Travis Hirschi’s Social Control Theory (SCT): Yoruba Family - Value and Domestic Violence Against Married Women

: Objectives: Domestic violence against married women (DVAMW) is a major challenge facing many married women in family-relationships today. Its menace is not only altering the expected peaceful union and unity in family-settings but, equally, affecting most married-victims from performing their necessary roles or obligations in family-settings. The paper seeks to examine Yoruba family-values, Yoruba family-structure, and the Yoruba-culture, in details. Methods: The paper grounded in exploratory research, is anchored on Social Control Theory (SCT) and secondary data sourced through peer-reviewed journals, edited books, news magazines, and credible on-line resources to explore DVAMW as a culture off-shoot that is depriving, if not denying, most married women the expected love, support, satisfaction, socialization, and equity within the family system. Results: The paper finds that the patriarchal system entrenched in the Yoruba-culture gave married men undue preference and domination over married women while ‘socializing’ women to endure men’s physical, mental, and psychological violence in family-setting, especially. Conclusions: The paper concludes that couples should imbibe the spirit of love and oneness/unity to avoid any cultural, religious, family, or self-arrogated values that may likely promote DVAMW in family-settings. It is thus, recommended that spouses should focus more on how to understand and manage one another properly in order to have and enjoy a successful family-relationships, while the society should guide and guard against any value-system that may likely promote gender-inequality and, by extension, DVAMW in particular.


Introduction:
Family, as an essential social institution, should rather promote a peaceful union and unity between spouses in order to perform its basic social roles and obligations of equity, love, togetherness, procreation, and necessary child(ren)'s socialization in society (Fasoranti & Owagbemi, 2012).Thus, violence whose ember is often fanned by inconsistent actions and reactions should not find its way into any family-setting since spouses have different roles and statues assigned to them by both nature and society.The family-system enables human beings to organize and carry out important marital activities with legitimate rights to sexual access, procreation, child(ren)socialization, and organization of domestic chores in accordance with gender division of labour (Fasoranti & Owagbemi, 2012).Domestic violence (DV), being an emotional vilification or physical abuse of a partner by the other, mostly evolve from threat, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty among spouses (Adeyemo and Bamidele, 2016).Spouses' physical abuse and emotional deprivation are major pattern of DV often used to control a spouse or partner in a family-setting (Abakare, 2021;Olojede, Ibukunoluwa & Busayo, 2020).DV is more or less a major global malaise and human rights' issue involving all ages and sexes that is mostly phantom by the will to dominate others in a family-setting (Abdullahi, Cusairi &Abdullah, 2017).
The Yoruba's family-values system as an aspect of African culture was effectively, communally, socially, and, hierarchically structured to accommodate and reciprocate love and affection, among both the nuclear and extended family-members (Familusi & Ajayi 2019).The system was established as family and societal patterns of socialisation, to promote the ease of administering and enjoyment of immediate benefits within both the family and community at large (Familusi & Ajayi 2019).The value-system views the family as the smallest and foundational unit whose sanctioning and rewarding functions to impact the whole communal society.Thus, the family-values system combines both the nuclear and extended families/households occupying a large compound, with male-dominance, from a particular genealogy marrying women from other families of different genealogies and living together as one indivisible family (Shitta-Bey, 2014).Thus, the value-system promotes strong familyknitted bonds, where an individual member is mostly identified by the ancestral quarter/compound's name rather than the immediate parents' names.The Yoruba's family-values encourage a large extended-family or clan where each member possesses an apartment or more, either as a nuclear or polygynous family-member (Shitta-Bey, 2014, Fadipe, 1970).
The Yoruba system, like most African family-systems, gives men more preference over women.Thus, fathers, in most Yoruba-families, are always revered with authority and their words are commands to both their wives and children without any objection (Ishola,2016).The Yoruba's family-value system, like most ethnic groups in Nigeria, equally entrenches a patriarchal, organized, learned and created cultural pattern -made of knowledge, beliefs, morals, customs, arts, etc. -that place men above women both in the family and society at large.This, however, both encourages and equips most men with both power and the urge to always be in control of and dominate women from generation to generation (Ishola, 2016).
However, the patriarchal culture also maintains a family-value system that subjects and socialises most females into accepting and tolerating males' domination and control over women and children in the family as a moral and cultural norm which must not be challenged (Abdullahi, Cusairi &Abdullah, 2017).Thus, making most married women perceive and justify physical, emotional, and sexual control leading to abuse as male marital corrective rights towards females irrespective of the negative effects -physical, mental, and reproductive well-being (Iliyasu, et.al 2013;Chika, 2012;Ilika, 2005).
