Ugh...

Sorry I haven’t written for the past two weeks! I came down with chicken pox and so that put me out of commission for a straight week. It’s not exactly easy to be mobile with a bunch of red sores on you, and having people wonder if you’ve been eating something bad.

Anyway, before that happened I started getting down to work in both devising the court watch program that I’ll be overseeing in the next few months. That involved meeting with Irene Oppong at the DOVVSU (the domestic violence sections of the police force in Ghana) and writing a letter to a magistrate asking for clearance to attend court sessions. Writing to a magistrate is a bit of an odd thing, since I’d never even drafted a letter to one, much less to ask permission for something. It was interesting that WiLDAF already has an idea of who to contact, and so I just had to outline the skeleton of my project and the premise of it – it illustrates that at least some of the judiciary is taking this as a serious problem.

That was backed up by my visit with Irene at DOVVSU. The trip to the police station was somewhat challenging for me, since I had no idea where it was exactly, but now I have a better idea of where it is in the city. The police station is crowded, noisy, dark, and very hot – not the most ideal place to bring a victim of domestic violence, particularly since police officers are often overworked and trying to oversee more than one thing at a time. That was the case with my meeting with Irene – every three minutes she jumped up to talk to someone else in one of the local dialects, so the flow of conversation was very disjointed. It gave me a sense, though, of just what kinds of difficulties the officers in this country face – on the first two floors there were well over one hundred civilians and maybe ten or twenty police officers at most. That kind of workload, that kind of environment makes it hard to try and solve crimes, particularly since law enforcement in itself is so chaotically busy. Also, when one considers that the police make little over three or four dollars a day (and in Accra, that really doesn’t go all that far), it makes one wonder about the incentive to work hard, or worse yet, to stand up to corruption.

Irene outlined many problems with trying to enforce the Domestic Violence Act which I found very interesting. Whilst she said that the Act was substantively quite a good piece of legislation, it was the mechanics of enforcement that were extremely difficult. Trying to convince people to lodge complaints, or to further carry their issue to a later stage in court, was especially different. I haven’t yet spoken to anyone at court or seen a court case, but I have an idea I’ll be seeing this kind of problem. In South Africa, it was reported that absenteeism of parties to the courtroom represented one of the greatest challenges to actually enforcing the act, primarily because things such as protection orders required service on the receiving party in order to take effect. In Ghana, I can see it being even moreso, since in Ghanaian court I’m not one hundred percent sure if domestic violence is viewed as a criminal or as a family matter. South African courts already outlined that problem, and there is a strict characterization of domestic violence as a criminal matter. Since Ghanaian court emphasizes reconciliation and makes means such as mediation available for offenses lacking a certain severity, does that mean that domestic violence has more of a social, more of a civil mandate? And, if so, when people fail to show up, what do courts do? South African courts often try to proceed without the parties present, but that’s because they have a strict mandate that the action is to be tried by the state (due to their characterization of criminal law); with Ghana, I’m not sure what will happen, whether an action can still proceed in the absence of parties. It makes it very tough, then, to find ways to encourage victims of domestic violence to not just make their statements, but to go through the whole court procedure, especially if they feel that the state may not be trying to represent them, but make them go up against their domestic partner in some kind of ‘grudge-match’ to determine whether protection orders are necessary. An interesting issue, indeed.

I also got to go to the launch of Ghana’s Millennium Development Goals Shadow Report, which tries to detail the progress Ghana has been making toward the MDGs - since it is 2008 and the goals are supposed to be reached by 2015, it was sort of a ‘halfway progress report’. Instead of being a comprehensive seminar on what Ghana does need to do and what it has accomplished, it was a lot more self-congratulation about what great work the committee does, and some discussion of what Ghana has done to reach some of the goals. What I found very interesting was when people were invited to ask questions of the ‘panel of experts’ (whom were all some sort of doctor or pastor or whatever), they firstly limited the number of questions to three, which I thought was self-defeating since I thought the greatest questions could arise from discussion and not just straight agenda issues. Then, when some schoolchildren decided to ask questions (which I thought was great), they asked strong questions and I don’t think their questions got answered. What instead came out was what I call a UPS, a Universal Political Speech, which obfuscates and takes focus away from the question rather than answering it. For example:

Student Q: You emphasize that children’s education is important, however you do not make any emphasis about the infrastructure that children need. For example, transportation – many of us have to take tro-tro (the Ghanaian version of a bus, but it is a *slow* bus) or walk to school, which can take upwards of a few hours each way. The distances to school can discourage some of my brothers or sisters (in Africa, they really get into the habit of calling colleagues this, which is very charming, I find). What do you say about trying to increase road availability, or better yet, making school buses available for children?
“Head of Ghana MDG progress committee”: That’s a great question. By one of the students, at that. Can we have a hand of applause for this student? (applause) Now, your question is so good and my answer is that we all have to sacrifice. The MDGs aren’t for one person to achieve, they’re not for the government to achieve, they’re for everyone to sacrifice, old and young and students. I actually have a story for you: back when I was going to school, all of us had to walk to school. And it was five miles away, and let me tell you this: when I got to university, I was so good at running I was my university’s long distance runner! (more applause as he sits down from his “answer”)

Do note, this wasn’t even a politician, this was an eminent researcher at the University of Ghana, who headed this committee – it’s not like I could see any overt political agenda, but maybe there is one. As it is, it does make me pause when I think that the message to children is “sacrifice” – sure, sacrifice is important and it’s key that everyone does things, but seriously, if children aren’t able to obtain sufficient education where will they go? Everyone was applauding how great this professor was for becoming a distance runner in university and whatnot, but I was far less impressed, because he failed to even try and address the question, even if it is to say that nothing is forthcoming and here’s a good reason why, instead of talking about sacrifice.

Let’s put this into perspective somewhat: the head of the committee was someone in his sixties, which means that when he was going to school it was in the fifties, at the birth of Ghana as a nation at best. Back then, there were no standard graduation exams to enter university for Ghana, and I’ve seen the ones they now give and they’re really hard given the standard of the students I’ve seen. To pass the exams, one needs to study – now, if they have fifteen pounds of books on their back when “jogging” the five miles back, that’s likely to take a longer time, and I’ll give them an hour or so to jog back. So, they get home at four. The sun sets at six, and there are likely to be chores at home to do. Thus, when they start to study, there’s probably no light and if they live in the villages, there’s no electricity. How easy is it to study trigonometry by I dunno, very limited firelight? Not to mention, there is a large rainy season in Ghana which might even complexify matters! Thus, bright answer professor, but the simple answer is that if you want to bring people to a certain educational standard, the standards have risen compared to where you were, so you are going to likely need to make things more available for students in order for them to actively explore these educational possibilities. I’m not sure if I’ll get lots of agreement on this, but I gave this answer an F even though it got the largest round of applause (even if I think most of it came from the rest of the “panel of distinguished speakers”).

I’m interested to see the shadow report, though. It’s apparently available somewhere in the building I work in (the Christian Council of Ghana) but I haven’t been there to pick it up (for obvious reasons). As it was, I guess the camera got some pretty good shots of me looking intent (though that was mostly because my arms weren’t able to move since they were both ultimately very sore, which is apparently an early symptom of chicken pox) since I got calls the day after from my coworkers saying I was on the news. That, or well, when trying to look for the most striking images in Ghana, look for the Chinese guy who (seemingly) randomly is present at these events, eh?

Finally, while I’ve been on my back, I’ve done some research and I’m getting really interested. My project, while it looked sort of straightforward (and still looks that way), is growing much more interesting, since it is really taking a polycentric approach to looking at domestic violence through the many lenses it can be portrayed. Hopefully, I’ll be able to publish my reports and then everyone can see them in the end!