Can marriage (re)produce and legitimize sexual violence?: A phenomenological study of a Ghanaian patrilineal society

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.