The Relevance of National and International Laws for the Protection of the Rights of Women and Children in Ghana: A Critical Look at the Trokosi System in Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper demonstrates that the rights of women and children are not being protected effectively in Ghana. It argues that although Ghana has laws such as the 1992 Constitution, a number of international human rights laws that Ghana had ratified to protect the rights of women and children, and the Criminal Code (Amendment) Act, 1998, trokosi which discriminates against women and children is being practiced in the country. The paper attempts to answer why: (a) Ghanaian women and children continue to be oppressed in spite of Ghana’s robust domestic and international laws that protect them? (b) the government does not enforce the trokosi law?, and (c) the 1992 Constitution has not been effective in eliminating violence against women and children Ghana? The paper anchors the trokosi practice in the paradigms of cultural relativism and universalism, and discusses the (i) presence of a strong patriarchal framework and the family structure which favours men over women in Ghana, the (ii) the secrecy of traditional religious practices, particularly, the trokosi rituals; (iii) the possible irrelevance of international conventions to Ghana’s cultural and political situation; and (iv) the internal dynamics of Ghanaian politics. The paper concludes that trokosism persists in Ghana because of the conflict between culture and religious norms on the one hand and positive laws on the other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".