Wife battering and child abuse are mostly considered and accepted as both disciplinary and sanctioning measures in most Nigerian communities (Abayomi, 2014;Aihie, 2009).This, however, has exposed most married women to continuous battering and other domestic abuse on a daily basis, in Nigeria, mostly by the husbands or family-members though supposed to be their sources of protective cover (Abakare, 2021;Amnesty International Report, (AIR, 2012,).Thus, most women and females, are tremendously facing varying challenges as a result of gender-based stereotypes and culture approved discrimination that has systematically denied the females equitable or just access to opportunities, resources, assets, and services both in the consanguine and conjugal family (Egbo, 2021;Abakare, 2021;Olojede, Ibukunoluwa & Busayo 2020).Notwithstanding, some women still play crucial roles overall, in ensuring food-and nutrition-security, eradicating poverty, supporting and improving families' well-being, both socially and economically, despite series of their rights being violated (Egbo, 2021).With all these deprivations, women's effective contributions to the family Abayomi (2014) asserted that incidences of DVAMW still occur in most family-settings to further subjugate married women into accepting and conforming to the cultural coercive dictates of patriarchal in most African societies.
The cultural dictates that subject married women to continuous and persistence DV has become more appalling and irritating when husbands who are expected to love, care, and protect the interest of their wives have metamorphosed into horrible monsters perpetrating evil towards their immediate family-members (Ugowe, 2022).For instance, Adeyemo and Bamidele (2016), in a study conducted in Abuja, Nigeria, reported the ordeal of continuous loss of pregnancies by a mother of one who was brutally and constantly beaten-up by her always drunken husband.The authors also reported another case of a 34-year-old housewife battered by her husband such that she needed 26 stitches merely for breaking her fast with a piece of fish.The recent horrible and frightening death of Mrs. Osinachi Nwachukwu -a Nigerian gospel-singer -and that of Mercy -a 23-year-old woman with a ripped open stomach by her husband, in Plateau State, Nigeria, -are some of the reported heinous cases of DVAMW in Nigeria (Nanlong, 2022).These, however, are a mere tip of the monumental suffering that most married women are made to endure, albeit there may be many un-reported grave cases of DVAMW occurring in the society.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), 2013), cited by Olubunmi, Olatunji and Abiola, (2014), equally reported that one fifth of Nigerian married women and young ladies between 15 and 24 years as victim of DVAMW while, the CLEEN Foundation National Crime Victimization Survey, (NCVS, 2013) reported an increase in DVAMW from 21 percent in 2011 to 30 percent in 2013, as one-third of women are violated within the family, by their husbands.This, also, aligns with Abakare's (2021) argument that many Nigerian women and children are frequently in grave danger within the family that should have been their safest places of succour.How best can one describe such high degree of violent male-behaviour towards female's consequent to a family-value system that projects men as the head and cover over and above the family?Thus, DVAMW has become one of the age-long global phenomenon affecting most married women regardless of their race, age, sexual orientation, religion, or status that requires a timely ameliorative approach towards qualitative control and, ultimately, prevention.
Based on the above, some questions beg for urgent answers; How related is Social Control Theory to DVAMW?How has the Yoruba family-structure influenced DVAMW?What is the connection between culture and DVAMW in most societies?Therefore, this paper is set to apply Travis Hirschi's social control theory (SCT), examine Yoruba's family-value system and DVAMW.Also the paper aims at interrogating Yoruba family-structure, culture and DVAMW to understand it causes.

Method:
The paper anchors a theoretical research sourcing its secondary data through peer-reviewed journals, edited books, news magazines, and credible on-line resources.The secondary literature adopted seeks to explore and unravel the relevance of Social Control Theory in interrogating the Yoruba's family-value system in relation to DVAMW, Yoruba family-structure, and culture.The paper is nonetheless, unfolds as an exploratory study, relying more on secondary data than hitherto.

