Lineage and Intimate Partner Violence: A qualitative study of Ghanaian women's experience of Intimate Partner Violence across kin groups.


Victor Agyei-Yeboah, Memorial University

Lineage ties are central to the social organization of many societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghana. They are fundamental to the socialization of its members, including the distribution, ownership, and access to resources, as well as the performance of important marital rites. In Ghana, lineage ties are mainly organized along either a matrilineal system - where descent and inheritance are traced through the female line, or a patrilineal system - where genealogical ties and inheritance are traced through the male line. Given its centrality in the lives of people in Ghana, especially as it relates to marital outcomes, some studies have identified links between lineage and women’s experience of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). In particular, the studies find that women in patrilineal societies are more susceptible to IPV, compared to those in matrilineal societies. Moreover, previous works on lineage and IPV limit the operationalization of lineage to a binary construct (matrilineal and patrilineal) to the neglect of women who may identify with both (bilateral). Hence, there is no evidence or empirical work on women’s experience of IPV in bilateral societies. Meanwhile, previous studies fail to show how, and in what ways, specific lineage norms facilitate or reduce women’s experience of IPV across kin groups. For instance, it remains relatively unclear why women in patrilineal societies are significantly more likely to experience IPV than those in matrilineal societies. In this study, we move beyond the simplistic binary operationalization of lineage to include a third group - bilateral – for a more nuanced understanding of women’s experience of IPV across these groups. Thus, our study explored women’s experience of IPV across the matrilineal, patrilineal, and bilateral kin groups. We also examined two theoretical pathways to understand the mechanisms through which lineage might reduce or exacerbate women’s vulnerabilities in intimate relations. First, we probe how differences in norms such as bride price payment (transfer of goods/money/wealth from a groom to a bride and her family at the onset of marriage), specific to the three lineage groups explain women’s IPV experiences. Second, we also explored how women’s access to lineage resources such as land, capital, education, and employment influenced their experiences of IPV across kin groups. We draw on the cultural , feminist and power theoretical perspectives to foreground the findings. A thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with 22 women ever-married found that IPV occurred across patrilineal, matrilineal, and bilateral societies. Women in patrilineal societies experienced continuous patterns of emotional, economic, and physical IPV, while those in matrilineal societies recounted repeated incidents of emotional, sexual, and economic IPV. In bilateral societies, women narrated frequent experiences of emotional IPV, which was triggered by physical IPV, and accompanied by economic IPV. The expensive nature of the bride price particularly in patrilineal and bilateral societies was constructed as “wife ownership”, which is symptomatic of male authority and female subordination, with consequences for women’s IPV experiences. Partial or non-payment of bride price in matrilineal societies, exposed women to IPV as such unions were not culturally recognized or respected. Furthermore, lineage norms in patrilineal and bilateral societies bar women from owning and having access to economic resources such as land, education, or kin support, which relegates them to an inferior status in which they become financially dependent on their partners’ resources, increasing their susceptibility to IPV. Women’s access to, and ownership of resources in matrilineal societies gives them some degree of autonomy and financial independence which decreases their likelihood of IPV; nevertheless, their experiences of IPV were explained by the foibles of male chauvinism, supremacy and strong patriarchal norms which undergird unequal gender power relations in marital unions. The findings show that lineage is a crucial site for perpetuating or reducing IPV and that efforts at reducing IPV against women, particularly in the global South, must use lineage as a conduit for empowering women by liberating them from the shackles of discriminatory lineage norms. Also, policymakers must use lineage as an avenue for the distribution of socioeconomic resources to empower women economically in marital unions.

Non-presenting author: Eric Tenkorang, Memorial University

This paper will be presented at the following session: