My Work in the Peace Cell

My task in teaching in the Peace Cell was to conflict resolution and peace building to six village leaders in rural Ghana. I knew absolutely nothing about this place before going, and I was going to be there for less than a month. To say this was a challenge would be an understatement. I had to keep a perspective both on my relative ignorance and also that I might have something to teach these people. The volunteer before me did a lot of work with them on healthy dialog, anger management, collaboration, etc. I decided to start small. I decided to start with the family. All of the village representatives expressed to me that domestic violence was a major issue in their villages. In a previous post I talked about the vulnerability of women in marriages. I mentioned how the parents inability to pay back the bride price makes it difficult for a woman to leave a marriage. It’s also incredibly difficult for them to leave because of the social stigma attached to divorced women and because of their lack of economic independence. Divorce is not impossible in rural Ghana (one of the village leaders had actually just terminated his marriage), but it is difficult and these difficulties make women vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. In fact, when I asked the village leaders what spouses argued about the most, they said money and sex. I guess some things are universal. Poverty was not a topic I was equipped to handle, and I was told that arguments about sex were the most likely to lead to violence. Normally these arguments begin with a wife’s refusal to have sex with her husband. In the area where I was working, the economy is primarily based on agriculture. Women put in a full day’s work in the fields before they return home to care for their husband and children—cooking, cleaning, etc. They are tired. Husbands put in a full day’s work too and are responsible for the economic wellbeing of the family. Cultural practices like bride-wealth symbolically reinforce the idea that the woman is the property of her husband. As such, many men I talked to felt entitled to sex. I decided to teach the village leaders about sexual consent.

Borrowing heavily from Scarleteen’s “Driver’s Ed for the Sexual Superhighway: Navigating Consent,” I taught sexual consent using the “yes means yes” model. In the US we’ve been so inculcated with the “no means no” model, that it is often difficult to get people to understand the limits of that model. For one, it ignores all of the reasons why saying no can be difficult or impossible such as power dynamics, intimidation, and being physically or mentally incapacitated. In its traditionally understood form, it also puts the burden of saying no upon the woman, forgetting the fact that sex is supposed to be fun—that everyone is supposed to be saying “hell yeah!” every step of the way. That’s where the “yes means yes” model comes in. The yes means yes model holds that consent is not when the other person “doesn’t say no” but instead when all involved parties are actively and willingly participating in the sexual activity. When I taught sexual consent from the “yes means yes” perspective in Aboansan, I didn’t encounter the challenge of shifting away from the “no means no” perspective, because they had never talked about the process of sexual consent as such. By this I mean to say that members of the peace cell group disagreed about whether or not a man was entitled to sex, but none had talked about sexual consent as such before. I started by emphasizing that no man or woman was ever entitled to sex and then moved on to talking about how to tell if your partner is consenting to sex. The sex-positivity defied my expectations of rural Ghana. The village leaders were very responsive to my argument that sex is better when all involved parties are really into it. This made it much easier for me to talk about both verbal and nonverbal signals of sexual consent. For example, I told them that “don’t stop!” and “whoohoo!” are verbal signs of consent, whereas “stop” and dead silence were signs of nonconsent. I told them that actively touching someone was a possible sign of nonverbal consent, whereas avoiding someone’s touch was a possible nonverbal sign of nonconsent.

Most of the village leaders I met with were men and we got into some really interesting conversation when talking about the idea that men don’t necessarily have to be the sexually dominant ones. It was hard for me to keep up, because when they really got into it with each other much of the conversation was in tri. But I was able to understand that they arrived at the conclusion that women initiating and wanting sex is sexy and that women wanted sex less when they felt like they had to. One of the more shy men shared that sometimes his wife did not want to have sex for 3 or sometimes 5 months but that he felt that this was okay. I don’t want to give any man too many kudos for simply respecting a woman’s sexual autonomy, but I think that him saying this in the company of other men was incredibly brave. The man who started off the sessions defending his entitlement to sex ended up telling us that he had changed his mind—that he knew now that consent was important. I think the first man’s openness and honesty had every bit as much to do with the success of our peace cell meetings on sexual consent. I learned from them that having what I would call backwards attitudes about sexual consent does not preclude having an open dialog about sex. And it seemed that they learned something from me too.

