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Article
The Social
Intentionality of
Battered Women’s
Agency in Ghana
Stephen Baffour Adjei1
Abstract
There is a growing body of research which suggests that victims of
intimate partner violence (IPV; mostly women) continue to remain in
abusive relationships. Many of the Western psychological theorisations
focus on battered women’s personal dispositions and/or the self-creating
(individualistic) view of agency to explain why victims remain in violent
relationships. These studies seem to suggest that staying in a violent
relationship is a personal decision that victims make in free will, and
that victims who continue to stay fail to act on their own behalf. Drawing
upon the Ghanaian communal conceptualisation of personhood and the
social norms of marriage and divorce, this study questions the individu-
alistic theorisations of battered women’s decisions to stay in or leave
abusive relationships. The article argues that battered women’s agency
in negotiating the stay/leave decisions in abusive relationships does not
only originate in an independent autonomous self, nor constituted by
a person’s internal motives, but also, and even primarily, it is culturally
grounded and dependent on social relations for its realisation. The article
concludes that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a social inten-
tionality, in the sense that battered women’s intentional behaviour in
marital relationships is both constituted by self and constrained by their
relational embeddedness.
Corresponding author:
Stephen Baffour Adjei, College of Technology Education, Faculty of Education and
Communication Sciences, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, PO Box 1277,
Kumasi, Ghana.
E-mail: stevoo24@yahoo.com
Psychology and Developing Societies
30(1) 1–18
© 2018 Department of Psychology,
University of Allahabad
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0971333617747320
http://pds.sagepub.com
1 University of Education, Winneba, Ghana.
2 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
Keywords
Agency, battered women, IPV, relational embeddedness, communal
personality, Ghana
The growing body of research suggests that intimate partner violence
(IPV) is a global health burden that needs urgent attention. Globally,
almost 30 per cent of all women who have been in a relationship have
been physically and/or sexually abused by their intimate partners (World
Health Organization [WHO], 2013). About 38 per cent of all femicidal
killings (murder of women) occur in intimate relationships (WHO, 2013).
The highest prevalence of IPV occurs in Africa, with approximately
37 per cent of ever-partnered women having experienced physical and/
or sexual violence at some point in their lives (WHO, 2013). There are
many health implications of IPV including physical injuries such as cuts,
broken bones, fractures and burns to women (Johnson, Ollus, & Nevala,
2008). Mental health problems such as depression and posttraumatic
stress disorder (PTSD; Mechanic, Weaver, & Resick, 2008) and post-
abuse psychological distress and suicidal ideation amongst women is
very high (Adinkrah, 2008; Issahaku, 2015). Women’s substance depend-
ence such as alcohol and cigarette has also been associated with IPV
(Gao et al., 2010).
However, research reports indicate that victims of IPV (mostly
women) continue to remain in abusive relationships (e.g., Adjei, 2017a;
Dare, Guadagno, & Muscanell, 2013; Eckstein, 2016). Although IPV
rate in Ghana is very high (see Coker-Appiah & Cusack, 1999), many
women justify husband-to-wife abuse and continue to stay in violent
relationships. For example, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS, 2012)
reports that about 60 per cent of women and 36 per cent of men believe
it is justifiable for a man to beat his wife, with an acceptance rate of
70 per cent for rural women and 51 per cent for urban women. The high
prevalence of IPV in modern society and its negative health ramifica-
tions on victims makes it hard to comprehend why some women remain
in abusive relationships. The literature is replete with theoretical assump-
tions about why battered women continue to remain in abusive intimate
relationships. There is a preponderance of research evidence, mostly
western, that generally indicates that individual psychological orientation
(e.g., personality traits) moderates whether or not victims of IPV continue
to stay in or leave violent relationships. Western research on IPV theo-
rises that battered women who continue to stay in abusive relationships
Adjei 3
suffer from depressed self-esteem or have acquired a pattern of learned
helplessness (Walker, 2000), have dependent personality disorder (Laos,
Cormier, & Perez-Diaz, 2011) or have developed tolerance for violence
and maltreatment through repeated exposure to violence during childhood
(Rhatigan & Axsom, 2006). Other researchers have argued that battered
women’s lack of agency and/or commitment—personal resolve to keep
a relationship and to remain psychologically attached to it—are the key
to understanding why women stay in abusive relationships (Dare et al.,
2013; Rusbult & Martz, 1995; Semaan, 2004).
