’ authority. In this view, disrespectful and non-submissive women are positioned by the informant as blamable because they could have avoided violence (punishment) if they complied with established communal and religious norms of society. Instead of seeing perpetrators as agentic forces responsible for violent misconducts, the key informant in this quote uses defensive accounts that transfer blame from abusers to victims.

Discussion

This article explored moral discourses of husband-to-wife abuse in Ghana. In particular, I have examined how participants in this study invoked normative discourses and social expectations to manage moral accountability and justify spousal violence in Ghana. Accounts of both abusers and victims draw on the valence of social norms to systematically (re)formulate spousal violence in culturally benign notions such as “normal,” “corrective,” “disciplinary,” or a means to accomplish a moral purpose (teach an erring wife some lessons). These moral warrants, embedded in widespread mundane discourses in Ghana, are produced and routinely used in varying degrees in talk to suggest that spousal violence is not an inappropriate behavior. As Fiske and Rai (2015) posit, linguistic justifications of violence are “informative about the conditions under which some people would be morally motivated by culturally legitimate standards for relationships” (p. 10).

Moral accounts of participants in this study are implicated in intersubjective social norms and embedded cultural scripts of gender relations, and are routinely (re)produced and sustained in talk. Kitzinger (2000) points out that dominant discursive practices constitute the practical reasoning through which the social order is maintained, and by which power and oppression are reproduced and sustained. Normative and dominant discourses that provide tacit warrant for abuse are powerful because “they set the horizon for what can be articulated or thought in any [given cultural] context” (Seymour-Smith, Wetherell, & Phoenix, 2002, p. 265) and also set up and reproduce taken-for-granted understandings of the “reality” of domestic violence (LeCouteur & Oxlad, 2011; Seymour-Smith et al., 2002). Apparently, the recognizable and intersubjective discourses of perpetrators and victims in this study position spousal violence as a moral construct that reflects local norms and marital customs in Ghana. As Adams and colleagues (1995) indicate, discourses are evolving system of values, understandings, or meanings specific to particular cultures, contexts, and times, and they construct and are constructed by the relationships of those they influence. The moral rules of the community in Ghana, more than individual rights, provide the evaluative standards for specific behaviors as either right or wrong (Osafo, 2012). The discursive practices and moral accounts of participants in the present study reflect normative understandings and meanings associated with spousal violence in Ghana.

Participants’ moral accounts about spousal violence were suggestive of their rootedness in collective ideals and social expectations of gender-appropriate behavior. Perpetrators constructed violence against an erring wife as culturally necessary and socially expected, whereas victims formulated it as commonplace and predictable. The notion of collective ideals were drawn upon by perpetrators to situate acts of violence in cultural mores of society as well as shoot down any attribution of personal or moral responsibility. The mutual (mis)perception about the beliefs and expectations of members of the collective may serve to diminish individual perpetrator’s sense of guilt, and thus ease the process of self-blame and personal sense of shame. Previous studies have argued that people are willing to commit interpersonal violence if they can diffuse their moral accountability in collective ideals (Bandura, 2001) or if they view their behavior as a consequence of situational pressures (Zimbardo, 2004). Social expectation discourses become deeply implicated in the formation and perpetuation of the “realities” of victims—they become part of women’s mundane experiences and discursive scripts that are taken for granted but routinely worked up in talk about gender-appropriate behavior and spousal violence. It might also be argued that victims appealed to collective beliefs and social expectations to adapt and adjust their behavior to social norms and cope with abusive marital relationships. Fiske and Rai (2015) suggest that IPV may be a mutually agreed-upon way to relate, a way of “conducting mutually meaningful, mutually rewarding relationship” (p. 167). As Mckenzie (2004) argues, when victims share and believe in the same values as aggressors, their aggressors cease to be a threat.

Perpetrators invoked the practice of bride price as a cultural symbol to construct violence toward wives “within a normative and moral order” (Edwards, 1995, p. 320). Even if the practice of bride price may seem both well intended and self-evident, it can have serious unintended consequences for the distribution of power in marriage in Ghana, given the everyday normative and moral interpretations of rights and duties associated with the practice (see Adjei, 2015). Significantly, discourses of entitlement were commonly framed around the practice of bride price and designed to objectify or commoditize victims as “acquired properties” owned by their husbands. These discursive devices serve as a resource for male dominance and entitlement to power and reveal a range of ways through which men justify their violent actions toward women (Adams et al., 1995). It can be added that moral inferences drawn from and built around bride price custom subtly epitomize mechanistic forms of dehumanization as it denies women of the shared, typical, and core properties of humanness (see Haslam, 2006). I would thus argue that when perpetrators frame spousal violence as a deserved right and duty; when they construct wives as “properties,” albeit implicitly; their empathetic and emotional feelings generally associated with misconducts may become deficient and weakened.

