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.