The individual-based studies are designed to address the most obvi-
ous pair of questions that are asked by both researchers and the general
public: ‘Why do they stay?’ and its equivalent, ‘Why don’t they leave?’
(Semaan, 2004). Though these questions are legitimate and logical, they
are inherently problematic. They imply that staying in a violent relation-
ship is a personal decision, a choice that battered women willingly
exercise, and that victims who continue to stay fail to exercise the agency
to act on their own behalf to flee abusive relationships. These individual-
focused questions pay little, if any, attention to cultural and structural
meaning systems that frame and shape battered women’s decision-making.
Thus, the individual-based research questions and theoretical explana-
tions invariably equate staying-and-not-leaving with being docile or
with failing to act on one’s own behalf (lack of agency) and being
passive (Semaan, 2004). These studies largely rely on a cultural back-
ground of individualism as a social representation and the Western atomistic
view of agency to account for why victims of IPV remain in violent
intimate relationships. The objective of this article is to draw upon the
communal personality and the meaning systems of marriage and divorce
in Ghana to develop a framework in which battered women’s agency in
negotiating stay/leave decisions could also be understood from their
social embeddedness and familial value orientation. I draw upon empiri-
cal and theoretical studies to show why emphasis should be placed on
battered women’s relationality as the primary source of agency in nego-
tiating stay/leave decisions in Ghana. In the following sections, I attempt
to conceptualise agency, followed by a discussion of the social position-
ing of personhood in Ghana. Next, I discuss marriage and divorce in
Ghana, and show how battered women’s agency in negotiating stay/
leave decision in abusive relationships in Ghana is culturally grounded
and dependent on social relations for its realisation. In the final part,
I demonstrate how battered women’s agency co-exists with relational
embeddedness in Ghana.
4 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
Conceptualising Agency
Personal agency, the experience of the self in action (Markus &
Kitayama, 2004), is an important determining factor in guiding human
thoughts and actions. Agency is an essential element in shaping the
empowerment processes of women (Adjei, 2015a) as well as the stay/
leave decisions of victims of IPV. There are two contrasting views of
agency: subject position that is determined by dominant discourses
(Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin, 2011; Davies & Harré, 1990) and self-
creating subject (Bruner, 1990). The subject position view of agency
holds that individual actions and choices are given to them by social,
historical and/or biological forces, subjecting the person and determin-
ing his/her action potential. Thus, the world, the social environment and
dominant discourses embedded in a given sociocultural context deter-
mine the direction of a person’s action potential. This view conceptual-
ises human agency as a social phenomenon which depends on and needs
social relations to be realised (become real) and objective (objectified;
Ratner, 1999). That is, agency has social intentionality in the sense that
it is sensitive to and integrates itself in social relations (Ratner, 2000).
On the contrary, the self-creating view of agency is based on conscious-
ness and free will in which the human subject creates itself, and is capable
of making independent decisions and agentively engage in both world
and self-making (Bruner, 1990). In this regard, individuals are agents,
having the free will to actively and independently engage in the con-
struction of their own life. The self-creating view construes agency as
less social and more a personal attribute. Though it may recognise the
existence of societal institutions, social conditions and customary and
normative actions, these social structures do not (or have little) influence
the individual. The individual is considered as the centre of his/her own
awareness and intentional actions.
Agency has also been understood to reflect the given cultural–
psychological ecologies, structural social situations and norms in which
individuals are embedded (Adams, Bruckmúller, & Decker, 2012). This
view also frames agency according to two distinct views: disjoint and
conjoint models of agency. According to the disjoint model of agency,
people experience action as the product of discrete actors abstracted
from social context, usually associated with independent construction
of self in Western societies (Markus & Kitayama, 2004). On the other
hand, interdependent construction of the self (in contexts such as Ghana,
see Adams, 2005) is associated with conjoint model of agency in which
Adjei 5
individuals experience action as a joint product of contextualised actors
in concert with social or relational forces (Markus & Kitayama, 2004).
