The Social Intentionality of Battered Women’s Agency in Ghana

Abstract

There is a growing body of research which suggests that victims of intimate partner violence (IPV; mostly women) continue to remain in abusive relationships. Many of the Western psychological theorisations focus on battered women’s personal dispositions and/or the self-creating (individualistic) view of agency to explain why victims remain in violent relationships. These studies seem to suggest that staying in a violent relationship is a personal decision that victims make in free will, and that victims who continue to stay fail to act on their own behalf. Drawing upon the Ghanaian communal conceptualisation of personhood and the social norms of marriage and divorce, this study questions the individualistic theorisations of battered women’s decisions to stay in or leave abusive relationships. The article argues that battered women’s agency in negotiating the stay/leave decisions in abusive relationships does not only originate in an independent autonomous self, nor constituted by a person’s internal motives, but also, and even primarily, it is culturally grounded and dependent on social relations for its realisation. The article concludes that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a social intentionality, in the sense that battered women’s intentional behaviour in marital relationships is both constituted by self and constrained by their relational embeddedness.

Understanding the endorsement of wife beating in Ghana: evidence of the 2014 Ghana demographic and health survey

“…This study has observed high inclination of both young men and women toward the approval of wife-beating in Ghana. Possible explanations might include their adherence to cultural tenets [31,32]. However, the older ones may hold a contrary view due to their experiences about the implications of violence over the years which the younger ones may not be aware of.…”

Conceptualising personhood, agency, and morality for African psychology

“…Personhood can be understood as the nature or essence of existence, the fact of being a person and possessing those qualities that confer distinct individuality or personality (Adjei, 2016). Personhood in Africa has social intentionality in the sense that it is relationally connected to pre-existing social forces by default of existence (Adams & Dzokoto, 2003; Adjei, 2018). The social intentionality of personhood is used in this paper to refer to the experience of the person as relationally connected to others in a network of embedded interdependence.…”

“…The self-creating view of agency, on the other hand, emphasises consciousness and free will in which the human subject creates itself, and is capable of making independent decisions and agentively engages in both world and self-making (Bruner, 1990). This is the view of agency in which the person is abstracted from social context and considered as the centre of his or her own awareness and intentional actions (Adjei, 2018). That is, persons are agents, having the free will to actively and independently engage in the construction of their own lives.…”

“…People in theses settings are confronted with the challenge to reconcile and balance these conflicting senses. While people in Western societies resolve this balance by shifting toward the individualistic sense, exemplified in personal freedom and choice, people in the African cultural context and many Asian societies such as Japan emphasise the selfless sense of self in which the communal takes precedence over the individualistic (Adams et al, 2012; Adjei, 2018; Spence, 1985). It is often stressed in mainstream psychological accounts that agency is more highly developed in WEIRD cultural settings than in “majority-worlds,” to the extent that being agentic is almost always synonymous with individualism (Miller, 2007).…”

“…For example, the conception of human agency as originating from an independent autonomous self or being constituted by a person’s internal motives leads to the most frequently asked pair of questions in the literature on gender-based violence: “Why do victims of IPV stay?” or its equivalent, “Why don’t they leave?” (cf. Adjei, 2018; Semaan, 2004). Despite being legitimate and logical, these questions inherently imply that staying in a violent relationship is a personal decision, a choice that victims of IPV freely exercise (Adjei, 2018).…”