Women as Actors in Violence against Women: An Analysis of Woman-to-Woman Violence within the Marriage Space

This article examines violence against women in marriage, and particularly, violence exacted or instigated by women in a relative position of power against less privileged ones, or what I refer to as woman-to-woman violence. This is carried out by paying critical attention to the network of relations and power dynamics between women and men within the marriage space, my designation for the physical space of the home, and the concatenation of relations that characterize marriage in the context of northern Ghana. The article draws on feminist ethnographic data collected in a rural settlement in north-western Ghana. Based on the analysis of my ethnographic data, I argue that as the Dagaaba notion of a family entails more than a nuclear family of wife, husband, and children, critical attention not only needs to be paid to woman-to-woman violence, but also to a broader scope of actors, including other-than-human entities in theorizing marital violence beyond the spouses in this and similar settings. Woman-to-woman violence can be as deleterious, if not more so, as male spousal violence and yet it has not received much attention in studies on marital violence particularly in the contexts of Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa more broadly.