Agency has also been described in recent times as negotiated (Adjei,
2017a; Jazvac-Martek, Chen, & McAlpine, 2011). Negotiated agency
involves engaging in joint decision-making and being responsive to
expectations and demands of social others in a network of inter-
connectedness (Adjei, 2017a). It can be said that the subject position,
the conjoint and the negotiated view of agency all conceptualise human
action (agency) as culturally situated and intentionally based behaviour
whose realisation depends on social referencing. This study draws upon
the culturally situated view of agency to explain how battered women
respond to the expectations and demands of the extended family in
Ghana in terms of the behavioural choices they make while in an abusive
marital relationship.
The Social Positioning of Personhood in Ghana
The intent of this section is to review how, within the social context of
Ghana, people generally express their sense of self (personhood) with
reference to their community, and how this externality of self-positioning,
in turn, gives form and direction to thought and social behaviour.
Personhood, the fact of being a person, having those qualities that confer
distinct individuality, is essentially social and normative in Ghana (Adjei,
2016a). Although Ghanaian personality is not like a blank slate on which
culture makes its imprint without protest, Ghanaian society is primarily
communal and normative based on specific values and meaning systems
that shape human thoughts and actions (see Adjei, 2015b; Gyekye, 1996).
Communalism is the theory that the focus of the activities of the individual
members of society is the community (Gyekye, 1996). African commu-
nalism is a normative theory about what a moral person, community and
their connection ought to be (Ikuenobe, 2006). Though not necessarily
detrimental to the individual, the theory of communalism emphasises the
activity and the success of the wider society.
Ghanaian social life is principally organised on the basis of interde-
pendency and communal value orientations which emphasise life and
social relations organised on the basis of social welfare, responsibili-
ties, obligations, interconnectedness and solidarity. Personhood is,
thus, based on ‘relational individualism’ (Adams & Dzokoto, 2003).
Individuals make daily interpersonal decisions by taking into account
6 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
their relational connections (Shaw, 2000). In this view, individuals’
agentive actions are more social than a personal attribute because the
self is ‘ontologically, cosmologically, spiritually, and normatively con-
nected to the community’, that, in turn, provides the person with the
way of life, logic and mode of reasoning (Ikuenobe, 2006, p. 53). The self
in African thought is indeed the community (Verhoef & Michel, 1997)
because ‘the individual self is, by various organic processes, constituted
by the community and the community is an organically fused collectivity
of individual selves’ (Ikuenobe, 2006, p. 56, emphasis in original).
Adjei (2016a) has observed that the individual person, within the com-
munal context of Ghana, does not have a choice of not belonging to a
particular community because a person’s ability to take on prescribed
social responsibilities defines his/her personhood.
The communal ontology of personhood provides insight into the view
of agency in Ghana as not only a personal attribute, but also as a negoti-
ated and jointly shared intentional action. The shared intention enables
persons in this particular cultural context to act in that world together
intentionally, in a coordinated and cooperative fashion, and to achieve
collective goals (see Schweikard & Schmid, 2013). Agency of persons in
Ghana does not originate in independent autonomous self, neither does it
only result from one’s own desires, intentions and choices. Agency
(normatively good actions) in this cultural milieu originates in interde-
pendent self, reflecting culturally constructed patterns of society and
individuals’ relational connectedness with the family in which they are
embedded. In the communal worldview, the world is experienced as per-
ceptually available to a plurality of agents (such as the individual, the
extended family and cultural institutions), and identity is never separable
from their sociocultural environment (see Adjei, 2016a). Agency and
personhood, thus, extend into the social as a relational unit in a systemic
web of social meaning. That is, the conceptual dichotomy between the
individual (personality) and the social in the cultural context of Ghana is
indistinguishable because the individual is ontologically part of the
social firmament (Adjei, 2015b).
