Gender-based Violence in Ghanaian Parliamentary Discourse: A Corpus-assisted Discourse Analysis

Studying gender-based violence (GBV) in country-specific parliamentary discourses can provide legislative perspectives and global understanding of the experience of GBV and the fight against it. In Ghana, for instance, men are mostly seen as the default perpetrators of GBV, even though research shows that men also suffer from GBV. Thus, using a corpusassisted discourse studies (CADS) approach, this study investigates the discursive construction of GBV in parliamentary debates in Ghana, a leading democracy in West Africa. The study uses parliamentary debates as primary data and legislation on domestic violence and other related instruments as secondary data. Through concordances and collocation, we identify and examine how GBV is constructed in the parliamentary debates and how such GBV constructions relate to the expression of domestic violence in legislation. The study shows that the discourse around GBV centres on three main issues, namely: the forms of GBV, victims and perpetrators of GBV, and the fight against it. The analysis indicates that when MPs talk about GBV, they refer predominantly to violence against women and children, including domestic violence, wife beating, sexual violence, defilement, rape, physical assault, teenage pregnancy, child prostitution, child marriage and violence against women in politics; they are silent on violence against men. The MPs think that collective activism, education, achieving gender parity and a strong legal regime that severely punishes offenders are critical antidotes to GBV.