Fighting Back: Providing Ghana’s Women and Girls a Place to Turn
As survivors of assault, rape and forced marriages, in rural Ghana, it is often difficult for women and girls to find a place to turn for justice and solace. Over the past few decades, Ghana’s women have recognized the need to step up protective measures for the country’s most vulnerable members and provide them with a place to turn.
With ActionAid’s assistance, a multi-prong attack on domestic violence has been launched leading to educational programs in schools, support groups, and work with a radio station and police unit.
Over the past seven years in Wa – the capital of Ghana’s Upper West Region -- ActionAid has provided a domestic violence unit of the police with money to operate and renovate two buildings for survivors of domestic violence -- both women and men --to come and file police reports.
Alex Amenyah, the regional coordinator for the domestic violence and victim support unit of the police, explained that his unit focuses on cases of rape, assault, incest, kidnapping, child trafficking, female genital mutilation, molestation and more.
“Women have started coming out but social pressures, most of the time, cause them to come back and withdraw it,” Chief Police Inspector Susana Dery said. She explained that even though more women will file the initial crime report, when they return to their community, their families and friends will convince them to withdraw their initial complaint.
To help shift the community’s views around domestic violence, the police unit is going into schools to educate children on a host of crimes including female genital mutilation and child abduction.
Members of the "Widows and Orphans Movement" meet in Ghana's Upper East region.
At the Tampaala School in Ghana’s Jirapa district, a group of parents gathered to discuss progress, as well as hurdles standing in their children’s way of an education. One woman complained that girls are “abducted without the consent of their parents” from school. Once taken, the girls are forced to marry.
“We draw attention to these practices that they think are lawful,” Dery explained. “We hold them accountable.”
Part of the educational campaign against domestic violence involves a partnership between ActionAid and a radio station that reaches homes around Ghana’s Upper West region.
“We inform and educate people on their rights” though different programming, said Chris Alalbla, the regional director for Radio Upper West FM 90.01 and 94 FM. “Women and children are the most vulnerable in our society and we are trying to help them through such education.”
Such programming includes discussions about domestic violence and problems facing women every day. Dealing with the larger picture of empowering women, for example, the radio station launched a “political empowerment” program where women from rural areas have traveled to Wa, sometimes spent the night for free in a hotel and meet to discuss how they can become more involved in the policital process.
As women in Ghana mobilize and stand up against domestic violence, organizations such as the “Widows and Orphans Movement” have been formed. Widows are often denied their husband’s properties such as cattle, animals, land and homes when he dies. In the early 1990’s ActionAid helped mobilize the Widows and Orphans Movement and the group has now flourished to130 widows groups made up of 11,565 women.
“When we get together we share,” said Betty Ayagiba, the national director for the movement. “We educate women on human rights when they lose their husbands.”
Ayagiba explained that the prevalence of polygamy in northern parts of Ghana can be a challenge for a woman when her husband dies.
“She can be asked to marry the late-husbands brother to keep the children coming,” Ayagiba said. A woman, she added, can also be accused of witchcraft when her husband dies and forced to publically strip off her cloths and drink a concoction to prove she is innocent.
“There is a real change now,” Ayagiba said. “We have given [widows] loans and they are farming. Now they can support their children so they can they can go to school.”
With outreach efforts from the police department, radio station and groups like the Widows and Orphans Movement, many women in Ghana said things are improving for them. However, more work remains in front of them.
From the police department’s perspective, they said money remains a challenge for women who are raped. In order to prosecute their attacker, a woman must pay the equivalent of $30 for a doctor to sign a form acknowledging the crime. Without the money and the doctor’s signature, the police must drop their investigation for lack of evidence.
“Victims are not given free medical care and it is hard to get evidence” without the doctor’s signature, Dery said.
In addition to working with ActionAid on a funding plan that will cover the rape kit costs for victims, the domestic violence unit in Wa is pushing to set up a safe house for women to take temporary refugee after they have been abused. Currently, Dery explained, when a woman is battered by her husband she has no where else to go except back to him. By building and staffing a safe house, abused women would have a few days to figure out what step to take next, while allowing their family time to cool down.
Please join Ghana and ActionAid’s efforts to end domestic violence.