Community leaders' perceptions of and responses to intimate partner violence in Northwestern Ghana.

Isaac Dery,Cuthbert Baataar,Constance A Akurugu,Lindsay Stark

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0262870

Abstract

Calls to engage community leaders in preventing gender-based violence against women have gained global prominence in recent years. Situated within the growing calls for greater community leaders’ engagement, this article problematizes the assumptions that efforts to mobilize community gatekeepers in violence prevention are likely to yield better results. Drawing inspiration from decolonial African feminist perspectives coupled with five focus group discussions conducted with 30 community leaders in the patriarchal setting of Northwestern Ghana, this article highlights the potential limitations of these assumptions by paying attention to the multiple ways; albeit subtly, in which community leaders as cultural gatekeepers may individually or collectively reproduce and sustain dominant cultural tropes that normalize violence against women. Our findings show that cultural gatekeepers’ perspectives on and their approaches to addressing violence against women risk normalizing and perpetuating it. If policy makers, development practitioners, and researchers are to adequately address the violence of men, a useful starting point is to build on community leaders’ perspectives, attitudes, and responses to violence as a collective issue. By building on these, we will be able to challenge and deconstruct the multiple ways in which community leaders’ approaches to addressing violence are reinforcing gendered subordination.

Highlights

We focus on understanding the perspectives of community leaders as they serve as important stakeholders in processes and interventions aimed at addressing violence broadly at the local level
From earlier interactions that the first author had with community members during fieldwork for a doctoral research project on constructions of masculinity and genderbased violence in December 2015, evidence revealed that community leaders, especially local chiefs play enormous roles in resolving possible cases of intimate partner violence (IPV) in their respective communities
Even though this study has provided critical insights into IPV from the perspectives of community leaders, it is important to recognize that the findings are only limited to a small group of leaders

Summary

Introduction

There is no doubt that long-standing feminist theorizing, activism, and scholarship have provided an important intellectual and political impetus through which gendered subjectivities, including gender-based violence have been brought to the forefront of public debate. Feminism(s) as an intellectual and political enterprise has created useful possibilities through which the everyday gendered subjectivities, experiences, and struggles of women may be interpreted [1]. The call for greater understanding of women’s everyday experiences and how they navigate gendered subjectivities is not entirely new; it has been a central focus of feminists’ politicking and advocacy since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, there has been renewed politicization among feminists, especially second-wave feminists on the need to dismantle boundaries between the private and public spaces through which gendered subjectivities are reproduced and made sense of on a daily basis

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