Social Control Theory, Yoruba's Value System, and Domestic Violence:
The primary goal of criminological discipline is to understand, explain, and create valid/accurate theories of both crime-causation and -prevention.The study adopted Social Control Theory (SCT) propounded by the American criminologist, Travis Hirschi in the late 1960s and recently used by Ogini (2020) to explain Yoruba's value-system and DVAMW.SCT is an off-shoot of rational choice approach, that views "human behaviour as being guided by a hedonistic principle or pleasure-seeking tendency".The theorist posits that criminal behaviour -e.g.DVAMW-most likely results from individuals who rejected or deviated from both informal and formal norms and /or laws.Thus, authority becomes essential to ameliorate and comprehend any criminality in the family-setting and society at large.
The theory emphasises human actions as the core values in every relationship what so-ever.Thus, human beings generally express unique behaviours and values in order to maintain individual and groups' interactions, in the family and society at large.The theory posits both individual and group behaviours as regularly the profound wellspring for satisfaction or compromised conflict-resolution which can only be controlled or promoted by a society's social control mechanism.Thus, the unequal power relationship, in the most family-settings, leading to domination and DVAMW is culturally created, and, thereby needing social control.The shocking and unacceptable human rights' violation that is becoming endemic in the country needs a proper corrective social control measure (Olojede, Ibukunoluwa & Busayo 2020;Gender in Nigeria Report (GNR), 2012).This in effect will orientated and enforced family bond to reduce if not prevent married womens' humiliation, torture and exploitation by husbands irrespective of the unequal statuses and roles (Anweting & Ogar 2018;Umukoro & Egbai 2016).
DVAMW is becoming a daily occurrence in the country because most families and societies condoned or are silent about it (Nanlong, (2022); Abakare, (2021); Amnesty International (AI), 2012).For instance, DVAMW that is mostly a coercive force or a form of power used by most men, either to harm, or enforce conformity or to control most married women in family-settings need to be checkmated by society's control system (Abraham, 2019;Powell,2011;Flury, Nyberg, & Riecher-Roosler2010). Individuals generally, engage in different activities for personal gain with lesser pain, unless restricted or refrained by moral directives or formal social control.Cultural norms and family-values that reduce unacceptable behaviour -DVAMW inclusive -family social ties, the socialization process, and the degree to which a society enforces social control in the family-setting and the society.Societal bonds and family ties may promote spouses' conformity to and, also, encourage acceptable social behaviour amidst people in a network of relationships; hence, diminishing all forms of DVAMW.
Social control can either be formal or informal.Formal social control mechanisms involve adequate policing and regular surveillance which may significantly reduce individual disorderliness as well as impacting the society generally.Informal control mechanisms mostly involve family social ties and mutual respect for each other inculcated in the socialisation process.While formal social control advocates a procedural justice system of adequate policing, courts' process, and correctional programs, the informal system is based on mutual respect, love, passion, perseverance, tolerance etc. expected to be maintained by recognized community/family-leaders in the society from time to time.Ogini, (2020) noted that an inappropriate social control system can account for deviant behaviour -e.g.DVAMW-more like a norm in Nigeria.Hence, the recent formal attention given DVAMW in Nigeria can be viewed from poor Social control mechanism, since communities now have little social control on the modern-day family-system.

Relevance of the Theory to the Study:
Yoruba culture is a social control system with ample social norms encouraging social bonding-i.e., we-feelings and affectionate closeness both within the family and the society.This, however, promotes and propagates a familyvalue with regards for every member's hospitality, sense of belonging, charity, and brotherhood.Yoruba ideology and cultural heritage are values infused, acculturated, internalised, and transposed generationally to maintain, protect, and preserve moral relevance in the society.Thus, the family institution generally imparts most members with positive and unique social values in order to protect both family and society interests.This popular familyvalue emanated from the society's cultural norms as passed from generation to generation, to strengthen the people's ideology about the family values rooted in the culture norms.It can, thus, be emphasized that Yoruba family-structure is a social control norm expected to guide and guard the family member's actions and inactions through proper socialization and effective internalization of the cultural norm.The Yoruba's family-values are an essential cultural aspect that are expected to control and regulate individual and group's behaviour.In like manner it can be strengthened towards instilling the proper family-value via socialization, internalization, and proper understanding in order to ameliorate, prevent, control or reduce DVAW effects on the family which is the paper's major focus.

