The policing of intimate partnerships in Yaounde, Cameroon

In Cameroon, intimate partnership violence has tended to be excluded from the designated domain of public policing, which is often justified through the invocation of "tradition" and the rights a husband has over his wife. Forces of order rarely intervene. Cameroonian law provides no definition of intimate partnership violence and its amalgamation of English common law, French civil law, and customary law further complicates cases involving such violence. This dissertation explores how interventions and non-interventions in intimate partnerships are situated within a larger socio-political field. In light of women's non-governmental organization (NGO) rhetoric on a crisis in intimate partnerships, I examine (non-)intervention by both NGOs and the state, investigating the attendant mobilization, reinforcement, and transformation of the meanings of gender, culture, and modernity. Through ethnographic and archival research in French civil law and "traditional" divorce courts and at an organization proving assistance to women who have experienced violence, I consider how these women constitute their subjectivity, articulate intervention needs, and engage with frames of violence and justice. Exploring the continuities between French colonial management of intimate partnerships and the contemporary contestation between actors and women's NGOs over the draft Family Code, I argue that state actors strategically employ multiculturalist rhetoric that clashes with NGO appropriation of the evolutionary model of culture used in human rights contexts and renders certain forms of violence invisible.