ABSTRACT

Title: Child Marriage in Ghana: A Critical Analysis of Victims’ and Service Providers’ Perceptions and Experience on Support.

Author: Samuel Logoniga Gariba
Keywords: Child marriage, stakeholders, Intersectionality, Survivors, Northern Ghana, Emancipation

This is a participatory practice research of stakeholders’ views on support to victims of child marriages in Ghana. The purpose of the study is to explore how victims’ and service providers’ perceived and experience child marriage support. It seeks to unravel the support available to victims and the challenges social workers, and law enforcement agents face in helping victims and others at risk of child marriages to escape.
The study purposively sampled 14 stakeholders from the northern part of Ghana where the practice is prevalent. The study drawn on in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight victims, four social workers and two police officers. The social constructivist grounded theory and reflexive thematic analysis inspired by intersectionality lens were used to analyze the data. The analysis was done iteratively by comparing the emerging themes or discoveries to the reviewed literature, existing theories, and concepts.
The study asserts that, pervasive contextual and cultural hierarchies interwoven with other factors to keep victims in a state of vulnerability. It also emerged that survivors get less support from social workers and police officers, who are supposed to be front line agents facilitating support. Again, interferences from religious, traditional, and political actors makes social workers and police officers fight against child marriage practices ineffective in Ghana. As a result, the girls have been left on their own to battle their way out of the practice while the perpetrators remain unpunished.