There is a growing body of research which suggests that victims of intimate partner violence (IPV; mostly women) continue to remain in abusive relationships. Many of the Western psychological theorisations focus on battered women’s personal dispositions and/or the self-creating (individualistic) view of agency to explain why victims remain in violent relationships. These studies seem to suggest that staying in a violent relationship is a personal decision that victims make in free will, and that victims who continue to stay fail to act on their own behalf. Drawing upon the Ghanaian communal conceptualisation of personhood and the social norms of marriage and divorce, this study questions the individualistic theorisations of battered women’s decisions to stay in or leave abusive relationships. The article argues that battered women’s agency in negotiating the stay/leave decisions in abusive relationships does not only originate in an independent autonomous self, nor constituted by a person’s internal motives, but also, and even primarily, it is culturally grounded and dependent on social relations for its realisation. The article concludes that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a social intentionality, in the sense that battered women’s intentional behaviour in marital relationships is both constituted by self and constrained by their relational embeddedness.

中文翻译：

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加纳受虐妇女局的社会意图

越来越多的研究表明，亲密伴侣暴力行为（IPV；主要是女性）的受害者继续保持虐待关系。西方许多心理学理论都着重于受虐妇女的个人性格和/或代理的自我创造（个人主义）观点，以解释受害人为何仍保持暴力关系。这些研究似乎表明，保持暴力关系是受害者自由决定的个人决定，继续留下来的受害者不能代表自己行事。该研究利用加纳的人格共同概念以及婚姻和离婚的社会规范，质疑受虐妇女决定保留或虐待性伴侣的个人主义理论。该文章认为，受虐妇女代理机构在虐待关系谈判中的停留/休假决定时，不仅起源于一个独立的自主自我，也不是由一个人的内部动机构成的，而且，甚至主要是，它是基于文化的，并且依赖于社会实现关系。文章的结论是，加纳受虐待妇女的代理人具有社会意向性，从某种意义上说，受虐妇女在婚姻关系中的故意行为既由自我构成，又受其关系嵌入的制约。