Abstract:
Marital sexual violence occurs in Ghana, where women and men are socialized to believe marriage confers
unlimited sexual access to women's bodies. Consequently, marriage is used to legitimize sexual violence and
rape. Ghana's legislative instrument covering domestic violence has been determined by Ghanaian sociocultural
norms that mute sensitivity to marital sexual violence. In particular, the research to date provides limited accounts
of the nature of marital sexual violence in the context of women's gendered experiences. To begin to
uncover the nature of marital sexual violence in Ghana, we used a feminist-informed phenomenological approach
to describe the experiences of sexual violence among Ghanaian married women in the Eastern Region of
Ghana. Our qualitative semi-structured interviews of 15 ever-married women show that sexual experience in
marriage is influenced by gendered and social expectations of women's sexual submission and childbearing role.
Participants believed that marriage confers promises of unlimited sexual availability regardless of the wife's nonconsent,
and the husband's infidelity is often blamed on the wife. Most narrated incidents of non-consensual sex
were accompanied by physical aggression and emotional abuse. Although the participants preferred to seek help
from informal sources, including family and friends, almost all favoured the criminalization of marital rape to
check the institution of marriage which encourages a husband's unlimited sexual access to his wife in the absence
of the wife's explicit consent. These findings create an awareness of the existence of marital rape and the need to
develop multiple strategies for addressing this problem.