The communal understanding of who a person and his actions are
in Ghana is contrary to the Western construction of identity and self
that is believed to be located in the internal properties of inherently
separate particles (Adams & Dzokoto, 2003). Persons in Ghana exist
as individuals, as members of a group and as members of a commu-
nity, all of which are constantly interacting and inter-penetrating one
another (Adjei, 2016a). There is an emphasis on the externality of
Adjei 7
self-positioning in this cultural context, where the ‘other’ person and
social institutions such as the extended family gain precedence over
and above the individual self and choices (Adjei, 2017b). The social
positioning of the self in Ghana is very central to the understanding of
intentional actions of battered women. It provides the broader frame
of reference by which behavioural choices and personal agency of
battered women in negotiating the decision to stay in or leave an abusive
relationship are understood.
The Social Activity of Marriage and
Divorce in Ghana
There are three main legally and customarily recognised types of marriages
in Ghana as defined by their contractual mode: marriage under the
ordinance, marriage under the Mohammed ordinance and marriage under
customary law (Nukunya, 2003). The customary and the Mohammedan
marriages are celebrated under customary laws of a given ethnic com-
munity or Mohammedan laws respectively, while ordinance marriage
could be either civil or church wedding (Nukunya, 2003). The entry and
exit process of marriage in Ghana is not a psychologically or an individu-
ally given activity, it involves group negotiations, solemnity and institu-
tionalisation (see Adjei, 2016b). Despite the general assumption that
marriage is between two consenting individuals, marriage in Ghana is a
group affair involving families rather than individuals (Nukunya, 2003).
This is because the two individuals (a man and a woman) do not give
themselves into marriage, their families do. One of the fundamental prac-
tices in all marriages in Ghana is the payment of bride price, popularly
called ‘tiri nsa’, according to which the family of a prospective husband,
through negotiations and consultations, present money and/or gifts to the
family of a prospective bride.
The dissolution of marriage in Ghana is also not an individually
given intentional activity; it involves solemnity, institutionalisation
and social recognition (Assimeng, 1999). For example, among the Akans
of Ghana, if parties to a marriage, particularly customary marriage,
decide to end the relationship, it usually goes through the customary
process of ‘nkurobo’ where each party gives his/her case in the pres-
ence of ‘badwafo’ (assembled witnesses or members) from the two
families. If an aggrieved party to the marriage makes a good case,
assigning a recognised reason entitling him or her to obtain a divorce,
8 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
the assembled witnesses confirm the wife’s or husband’s decision to
obtain a divorce (Danquah, 1928). Parties married under the ordinance
may appear before a court of competent jurisdiction for the purpose of
effecting a legal divorce. However, the party seeking divorce is custom-
arily required to go through the traditional process of marriage dissolution
by returning the ‘tiri nsa’ to the family of the man or the woman before
official dissolution of the marriage is granted. Essentially, the process
of marriage and divorce in Ghana is socially and jointly organised,
with profound implications for the identity and behavioural choices of
particularly the two parties to the marriage. The social and customary
activities of marriage and divorce in Ghana are significant in under-
standing how battered women negotiate their intentions in violent
relationships in Ghana.
Cultural Grounding of Battered Women’s
Stay/Leave Decisions in Ghana
Thoughts and actions of individuals are not private or self-contained
cognitive activities; they are regulated by normative systems, and the
source of psychological experiences is out there in the social world
(Moghaddam, 2010). As discussed earlier, both marriage and divorce
processes in Ghana are not personal intentional actions, rather, they are
group and social decisions (socially intentioned), which take into account
the normative expectations of society and the family. This view has
received empirical support. For example, research on IPV in Ghana has
reported that battered women subordinate personal decisions and choices
to the requirements of the collective value orientation of the extended
family to remain entrapped in violent marital relationship (Adjei, 2017a).
Though people generally demonstrate personal agency, Adjei (2017a)
found that battered women in Ghana exercise personal agency in a given
relational context, and as partly constituted by family relationships and
identities. Thus, stay/leave actions of battered women in violent marriages
are negotiated with and impelled by others, in a relationship and interac-
tions with contextualised others. He provided an empirical account of one
of the female participants (victims) to exemplify the social intentionality
of battered women’s agency in Ghana:
I don’t think I will feel ashamed [for leaving him]. Of course, people will
always talk about me but I will not mind, after all it is my life not theirs.