The Emancipation of African Women

While I was in Ghana, I found this awesome book in the Cape Coast Castle gift store. It's called The Emancipation of Women: An African Perspective, and it's written by a Ghanaian woman named Florence Abena Dolphyne. She begins by saying that women suffer similar types of injustices in the family structure, education, little access to professional training, etc. The difference, she says, is the degree to which the women suffer these injustices. Africa though, has problems that many other places do not such as polygamy, bride-wealth (bride price), & female circumcision. She goes on to talk about the tensions she witnessed between African women and Western feminists gathering to discuss women's issues at the Mid-Decade Conference in Copenhagen. To begin with, they couldn't even agree upon what was a "women's issue," much less how to address them. The Western solution for African women's problems, which they thought were primarily practices like bride-wealth, polygamy, and female circumcision, were legislative bans. Dolphyne argues that both Western feminists' focus on these issues and their proposed solutions are out of touch with the lived reality of women in Africa. For African women struggling with hunger, access to clean water, no nearby hospitals, etc., "the issue of women's rights is inextricably linked with that of survival," and so "the emancipation of women and the status of women in society are closely linked with national development" (xiv).

This was readily apparent in Aboansan. Polygamy and female circumcision are not practiced there, but bride-wealth is an important part of the marriage ceremony. Before a marriage can take place in Aboansan, a man must go to the woman's parents and present them with gifts that are highly symbolic--bowls and plates, blankets, jewelry, livestock, etc.--to demonstrate that the man is able to provide for the daughter. The bride's family will also present gifts to the groom's family, but the value of this gift is generally significantly lower than the gifts received by the bride's family. The major problem with this practice is not the implicit messages (the bride is being paid for; the groom is paying the bride's family for their prior care taking, a responsibility that he is now posed to assume, etc.) but the vulnerable position that it puts women in. You see, if a woman wants a divorce, she is expected to "pay back" the bride price in full. Aboansan is an agricultural village--farming is their income. Because of strictly adhered to gender norms, women have no access to that income, which is controlled in full by their husbands. What this means is that the burden of repaying the bride price falls on the woman's family who may be unwilling or unable to repay it. Women who cannot payback the bride price cannot get a divorce and are vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. Women with less money are actually less vulnerable in this situation because the less money a woman and her family have at the time of the wedding, the lower the bride price is. The lower the bride price is, the easier it is for the bride to leave. While the Western solution, according to Dolphyne, is to ban this practice, it would be virtually impossible to enforce, especially in rural villages like Aboansan where there is little government oversight and people are very tied to tradition. For a woman in these villages, to be wedded with a low bride price would indicate that she was of little value to her family. So instead of legislative bans, Dolphyne argues, will do little to stem the problem.

Something else that contributes to cycles of poverty is high fertility rates. To promote limiting the size of the family will not go over well because it is seen as unnatural for an African woman to willfully choose to limit the size of her family. Moreover, at some point parents become dependent on their children to take care of them in their old age. There is a high mortality rate because of poor sanitation and nutrition, high rates of disease, and a lack of access to medical services. Mothers must have lots of babies in order to make sure that enough survive into adulthood. A case in point would be the little boy Emanuel who fell out of a tree, broke his nose, and bled to death because there was no way to get him to a hospital and no money to pay for treatment should he have gotten there. This is a symptom of poverty, not a lack of knowledge about what perpetuates poverty per se. She suggests that the best way to reduce family size is to invest in education. Educated women want a higher standard of living for their children. They are also more likely to understand the health risks associated with not spacing out the births of children.

The problem of course is convincing people of the value of educating girl children. Girls face many challenges in continuing education. Girls may stay out of school to care for younger siblings. If there is only money to send some of the children to school, it is the boys who will be sent. Girls are at risk for pregnancy, which functionally terminates the advancement of their education. Should they make it to apply to secondary school they’ll find that there are fewer spots for girls at these (usually boarding) schools and so girls must score higher to be admitted. Rural girls, she says, are doubly disadvantaged, because they have to leave their villages to go to school which leads to astronomically high drop out rates. This was definitely something I saw in Aboansan. To pursue education beyond the elementary school level, kids must walk a couple miles to a nearby village. This is not possible for girls who attend classes with a baby on their hip. Education should be mandated for all children—regardless of sex—but this can only happen if (1) this can actually be enforced and (2) if education is actually accessible.

What rural African women need more than legislation or attitudinal shifts is the alleviation of the poverty they face. This is not the case for the vast majority of American women. We do not have to rank oppressions to understand that these women are not similarly situated and that the emancipation of women is not a one size fits all.