Accounts of perpetrators in this study explicitly appealed to normative standards of appropriate gender behavior in marriage in ways that provided effective warrant for their violent behavior. It has been found that perpetrators of IPV in Ghana construct husband-to-wife abuse as a legitimate punishment for women who transgress culturally assumed gender norms or encroach on masculine spaces (Adjei, 2016). As LeCouteur and Oxlad (2011) note, men use everyday discursive practices of membership categorization to invoke normative expectations, justify acts of violence toward women, and maintain the broader moral order around normative gendered identities. According to Drew (1998), speakers sometimes find fault with other’s conduct by formulating some normative standards that the other’s behavior has transgressed. Discourse affords individuals in a particular ideological context the possibility to systematically attribute responsibility and manage their moral accountability (Sneijder & te Molder, 2005). Apparently, discursive accounts that invoked gender-norm expectations allow perpetrators in this study to attribute blame externally, conceal responsibility, and mutualize spousal violence (we are all to blame). Coates and Wade (2004) have argued that discursive devices that mutualize violent behavior imply that the victim is partly to blame and inevitably conceals the fact that violent behavior is unilateral and solely the responsibility of the perpetrator. When perpetrators blame their victims as partly responsible for bringing suffering upon themselves, they become at ease with and convince the self that an act does not entail immorality (Bandura, 2001). Accounts produced in the context of talk in which moral work is overt and explicit seem to be generally condemnatory, and are produced to “manifest transgressions by others of normative standards of conduct and hence to warrant the speaker’s sense of moral offense and indignation” (Drew, 1998, p. 297).

Discursive situation affords moral locations from which people speak (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008), and draws attention to the power of discourse to construct its human subjects and how human subjects act upon themselves and others within a given moral order (McMullen, 2011). As Fiske and Rai (2015) have argued, perpetration of violence is morally motivated and often, the victim shares the moral perspective of the perpetrator, and so do third parties from the perpetrator’s cultural context. Discursive accounts of participants in the present study suggest that the propriety or impropriety of husband-to-wife abuse is not something that happens in a vacuum; it is dependent on circumstances and context of its use. Essentially, these moral discourses are indicative of how perpetrators, and perhaps those they appeal to in the Ghanaian cultural context, perceive spousal violence as culturally legitimate. The accounts of participants in this study may thus be understood as performing a moral function and as providing a context for judging the moral appropriateness or inappropriateness of husband-to-wife abuse (Drew, 1998). Apparently, the cultural and social norms of spousal violence are morally constituted, reproduced, and sustained in talk of abusers, victims, and key members of the Ghanaian community.

Study Limitations

A limitation of this study is that the limited number of participants who were not selected in a representative way does not allow the findings to be extrapolated to the whole population of victims and perpetrators of IPV in Ghana. Ghana is a multiethnic and multireligious society, and there are major ethnic groups whose views have not been significantly represented in this study. The views expressed here represent only 40 participants in Ghana who are predominantly Akans (77%) and Christians (82%). Nonetheless, the central goal of the present study, like most qualitative research, was to interrogate subjectivity, intentional action, and moral discourses and experiences of IPV embedded in real-life contexts (see Marecek, 2003) rather than aim for representative sampling or large sample size. The findings of the present study help illuminate how sociocultural norms of IPV are morally constituted, reproduced, and sustained in dominant cultural discourses within a given sociocultural context.

Implications for Research and Practice

To repair dominant cultural discourses that provide implicit moral warrants for spousal violence, sustained and broadly conceptualized awareness campaigns may be required. Community-based psychoeducation that diffuses acceptable notions of abuse and promotes mutually positive relationship between males and females could be a very useful approach to tackle the phenomenon. This could be achieved through an all-inclusive and comprehensive attitude-changing public and media education that focuses on forming detailed role model messages across multiple key demographic groups such as men, women, boys, girls, community opinion leaders, religious and traditional leaders, government and political leaders, as well as sports and entertainment celebrities. Alternatively, churches, mosques, and other religious communities could use their platforms to openly and expressly condemn spousal violence and help foster an awareness of its destructive consequences on individuals, families, and society. As Vandello and Cohen (2004) point out, unless people are willing to publicly and openly speak out against spousal violence, to expose their true attitudes, normative discourses, culture of silence as well as open instances of wife abuse can give the general impression that society condones violence. Research on IPV should extend its focus to include ways in which culturally dominant notions about spousal violence construct discourses about it, how these discourses become evident in talk, and through which power and oppression are (re)produced and accomplished.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all participants, particularly victims and perpetrators, 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’s Biography

Stephen Baffour Adjei, MPhil, is a doctoral 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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