Adjei 9
But the problem is that I cannot take this decision alone, I have to consult
with my family because I didn’t give myself into marriage; they did. (Rural
victim 5; Adjei, 2017a, p. 742)
While the victim positions the self as highly agentive, as a person who
comes across as in control and self-determined, the account also indicates
how battered women in Ghana are positioned (influenced) by the expec-
tation of the extended family or its values. The victim emphasises social
positioning over and above her personal positioning. The externality of
the victim’s self-positioning clearly evinces the fact that, within the
interdependent context of Ghana, agency is construed and exercised as a
cultural phenomenon, in the sense that its quality or character depends
on the quality and character of social relations in which an individual
participates (see Ratner, 2000). The customary consultative decision-
making process between a victim of abuse and her extended family is a
form of negotiated agency, in which battered women engage in joint
decision-making by being responsive to expectations and demands of
social others and their family of embeddedness (Adjei, 2017a).
The primacy of victims’ family identity and their subsequent alignment
with the familial values to remain in abusive marriage is consistent with
the view of human agency as a social phenomenon, dependent upon social
relations for its realisation. As shown in the extract earlier, the extended
family is viewed as the ‘great self’ (see also Bedford & Hwang, 2003), to
which battered women appear obligated. That is, though battered women
in Ghana demonstrate intentional behaviour, they do so in a coordinated
and cooperative fashion, and in tune with their relational embeddedness to
achieve collective goals. As pointed out earlier, in Ghana, a woman is
given to marriage by her extended family and for this reason, ending a
marital relationship, even if the relationship is abusive, is not a decision
battered women can make alone in free will without reference to the family.
As Adjei (2017a) empirically asserts, battered women have the moral duty
to protect the identity and image of the extended family (the great self)
against any divorced-induced negative social evaluations that may either
threaten family image or portend bad omen for its members. In much the
same way as marriage involves members of the family, the intentional
behaviour of divorce is also not free-agent behaviour; it involves prior
negotiations with the family and contextualised others. As has been argued,
the content of the repertoire of socially possible actions (agency) of a per-
son is bounded by taken-up positions that, in turn, implicitly limits how
much of what is logically possible for a given person to say or do at a
certain moment in a particular context.
10 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
The Co-existence of Battered Women’s
Agency and Victimisation
While asserting personal sense of self and agency, an indication of
person-to-world direction of agency, the tendency of battered women in
Ghana is to acquiesce to and align the self with the value orientations of
the extended family, suggesting a world-to-person direction of control.
For example, one of the responses of female victims in Adjei’s (2017a)
study demonstrates the co-existence of intentional action (agency) in an
abusive relationship and battered women’s relational embeddedness:
I couldn’t take his behaviour any longer and reported him to the police because
I thought that might change things for the better. But the family advised me to
withdraw the case and said I should avoid reporting every single incident to
the police. I listened to them and withdrew. (Urban victim 4, p. 744)
As the account suggests, agency—intentional behaviour of battered
women (such as reporting abuse)—is both constituted by self and con-
strained by family relationships. Apparently, in relation to stay/leave
actions, battered women in Ghana do purposefully initiate intentional
action aimed at resisting abuse or changing their predicament, but they
may not function effectively in judgement and choice without prior
negotiations with the extended family. Thus, an intentional act of divorce,
in the face of abuse or personal pain, becomes depersonalised and a
jointly negotiated activity (agency) between individual victims of abuse
and the extended family (Adjei, 2017a), to the extent that the expecta-
tions of the latter may prevail. This reflects the sense of self in Ghana
as enmeshed in a communal network of influences with rights and
obligations to this network of social relations (Adjei, 2016a). The decision
to leave an abusive marriage cannot be taken alone in free will—it
involves interpersonal-consensus that takes into account personal
agency of victims and the shared beliefs (intentions) of the extended
family (Adjei, 2017a).
