“I” Love “You”: Issues of Love and Domestic Abuse in Accra, Ghana

Abstract

Domestic abuse remains a lingering predicament of romantic relationships. However, it appears that the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) spiked a resurge in domestic abuse globally. In Ghana, the stress associated with the pandemic and its concurrent social distancing and safety protocols partly aggravated domestic abuse. Both the traditional and social media repeatedly reported cases of all shades of domestic abuse. For a very long time, researchers have provided plausible reasons, including patriarchal social and cultural norms, women’s lack of autonomy over their bodies, and economic and cultural lives as major drivers of domestic abuse. Focusing on the phenomenon of the pandemic as a major entry phenomenon in holding the gendered status quo of domestic abuses, I discuss the issue of intimate partner violence by interrogating the issues of love. As I shall discuss, “I love you” generally serves as the entry protocol for initiating a romantic relationship. And yet, intimate partner violence remains a major fault line of romantic relationships. Deploying ethnographic data, involving interviews with students at the University of Ghana in 2019 and 2022, I argue that the issues of “love” in romantic relationships are complicated by their transactional undercurrents. Thus, in addition to all the reasons and concurrent measures offered to remedy domestic abuses, I argue that if the expression of romantic “love” could be routinised as part of human ontological social deficiency, anchored on human inherent dignity, the need for the other may stem the tide against othering as susceptible for abuses.