The Yoruba Family Structure:
The structure of the Yoruba family system is quite distinct from the Western family-system that is mostly nuclear and closed.For instance, while the nuclear family-structure recognises only the immediate family-members while considering others as insignificant members.The extended-family, however, considers and recognizes every other member, such as uncles, aunties, nephews, nieces, grandmothers, grandfathers, mothers-in-law and fathersin-law, etc. as family (Familusi and Ajayi, 2019).This open family system is equally receptive as all family-members and even visitors are always welcome in the family with warm hospitality, to sponsoring neighbours' and relatives' children education while the closed family system is -Me and My Family system -that lacks the receptive and accommodative features in other family structure (Familusi and Ajayi, 2019).Thus, a family-member's adoption or consideration may not be limited to some necessary factors ranging from consanguinity, conjugal, birth, and descent.
The family-virtue of openness, affectionate closeness, and being one's brother's keeper (Fasoranti & Owagbemi 2012) where a clan is superintended by the family head and is supported by other members within the extended-family and their children.The family-system caters for the well-being of all its members and recognises all extended-family members as integral parts of the nuclear-family, thus, Omoregbe, (1998) as cited by Familusi and Ajayi, (2019), opined that the indigenous Yoruba family-system accepted all extended family-members -stepbrothers, half-brothers, half-sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews etc. as one relation i.e. brother or a sister.
The indigenous Yoruba family-value invariably, encourages and promotes oneness and togetherness among all the members (Dzurgba: 2007).Thus, the family becomes a strong social bulwark to all family members from the elderly to youths irrespective of gender.For instance, the strong protect the weak, the rich provide for the poor etc.The family-structure equally accords maximum respect to the elders as the hierarchical arrangement of seniority is based on age or birth date and not economic achievements (Familusi & Ajayi, 2019).Labour and rewards are usually considered and determined mostly by age and gender of the person concerned, just as inheritance is mostly shared hierarchically among the eldest to the youngest male-child in the family.It is equally unacceptable for any younger person-male or female-to address an elder without being preceded with the cultural designation "egbo mi" senior male or female, as the case may be, irrespective the age range difference.This, however, aids the proper organisation of and adequate mentoring in the family, as all family-members are socialized into conforming to such proper family arrangement (Familusi & Ajayi, 2019).
Among the Yorubas, everyone is expected to guard and guide family-values jealously, with integrity.This inevitably makes each member a protector of such moral value (Familusi & Ajayi, 2019).The young ones are socialized into internalising discipline and moral standards of the family.Thus, any moral deviant is liable to any elder's immediate discipline with no parents' objection as all elders have the authority to correct the younger ones.
Marriage and other celebration demands the whole family's contribution and support, most especially the elders.For instance, marriage ceremony and family issues are chiefly an affair of both the prospective families and not couples or spouses' decision alone.The introduction, and acceptance of a marital partner, choosing the date of celebration and the ceremony are jointly planned and executed by the extended-family members (Familusi and Ajayi, 2019).The family structure encourages family-members to bear the marital burden with the prospective spouses.The structure supports and protects marital and family relationships and assigns a well-defined role to the father, mother and children.
Basically and structurally, the issue of women emancipation is alien or strange to Yoruba family-system (Familusi and Ajayi, 2019), as the system provide a traditional specialized role to women against the enslavement as was insinuated by many recently.The status of women is changing globally and most women now prefer to embrace the nuclear family-system, to reduce if not reject the subservient female role in family affairs (Fasoranti & Owagbemi 2012).The modern society is currently encouraging most women to favourably compete with men globally and equally while changing the economic values of both the children; and, family priorities (Fasoranti & Owagbemi 2012).Most men now develop the habit of having many concubines-side-chicks for their selfgratification-rather than marrying more wives under same roof as polygyny is fading away for monogamous family type (Fasoranti & Owagbemi 2012).Women's maltreatment, as witnessed in the modern-day societies -denial of fundamental rights and struggling against men -politically, religiously and economically in the society, is against the custom of the land.

Culture and Domestic Violence:
Culture, no-doubt has great influence on how most couples understand and interpret their individual rights, statues, and roles within the family-setting (Abdullahi, Cusairi, & Abdullah, 2017); Lee, Moon & Gomez, 2014).Thus, Ntoimo and Isiugo-Abanihe, (2014) argued that the patriarchal Nigerian cultural system mostly distinguishes and gives more preference to males than females in the society.For instance, a male-child is more favoured, respected, and better placed than the female among most ethnic groups in Nigeria (Nelson, 2015).The patriarchal system accords the male-child with the source of power and respect while the female-child is viewed as a chattel/property to be owned and sold especially by the father and to be bought by her husband (Abdullahi, Cusairi, &Abdullah, 2017).