Whether they are in subordinate or dominant positions, humans do act
assertively, but they act within historically produced social relations
(Semaan, 2004). To this end, battered women in Ghana can be said to
resist abuse in ways that illustrate the co-existence of their agency and
relational embeddedness (Adjei, 2017a). Personal meanings and experi-
ences do not transcend normative cultural patterns, they emerge from
distinctive experiences with a given people in a given social situation
Adjei 11
(Ratner, 2000). Although people are intentional agents and are highly
active in the process of self-making, ‘the materials available for writing
one’s own story are a function of our public and shared notions of
personhood’ (Oyserman & Markus, 1998, p. 123). If (battered women’s)
agency is reduced to and conceptualised as merely an individual wish or
action, it is as inexpressible and impotent as thought without language
and intelligence without performance (Ratner, 2000). Accordingly, if
battered women’s agency has a social character that depends upon social
relations, it is not intrinsically creative, fulfilling or empowering. It only
becomes so by creating social relations that will promote these charac-
teristics. Using language to analogously illustrate the social intention-
ality of agency, Ratner (2000) argues that everyone possesses language
ability and everyone expresses some language to some degree. However,
the specific kind and level of language that a person expresses depends
upon her position in a specific cultural context. Similarly, he further
argues, ‘agency is merely a potential (capacity) which must be developed
through social intercourse into a specific form’ (p. 426).
The view of battered women’s agency as a socially intentional behav-
iour resonates with Bourdieu’s (2000) concept of habitus, which repre-
sents intentional action that is socially constrained. According to
Bourdieu (2000), the human agent is never completely the subject of his
practices, instead, the beliefs which are the basis of engagement in the
game find their way into apparently the most lucid intentions. Similarly,
the agency of victims of IPV in Ghana always operates within and
through a social structure. The agentive actions and experiences of
battered women in this context are profoundly embedded in the cultural
habitus (i.e., beliefs and values) and in resulting psychological functions
and behaviour. This does not in any way suggest that the relational
agency of battered women in Ghana is unhealthy or regarded as the second-
best way of being. The prescriptive models of self and well-being that
inform mainstream psychological science are not naturally superior, but
rather, they reflect androcentric conception of self and agency (Kurtis &
Adams, 2015). Social intentionality seems to be a basic characteristic of
humans, and it is exemplified in social referencing, joint attention and
imitation (Ratner, 2000). People’s actions are not freely constructed but
rather, they are guided by the socially built-up habitus (Ratner, 2000).
African gendered life essentially involves collaboration, negotiation
and compromise (Nnaemeka, 1998). African feminist scholarship has
established the notion of womanhood and its related concepts as a kind
of unity and collective strength (i.e., agency) amongst African women.
12 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
It shifts the focus away from individualist drive or agency and empha-
sises and recognises agency within a collectivity and the important place
and contribution of all those who constitute the collectivity such as
kinship, ethnic groupings and the family (Morell & Ouzgane, 2005).
An uncritical acknowledgement of the self as the dynamic centre of its
universe apparently reduces behavioural actions of battered women to
individual (intra-psychic) level of analysis at the expense of more structural
(interpersonal) explanations. As Adjei (2017a) points out, given the
conventional psychological understanding of humans as active subjects
(agents), an apparent acquiescent behaviour of battered women in Ghana,
without critical reflection of the context, could be (mis)interpreted as
lack of agency. The view that battered women should act on their own to
extricate themselves from abusive intimate relationships overlook the
social intentionality of agency, the fact that ‘agency is oriented toward,
depends upon, and is constrained by social activities, institutions, condi-
tions, and movements’ (Ratner, 2000, p. 421).
The decision to leave abusive marital relationship in Ghana is
inspired and constrained by culturally organised meanings and institu-
tionalised activities of marriage and divorce. The moral behaviour in
marriage in traditional Ghanaian society (e.g., whether or not a woman
should leave her marriage) may depend on the social expectations of the
community rather than personal choice (Adjei, 2015c). This view
embodies the cultural affordances of self in interdependent cultural con-
texts where the functional unit of conscious reflections of people may
cease to be the individual and his/her private motives. Rather, their
sense of belongingness to the social relation may be so significant and
strong that it may be reasonable to think of people’s relationality as the
primary unit of consciousness (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Thus, theo-
retical explanations of battered women’s agency that are solely rooted
in individual psychology, such as personality traits, self-determination
or self-efficacy beliefs, may be problematic in these cultural contexts
where implicit and explicit theories about the self and agency are
socially anchored and understood. In this context, the collective or nor-
mative system, assimilated through socialisation processes, becomes
the main source of the social and psychological experiences of people
(see Moghaddam, 2010). Thus, society, the collective, in a way enters
into each individual, and the psychological experiences of people
belonging to the collective are through this entering. There are many
assumptions of the collective we take on through this ‘entering’ that are
never questioned (Moghaddam, 2010, p. 472), because they are the
Adjei 13
moral hinges (Wittgenstein, 1972) or contingent universals (Shweder,
1991) that help the smooth running of the social order.
