Interpersonal violent crime in Ghana: The case of assault in Accra

This study examined the trends, patterns, and socio-spatial conditions and factors that foster assaultive incidents and behaviors in Accra, Ghana. Specifically, the study examined how much assaults occurred over time, background characteristics of the victims and offenders, victim-offender relationships, and the housing units that recorded the most assaults. Among the triggers of assaults were females in familial settings and neighborhood propinquity, that is, disputants related through kinship, residential proximity, and contractual obligations. Arguments, drunkenness name-calling, jokes, funerals, inheritance, property, festivals, chieftaincy, communal living and sharing, such spatial factors as transient populations and routine activities were among the remote and immediate causes of the assaultive incidents. Among the housing units, the compound houses recorded the highest assaults. The majority of the victims and suspects were young males, between eighteen and thirty-four years, unemployed or in low paying blue-collar jobs. The majority of the assaults occurred in Accra Central, the precinct with the most compound homes and lower-class neighborhoods, followed by Nima, Kaneshie, and Kpeshie. Most assault incidents occurred in the morning, between 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and in the afternoon, between 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.