The patriarchal system maintains a firm marriage-and family-ideology stipulating that most married women need to endure and remain in marriage, irrespective of the challenges (Ntoimo & Isiugo-Abanihe, 2014).The authors, maintained that societal stigma and parental insistence as a major reasons denying and depriving most married women the right to and privileges of divorcing an abusive spouse or partner.Bowman (2003) noted that the exorbitant bride-price and other required items demanded by the bride's family, during the marriage rites consigned most married women as a property sold and bought.property in most African societies.Similarly, Onifade, Aduradola and Adamu (2016) reported that the demand and acceptance of bride price and other listed materials by the bride-family, during marriage rite in most African cultures symbolizes a means of selling to and buying the bride by the groom and his family.The exorbitant items ranging from cattle, goats, yams, cash, etc. symbolically demonstrate the transfer of women's rights and privileges to their husbands.
Thus, most husbands do not only exert power and authority over their wives due to their feebleness but, also, because of the exorbitant bride-price which her family may be unable to or unwilling refund in the event of separation or divorce (Abdullahi, Cusairi, & Abdullah, 2017).However, Ntoimo and Isiugo-Abanihe, (2014) found that emancipated and economicall buoyant married women -who are able to refund their bride-price -are less likely to be abused, and, thereby, most women often seek socio-economic independence either as civil servants or private employees before marriage.On the contrary, Balogun and John-Akinola (2015) found that most economically independence married women equally face an increased risk of being abused in the family.Thus, inadequate submissiveness and self-independence financially, most often trigger DVAMW in most homes.However, divorce or separation in abusive marriages is difficult for most women in Nigeria because of potent family-involvement (Bowman, 2003).
Male-child preference is one of the contributing-factors to DVAMW, in Nigeria, as the birth of male-children generally attracts accolade from friends and sundry, while that of female-children can cause most women grave consequence in the family (Abdullahi, Cusairi, & Abdullah, 2017;Ishola, 2016).Subsequently, the system also grants most married women with male children a reputable status within the family as a sign of preferred marital obligations (Nwokocha, 2007).Therefore, most families desire for male-children constitutes an essential part of gender-inequality in African societies (Bowman, 2003), which had been identified as a major factor in DVAMW, in most studies across Africa.The study conducted in Kenya by Njue, et.al (2014), found that most families treasure male-children compared to females and that women who are yet to have sons were consistently abused in many patriarchal societies.Conclusively, male-children are often reckoned with as future leaders, to sustain and maintain the family's heritage while the female-child later marries out of her family of origin to set up her own home.Thus, the potent preference for a male-child to take over the headship of the extended-family, may subject women to all manners of DVAMW, irrespective of the attending consequences.
Forced marriage is a form of sub-cultural contracted marriages mostly practised against the wish of the parties involved.In Nigeria, most especially this involves the brides married either to wealthy individuals or close allies/friends, to strengthen the existing relationships (Abdullahi, Cusairi, & Abdullah, 2017;Ishola, 2016).Studies on gender and marriage institutions, in Nigeria, affirmed that most marriages are almost the same among all the ethnic groups (Ishola, 2016;Ntoimo & Isiugo-Abanihe, 2014).It is, therefore, established that in ethnic groups where early marriage is encouraged, the bride is expected to marry her fathers' approved choice as any refusal may tag her as a social evil and a disgrace to the family (Ntoimo & Isiugo-Abanihe, 2014;Ekiran, 2003).
Finally, it is high time the society pay particular attention to those socio-cultural marital practices bewildering or promoting incessant incidences of DVAMW in most families with a view to proffering a solution towards ameliorating and remedying the plights of most married women.It is nonetheless necessary to mention the positive influence of religions and formal education capable of greatly reducing the menace of DVAMW in familysettings in Nigeria.

Results:
The paper shows that the Yoruba family-system gives more preference to the husband with little consideration to the wife as integral part of the family.It, also, shows that the virtue of openness, authority, closeness, being one another's brother's keeper, family provider, is mostly enjoyed by the man or husband.The cultural system generally socializes women and wives as extrinsic or inessential members, with little or no privileges in respect of important decision-making progress in the family.Finally, the Yoruba's cultural system supports and protects marriages firmly encouraging polygyny while discouraging separation and stigmatizing divorcees, even, in an abusive marriage.This tend to indicate that many men/husbands purposefully indulge in DVAMW to control women/wives, since separation or divorce is very much unacceptable in Yoruba's family-settings.