The social intentionality view of battered women’s stay/leave deci-
sion reflects the subject position view and the conjoint model of agency,
both of which articulate the view that socially important others and
institutions (such as the family), and human’s relationship with those
others and institutions are focal and necessary for normatively good
actions. The agency of battered women in Ghana should be understood
as part of a dialectic that is full of contradictions and tensions rather
than construed as polar opposites where agency and victimisation are
each known by the absence of the other (see Mahoney, 1994; Semaan,
2004). To equate staying in abusive relationship with battered women’s
passivity or lack of agency (failing to act on one’s own behalf) will be a
one-sided focus on agency which may leave little conceptual space for
discovering the subtle and ambivalent ways by which abused women
negotiate differential power relations and structural constraints in inter-
personal relationships (Davis, 1983).
Conclusion
This article has shown that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a
social intentionality. The social intentionality of battered women’s stay/
leave decisions embodies the normative meaning systems and cultural
affordances of marriage and divorce in Ghana, in which normatively
good actions require the consideration and anticipation of the perspec-
tives of social others. For example, it is the family of a woman that tra-
ditionally gives its daughter in marriage, the same reason for which bride
price is paid by a prospective suitor and his family to a bride’s family
(Adjei, 2017a; Nukunya, 2003). The process of marriage and divorce in
Ghana is based on shared belief systems and value orientations mani-
fested through negotiations, concessions and compromises made by
individuals and the family.
A person’s collective identity is the most significant and psychologi-
cally primary component of self-concept and, therefore, it is impossible to
form personal identity without a collective identity to serve as a reference
point (Taylor, Bougie, & Caouette, 2003). Victims of IPV in Ghana modify
or balance personal intentions in order to comply with social expectations
and values of their families, and to promote an experience of embedded
interdependence. Balancing personal agency with social embeddedness
14 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
departs from the all-agent or all-victim conceptual dichotomy of agency,
where a person is either an agent if he/she is not a victim and a victim if he/
she is not an agent (Mahoney, 1994). Rather than perceived as helpless
victims, lacking in agency, battered women in Ghana act in ways that
illustrate the co-existence of agency and relationality. To ask why battered
women stay in abusive relationships may have an unintended implication
that they are impervious to contextual factors, or that they are expected to
ignore the sociocultural constraints that impact personal behaviour and
choices (see Adjei, 2017b). It may be an important oversight to explain
battered women’s intentional behaviour in violent relationships only from
their private internal space and motives without a critical reflection of their
interdependency, social embeddedness and normative meaning systems
that circumscribe people’s thought and sense of personhood.
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Author’s Biosketch
Stephen Baffour Adjei, PhD, is a Social/Cultural and Human
Development Psychologist. He is a lecturer at the Department of
Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty of Education and Communication
Sciences, College of Technology Education, Kumasi, University of
Education, Winneba, Ghana. He applies his research to understand the
interactional complexities between culture, context and psychological
processes, with a particular emphasis on interpersonal violence, human
development and learning, agency and identity. He has taught, carried
out research and directed programmes at universities in Africa and
overseas, including University of Aarhus, Denmark, and Norwegian
18 Psychology and Developing Societies 30(1)
University of Science and Technology, Norway. He has published
several scholarly articles some of which have appeared in such inter-
national peer-reviewed journals as Journal of Family Violence, Journal
of Interpersonal Violence, Psychological Studies, Psychology and Developing
Societies, The Qualitative Report and Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment
& Trauma.
