Beyond Domestic Violence Laws: Women’s Experiences and Perceptions of Protection Services in Ghana

Since the early 1990s, there has been increasing recognition across the world that states should put in place effective mechanisms to address the violation of women’s human rights. A number of countries have passed legislation designed to prevent domestic violence, punish perpetrators and protect survivors. There is a limited body of work that explores survivors’ experiences of domestic violence and their perceptions of the services provided under the new legislation. Based on a small number of cases, the studies suggest that the effect of legislation has been generally positive in Rwanda, Zambia, and South Africa. This study is designed to contribute to that literature by providing a context-specific analysis of the protective services available to survivors of domestic violence in Ghana. The article focuses on the existing shelter services in Ghana and assesses women’s experiences and perceptions of these services to draw out a number of policy implications. Ghana is one of seven West African countries and twenty sub-Saharan countries to have passed a domestic violence bill. In an analysis of ten of these countries, Ortiz-Barreda and Vives-Cases (2013) point out that the legislation in none of these countries provides a sufficiently comprehensive approach. Botswana, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, and South Africa only include police sector interventions; Ghana, Mozambique and Namibia do a little better, with police and justice sector interventions; while Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe do better still, with police sector, justice sector and education sector interventions. Ghana is a special case in that it recognizes a diversity of domestic relationships, including kinship. It considers both men and women as survivors and perpetrators and also includes mediation as as one of the ways to deal with domestic violence. However, the decrees for ensuring the full implementation of the Domestic Violence Act in Ghana are yet to be put in place. Ghana has only one shelter1, so the research focused on that shelter. We used a qualitative approach and interviewed six survivors, three staff members and one former staff member of the shelter. We found that the survivors first turned to family and/or friends who then pointed them in the direction of the police. Experiences with the police service were generally negative. Survivors’ encounters with the police left them feeling revictimised. On the other hand, the survivors generally perceived their experiences at the shelter as positive. This particular finding resonates with similar studies in Rwanda (Bernath and Gahongayire 2013) and South Africa (Wright, Kiguwa and Potter 2007). The shelter provided them with a refuge from the abuse they had suffered and offered them an opportunity to prepare for living economically independent lives once outside the shelter. For many survivors, however, the process they underwent which led to their placement in the shelter resulted in estrangement from their families. It would appear then that the shelter model does not take the communitarian nature of African societies sufficiently into consideration, and there is a need for existing protection models to be reassessed. Based on these findings, we make the following recommendations to improve the provision of protection services in Ghana.